John Tod: Rebel in the Ranks

Barry M. Gough is a professor of history at Wilfrid Laurier University
and author of The Northwest Coast: British Navigation, Trade, and
Discoveries to 1812.

Rescued from relative obscurity by this readable biography is John Tod,
a feisty and prickly figure of Hudson’s Bay Company history. Although
primarily remembered as the owner of Oak Bay’s heritage cottage and of
a vast estate carved from the fur-trade reserve lands of the HBC, Tod
was one of those secondary figures who flourished in the Canadian
northwest in the first half of the 19th century. His life is thus an
important window through which one can view the HBC in its full and
final fur-trading prime.

The Scotland-born Tod spent 40 years at the HBC in postings all over
the Company’s domain (York Factory, McLeod Lake, Fort Alexandria,
Island Lake, and Fort Kamloops). In his time he knew Sir George Simpson,
Peter Skene Ogden, Samuel Black, and Sir James Douglas, among many
others of prominence. He outlived them all, dying in Victoria at age 87.


Belyk tells Tod’s story with relish and sympathy, as well as with a
thorough understanding of fur-trade practices and other historical
aspects. Reviving for our own times such a fascinating character as John
Tod, whose life spanned the transfer of Canada’s far west from fur
trading to pioneering and settlement, ranks as a historical project well
worth doing.