‘The Company’ Review: Conquering Canada

It was the age of the English East India Co. and the Dutch East India Co., European corporations geared to profit from distant, exotic territories. The Hudson Bay basin offered a similar opportunity because it was rich in one of the most valuable commodities of the time—furs. During the next two centuries, the Hudson’s Bay Co. would extend its reach across the Rockies to the Pacific and into Oregon, Idaho and Washington. It would realign the economy of North America.

In “The Company,” Stephen Bown, the author of  “White Eskimo,”  tells the story of the Hudson’s Bay Co. with verve and an astringent, contemporary slant. Until the late 20th century, histories of the HBC were invariably accounts of intrepid white men who paddled through treacherous rapids and struggled through thick brush to emerge as bearded heroes. They traded with the land’s Native Americans, who supplied the furs but were rarely identified by tribe or name. Mr. Bown widens the lens to include a more-informed portrait of the these peoples and a more-balanced assessment of the HBC’s impact during 200 years of monopoly.

He details how, in the late 1660s, two longtime New France traders sold the English monarch on the idea of a trading monopoly, which would be a poke in the eye of England’s rival, France. Soon the company was setting up trading forts at the mouths of the major rivers flowing into Hudson Bay, the huge inland sea connected to the Atlantic by a single inlet. There was already a well-developed trade network throughout the continent’s waterways, dominated by the Cree and Ojibwe. A handful of HBC managers bought into this system with their own supply of trade goods—primarily metal tools, implements, firearms, tobacco and gunpowder. They did business first with Cree trappers and then with Cree and other Native American middlemen, who purchased the furs from people further inland.

For the next 150 years, the Hudson’s Bay Co. gradually extended its activities, overseen by fewer than 500 North America-based employees, known as Baymen, many of them from the Orkney Islands of Scotland. Each spring, Native American trappers and traders arrived at the forts, their canoes loaded with lustrous beaver, fox, otter, muskrat and other furs. The Baymen welcomed them in elaborate ceremonies signaling mutual respect. In late summer, ships from London sailed into Hudson Bay, quickly unloaded trading goods and supplies to last the winter, packed their holds with pelts, then sped home before the ice set in. Mr. Bown describes the harshness of those winters: “It was a land where . . . wine froze when poured from the bottle and hoarfrost covered the interior walls.” Summer was little better. One Bayman recalled how the bugs were so bad that “if a man open’s his mouth he is Lyable to be Joack’t.”

As HBC explorers and traders ventured farther and farther westward, they charted the continent’s great rivers and mapped new routes, finally reaching the Pacific. European diseases travelled with them; in some regions, Native American mortality was as high as 80%.

Gradually, communities of mixed-race families settled around the forts, despite directives from London forbidding liaisons between HBC employees and Native American women. Throughout the 18th century, the commingling of communities generated little tension. The HBC muddled along, its profits eventually beginning to shrink. Then, in 1821, a Scotsman named George Simpson arrived to take charge of operations and revive the company’s flagging fortunes.

Short, plump and pugnacious, Simpson had made several trips to the West Indies while working in the sugar trade. There he “absorbed notions of superiority based on skin color” and gender, views that infused the corporate culture he now imported to the fur trade. For the next nearly 40 years, Simpson—an iron-willed executive dedicated to eliminating waste and inefficiency—crisscrossed his sprawling domain in his birchbark canoe, propelled by Iroquois voyageurs who would furiously paddle 100 miles in all weather during 18-hour days. Simpson swooped in on outposts, catching managers unprepared. He treated his mixed-heritage employees and mistresses with sneering cruelty.

Simpson could rule as “a virtual dictator,” Mr. Bown writes, because he kept the company so profitable that his landlords in London never questioned his decisions. According to the author, “the easy companionability that previously had flourished between the peoples of the fur trade” dissolved under pressure from the racist, imperial attitudes of Simpson and his appointees. Mr. Bown’s judgment on Simpson is harsh: He was “the greatest tragedy to befall the Company and northern North America. . . . Rather than helping to prepare its employees, contractors and customers for the tectonic changes that were shaking the land in the later nineteenth century, [he] turned on them.”

By the mid-19th century, British North Americans felt threatened by American expansionism and wanted to secure their own country. Supplies of beaver pelts had long dried up, and an influx of settlers wanted access to HBC land. In 1869, the company surrendered the vast majority of its territory to the British Crown, receiving £300,000 in compensation. The lands were then transferred to the new Dominion of Canada. As before, the Native Americans who shared the land were not consulted. But the HBC continued to thrive, becoming the retail and real-estate corporation it is today.

“The Company” is compelling, both as a lively narrative about a corporation that helped shape North American development and as a thoughtful exploration of the complex indigenous cultures that once dominated the continent.

Ms. Gray is the author of 11 books of biography and popular history, including “The Promise of Canada.”