The Lifeline of the Oregon Country: The Fraser-Columbia Brigade System, 1811-47

Randall White is the author of Voice of Region: On the Long Journey to
Senate Reform in Canada and Global Spin: Probing the Globalization
Debate, and the co-author of Toronto Women.

In the first sentence of this admirable book James Gibson, a historical
geographer at York University, bows gracefully to Harold Innis’s
classic, The Fur Trade in Canada (1930). Gibson then goes on to describe
how Innis’s fur trade, “forerunner of the present confederation,”
struggled to deal with“the high overhead costs of distance” west of
the Rocky Mountains during the first half of the 19th century.

When the old North West Company set up shop in what is now British
Columbia, it was supplied from Montreal and sent its fur resources there
as well, for subsequent international trade. The high costs of this
orientation were moderated somewhat when, after merging with the
Hudson’s Bay Company, the region was supplied from York Factory on
Hudson’s Bay. But a continuing drive for economy finally led the HBC
to revive an earlier NWC vision of orienting the trade west of the
Rockies to the mouth of the Columbia River, on the Pacific Northwest
Coast. In a way that ought to engage even some general readers,
Gibson’s book traces the development of the route that linked the
mouth of the Columbia with the fur-trading interior via alternating
“brigades” of canoes, pack horses, and boats. Starting in the
spring, the brigades transported furs from the interior to British ships
at the mouth of the Columbia, and then returned in the summer with trade
goods for aboriginal producers and supplies for interior posts. The
system remained intact until the Oregon Treaty of 1846 extended the 49th
parallel west to the Pacific Coast, as the boundary between British
North America and the United States.

This kind of historical economic geography is full of provocative
echoes to the present. Gibson’s study is “very much an empirical,
even documentary, treatment” that “does not pretend to be
theoretical or philosophical.” But “it may well serve as a source or
basis for such approaches.” He has done his job very well.