Harmon's Journal, 1800–1819.

Gratien Allaire is a professor of history at Laurentian University in
Sudbury, Ontario.

Daniel Harmon (1778–1843) entered the fur trade in 1800 as a clerk. He spent his first years west of Lake Winnipeg, wintered near Nipigon in 1807–1808, and was assigned to Fort Dunvegan (Peace River) from 1808 to 1810 and to Stuart Lake (New Caledonia) afterwards. In 1819, he left and spent the following winter in his native Vermont. He returned to the Upper Country in 1820, at Rainy Lake. Then a wintering partner of the North West Company, he became a chief trader of the Hudson’s Bay Company following the agreement of 1821. He left the fur trade the same year to live in Vermont to 1842. He died near Montreal a few months later.

Harmon’s Journal is of a more personal nature than other fur trade journals. It provides geographical descriptions of the areas Harmon visited and documents daily life at the forts: hunting, fishing, gardening, weather, visitors … Rather than details on fur trade transactions, the journal contains frequent reflections on God and religion. Harmon often made reference to his Scottish, Irish, and English friends, commenting on his relative solitude: “But such is the nature of this Country,” he wrote from Fort Dunvegan on July 19, 1809, “that we meet but seldom and the time we can remain together is never long.” He did not have a high opinion of voyageurs. He showed only ethnological interest in aboriginals. He usually mentioned his Métis country wife from 1805 in relation to his children, not even naming her; however, he considered a “moral obligation” to marry her in 1819 and his duty to take her, with their children, to a “christian land.”

First “heavily edited” in 1820 by Rev. Daniel Haskel, with detailed maps and a portrait, Harmon’s original Journal was published again in 1957 with a detailed introduction by W. Kaye Lamb, Dominion archivist. The current edition is introduced by Graham R. Ross, Harmon’s great-great-great grandson, and Jennifer H.S. Brown, a leading scholar on the fur trade, has provided a foreword. Harmon’s Journal is important reading for anyone interested in fur traders’ lives.