Born in Scotland and trained as a sugar broker in London, England, Sir George Simpson (1792-1860) was unexpectedly appointed in 1820 as governor of Rupert's Land and the Indian territories, an area encompassing all of Canada from Hudson Bay to the Pacific Ocean. By his friendliness of manner, strict discipline, and vigorous and constant travel, he brought peace and prosperity to the vast empire under his control. Simpson's explorations opened Canada from Labrador to British Columbia and from Yukon to Nunavut. He was knighted in 1841, then travelled around the world, predicting the fall of California to the United States, saving the Hawaiians from colonial occupation, and describing the mysteries of remotest Siberia. Praised as the governor who "combined the widest range of authority and the longest tenure of power ever enjoyed by one man in North America," he stands with Sir John A. Macdonald as one of the greatest Makers of Canada.

In The Lifeline of the Oregon Country, James Gibson compellingly immerses the reader in one of the most intractable problems faced by the Hudson's Bay Company: how to realize wealth from such a remote and formidable land. The personalities, places, obstacles, and operations involved in the brigade system are all described in fascinating detail, stretch by stretch from Fort St. James, the depot of New Caledonia on the upper reaches of the Fraser River, to Fort Vancouver, the Columbia Department’s entrepôt on the lower Columbia River, and back. Never before has such a rich collection of primary information concerning the fur trade supply system and the constraining role of logistics been so meticulously assembled. The Lifeline of the Oregon Country will prove indispensable to historians, researchers, and fur trade enthusiasts alike, and is an important contribution to our understanding of the economic history of the Pacific Slope.

Before contact with white people, the Indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast traded amongst themselves and with other Indigenous groups farther inland, but by the end of the 1780s, when Russian coasters had penetrated the Gulf of Alaska and British merchantmen were frequenting Nootka Sound, trade had become the dominant economic activity in the area. The Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, Nootka, Salish, and Chinook spent much of their time hunting fur-bearing animals and trading their pelts to settler traders for metals, firearms, textiles, and foodstuffs. The Northwest Coast First Nations used their newly acquired goods in intertribal trade while the Euro-American traders dealt their skins in China for teas, silks, and porcelains that they then sold in Europe and America. While previous studies have concentrated on the boom years of the fur trade before the War of 1812, James Gibson reveals that the maritime fur trade persisted into the 1840s and that it was not solely or even principally the domain of American traders. He gives an account of Russian, British, Spanish, and American participation in the Northwest traffic, describes the market in South China, and outlines the evolution of the coast trade, including the means and problems. He also assesses the physical and cultural effects of this trade on the Northwest Coast and Hawaiian Islands and on the industrialization of the New England states. Uncovering many Russian-language sources, Gibson also consulted the records of the Russian-American, East India, and Hudson’s Bay Companies, the unpublished logs and journals of American ships, and the business correspondence of several New England shipowners. No more comprehensive or painstakingly researched account of the maritime fur trade of the Northwest Coast has ever been written.

Assembles a range of women's letters from the former British Empire. These letters 'written home' are not only historical sources; they are also representations of the state of the Empire in far-off lands sent home to Britain and, occasionally, other centres established as 'home'.

Do law and legal procedures exist only so long as there is an official authority to enforce them? Or do we have an unspoken sense of law and ethics? To answer these questions, John Phillip Reid’s Contested Empire explores the implicit notions of law shared by American and British fur traders in the Snake River country of Idaho and surrounding areas in the early nineteenth century. Both the United States and Great Britain had claimed this region, and passions were intense. Focusing mainly on Canadian explorer and trader Peter Skene Ogden, Reid finds that both side largely avoided violence and other difficulties because they held the same definitions of property, contract, conversion, and possession. In 1824, the Hudson’s Bay Company directed Ogden to decimate the furbearing animal population of the Snake River country, thus marking the region a “fur desert.” With this mandate, Great Britain hoped to neutralize any interest American furtrappers could have in the area. Such a mandate set British and American fur men on a collision course, but Ogden and his American counterparts implicitly followed a kind of law and procedure and observed a mutual sense of property and rights even as the two sides vied for control of the fur trade. Failing to take legal culture into consideration, some previous accounts have depicted these conflicts as mere episodes of lawless frontier violence. Reid expands our understanding of the West by considering the unspoken sense of law that existed, despite the lack of any formalized authorities, in what had otherwise been considered a “lawless” time.

Discusses the role of the Hudson's Bay Company and its fur traders in the exploration of northern B.C., the western NWT, the Yukon and eastern Alaska.