PhDThis thesis traces the evolution of the role played by
Indian, mixed-blood and white women in the development of
fur trade society in western Canada from about 1700 to 1850.
The importance of the role played by women in the fur trade
has been generally overlooked by historians of the subject
but such a study provides many insights into the complex
interaction which took place between European and Indian as
a result of this enterprise.
The men of both the Hudson's Bay and North West Companies
formed liaisons with women from the various tribes of western
Canada. In the English company, these unions were formed
in spite of official rulings to the contrary, whereas the
Canadian company actively encouraged unions between its
servants and Indian women. Such alliances served to cement
trade ties. Indian women performed a variety of important
economic tasks vital to the functioning of the fur trade
besides fulfilling the role of wife and mother left void by
the absence of white women.
Eventually, however, the Indian wife was to become a
source of friction rather than an effective liaison between
Indian and white, and by the early nineteenth century, her
place was being taken by a growing number of mixed-blood women.
The very child of the fur trade, the mixed-blood woman's dual
heritage gave her the ideal qualifications for a fur trader's
wife. It is significant that marriages contracted A la façon
du pays during this period showed a marked tendency to become
permanent unions.
After the union of the two companies in 1821, however,
the position of native women in fur trade society was
threatened by two outside forces--the missionaries and white
women. While the missionaries' attack on fur trade morality
was to lead to a good deal of cultural dislocation, the coming
of white women presented a potent threat to the prominence
of mixed-blood women in fur trade society. The resulting
development of social and racial tension between these two
groups of women was to erupt in a divisive scandal in Red
River in 1850, which symbolized the increasing ascendancy
of white women in western Canadian societ
