The Old Bow Fort

David W. Leonard is the project historian (Northern Alberta) in the
Historic Sites and Archives Service, Alberta Community Development. He
is the author of Delayed Frontier: The Peace River Country to 1909 and
coauthor of The Lure of the Peace River Count

From 1832 to 1834, the Hudson’s Bay Company attempted to maintain a
small fur-trade post on the Bow River near the present site of Morley,
Alberta. The effort was initiated by trade governor George Simpson,
probably in recognition that fur in the area, harvested mainly by the
Peigan Nation, was then being directed by the American Fur Trade Company
to its posts along the Missouri River. It could more easily be
transported along the Bow or Red Deer Rivers to HBC posts along the
Saskatchewan.

The venture was fraught with danger, however, for tribes of the
Blackfoot Confederacy were known to be occasionally hostile to white
intruders in their domain. In fact, it was the threat of a major battle
between Blood and Peigan war parties right at the post’s doorstep,
that led the post’s leader, John Harriott, to abandon it in early
1834.

Originally called the Peagan Post, it later had its name changed to the
Old Bow Fort. In the 1920s, historian J.E.A. Macleod started
investigating the site, and, in 1970, archeologist Paul Nesbitt managed
to uncover its exact location and recover some artifacts. Recently, the
post has been the subject of much research by Douglas Hughes. Using
mainly Hudson’s Bay Company records and post journals, Hughes has
managed to weave together the story of the Old Bow Fort. It is a short
account, but the post existed for only a short time. It is an easy,
unpretentious, non-analytical read, and not all of the sources have been
properly cited. Curiously, the wide margins of each page in the book
replicate in script one sentence from the page itself. It is also odd
that at the bottom of each page, there is the same unidentified and
uncaptioned picture of a trading party. The book does, however, add to
our understanding of the fur trade in Western Canada by revealing
information on one of the area’s more remote trading posts.