Nancy Marguerite Anderson wrote The Pathfinder: A.C. Anderson's Journeys in the West (Heritage House 2011), the story of Hudson Bay Company clerk Alexander Caulfield. Caulfield was instrumental in the discovery of a safe all-British route through the Rockies.

The York Factory Express (Ronsdale $24.95) is Anderson's portrayal of the voyagers who, between 1826 and 1854, paddled their boats up the Columbia River a thousand miles east to Jasper's House, 3,000 feet above sea level. Then they went to York Factory on the shores of Hudson Bay. It was a staggering climb and descent, which they did in reverse on the way back home to the mouth of the Columbia. The voyageurs were made up of unnamed Canadiens, Orkney-men, Iroquois, and their Metis children and grand-children. Their stories would be lost to time if not for the traders who preserved the stories the voyageurs told them. Anderson researched and uncovered these stories.

Review of the author's work by BC Studies:
The Pathfinder: A.C. Anderson's Journeys in the West


The York Factory Express by Nancy Marguerite Anderson
(Ronsdale $24.95)

Review by Gene Homel

You may think you’ve got it tough stuck in a traffic jam or driving the Coquihalla in sleet, but consider paddling by boat and walking by portages some 5400 miles across a network of rivers and waterways from the Pacific coast to Hudson Bay and back.

This was one route taken by Hudson’s Bay Company fur-trade employees working in the Columbia Valley from the 1820s to the 1850s as described in Nancy Marguerite Anderson’s The York Factory Express.

The actual York Factory Express was the arduous annual boat trip from Fort Vancouver (present-day Vancouver, Washington) to York Factory, the HBC’s depot on Hudson Bay, about 200 kilometres from Churchill, Manitoba. The route roughly followed the Columbia River through present-day Washington state and British Columbia, the Rocky Mountains via the Athabasca Pass and Jasper Valley, and the Saskatchewan and Hayes rivers to the Bay.

The Express’s journey east of the Rockies was paralleled by the Saskatchewan Brigades, a convoy transporting pelts and trade goods to and from what’s now northern B.C.

Anderson’s book is not an inclusive account of Western Canada’s fur trade and it doesn’t delve into issues explored by academic historians. Instead, it is a travelogue of the waterways and portages between Fort Vancouver and York Factory, as well as a portrait of the adventurous men who traversed the hazardous route between March and November each year.

Company operations were based on clear class lines. The “gentlemen,” the chief traders, clerks and other company administrators were socially elevated career men, at least in the context of the fur trade. On the other hand, the men who did the incredibly tough work of transporting people, furs, HBC documents, and goods over thousands of miles were a mixture of cultures: French Canadians, Métis, Iroquois from the Quebec colony and recruits from the Scottish Orkney islands.

But it was the gentlemen HBC employees who wrote the stories of the voyageurs in their extensive journals and diaries, some of which have survived to the present day. Anderson’s book is based on these documents, which are housed in the B.C. Archives, company archives and elsewhere.
One of the men Anderson quotes is James Douglas, future HBC Chief Factor and Governor of Vancouver Island and the colony of British Columbia, who described in his journals that “a few Indians” visited a camp site “with the hopes of obtaining a supply of tobacco, a gratification to which they appear to be passionately addicted.”

Each group had its own work habits and cultural practices. The Métis labourers, for example, were reported in the 1842–52 journals of a young clerk named Augustus Richard Peers to be “naturally of a buoyant disposition…for let a half-breed be ever so tired if he but hear a discordant jingling of an ill-tuned fiddle he must be up and capering with ever and anon an inspiring ‘Hi! Hi! Hi!’ inviting the others to join in the dance.”

The hazards and challenges of the route began with the weather and landscapes. One gentleman noted a “very coarse night” with rain, sleet, thunder and lightning, and the next morning the portaging group “pursued our route, by a road almost impassable to Man or Beast—the Horses & their loads frequently falling into swamps & ruts, in which they almost disappeared, and it required extraordinary efforts at times to extricate the poor Animals from their very uncomfortable situation, and calling down upon them the Most Awful imprecations from their Canadian guides.” Repairing the boats when battered, guarding against possible attacks by animals and Indigenous men, and traversing the rapids and portages with the travellers’ very heavy loads made journeys harrowing. One gentleman observed the arrival of workers “almost worn out with their hard journey, which did not however prevent them quozzing [sic] each other as usual & many were the tales of misfortune recounted.”

While much of the content in the HBC employee papers is routine—daily descriptions of the weather, the routes, the troubles encountered—there’s a richness and occasional awe reflected in some notations. One gentleman approaching the Rocky Mountains described “a continued Mass of snow clad Hills towering their lofty summits in successive ranges, their outlines assuming a great variety of forms, giving to the whole scene a grandeur and novelty beyond my powers to describe —but it is truly sublime.”

Douglas described “the vast expanse of prairie variegated and adorned by innumerable groves of trees, smooth green hills and streams of water forming altogether one of the finest prospects imaginable.”
The withdrawal of the HBC and Britain from the furred-out and American-settled Columbia district and the consequent establishment of Fort Victoria ended this Express in the 1850s.

Anderson’s book reflects her in-depth research and personal interest. She is the great granddaughter of Alexander Caulfield Anderson, fur trader and subject of her 2011 book The Pathfinder (Heritage House, 2011). She calls herself “an accidental historian” who, being curious about her forbearer, researched her great grandfather in the B.C. Archives and found another ancestor on the York Factory Express. She identifies strongly with what she says is her French Canadian and Indigenous blood, and ends the book by criticizing prejudice and proclaiming “We Are Still Here.”

Readers interested in the geography of western Canada and the life and work of the HBC employees will enjoy the accounts in The York Factory
Express. 9781553805786

BCBW 2021-22

Gene Homel has been a faculty member at universities, colleges and institutes since 1974.

BOOKS:

The Pathfinder: A.C. Anderson's Journeys in the West (Heritage House 2011) 978-1-92693-682-6 $19.95

The York Factory Express (Ronsdale 2020) $24.95 978-1-55380-578-6

[BCBW 2020]