The Fur Trade Promotion Ladder: Voyageurs Need Not Apply

Could a voyageur climb the fur trade ladder and get a powerful job? 

• Non, c’est impossible. A glass ceiling existed. There were strong class and caste restrictions in place, and it was impossible to transcend them. Reading, writing and mathematics skills were necessary for higher-level positions, but fewer than 20% of men were educated, and practically no French-Canadians. In 1799, the North West Company listed 1120 middlemen (milieux) paddlers, 71 interpreters and 35 brigade guides, all of whom had spent many years in the interior. That trade and life experience never led them to a corner office. 

Here’s the bourgeois hierarchy to which voyageurs could not ascend:

Clerks 

In 1799, 50 clerks were hired, young literate men just starting in the business, all hoping for upward mobility. Every fur post needed one or two to keep track of their trade, recording in ledgers and day books the information the company requested —

• what each Native trapper traded for
• what pelts he brought in return
• noteworthy events and
• any interesting or unusual details.

A clerk was to show these records to his superior if requested, and to bring them to the rendezvous for the wintering or Montreal partners to pore over.

Clerks also directed the daily labor of their engagés (the voyageurs wintering at that post), who were usually older and much more experienced, a complicated social arrangement. They earned 1,000-1,800 livres per year, about double the pay of a common voyageur.

Read about these clerks who progressed through the North West Company:

In 1802, at age 15, George Nelson was hired as an apprentice clerk for the XY Company to work in the St. Croix valley. His salary was £5 Halifax “with the promise of a Share in the Company at the expiration of the indentures.” He was miserable his first two years, struggling both because his superior, Sir Alexander Mackenzie, failed to mentor him and because the experienced voyageurs he attempted to manage blamed him for their shortcomings. At the end of 5 years, he earned £100 a year, and more after XY merged with the North West Company. He moved up the ladder and spent another 20 years in the fur trade before retiring. But he never became a partner, and felt bitterly disappointed toward Sir Alexander. 

In 1800, at age 22, Daniel Harmon began his first engagement as a NWC clerk. He held that position for 7 years, and renewed for a year. At age 30, he was sent to Dunvegan for at least 3 years with a salary of £100 Halifax per annum, and furnished with “Cloathing and victuals, &c, &c.” Harmon eventually became a wintering partner in 1818, in charge of a large district. However, he left the fur trade the following year, deeply affected by the death of his eldest son, and only returned to NWC service briefly in 1820-21. 

[In my first novel, because he has schooling, Andre paddles and portages with an elite brigade but also maintains his post’s records; in Book 2, he’s moved to a different post where their clerk has died. But by Book 3, the opportunities to move up elude him due to the merger of the XYC and NWC, because suddenly fewer clerks were needed.] 

(Wintering) Partners

These part-owners in fur trade companies, responsible for large districts of the interior, were the real bourgeois. They lived and traded directly, overseeing around 10 posts and up to 20 clerks their region. They monitored the trading of rival companies who worked with the same tribes. In the beginning of the organized fur trade companies, there were up to 15 partners, each earning one share. By 1799, that mushroomed to 100 shares. They earned $$$$.

In the 1770s, a 20-something John Sayer began as one of the earliest independent traders working out of Michilimackinac. In 1778 he was licensed to send one canoe to Lac de la Sangsue (Leech Lake, Minnesota) but he found most of the Ojibwe there had died of smallpox. Angry at government interference in the fur trade, Sayer joined with other traders in protesting that interference. He continued trading and, in 1784, became part of a committee of merchants to regulate the market. The next year, when the North West Company was being formed, he again assisted in organizing and was appointed to direct the fur trade south and west of Lake Superior, traveling widely in the area, wintering at various posts. In 1802, he signed an agreement with NWC, which granted him 2 shares.

Possibly vulnerable to the ravages of the high wines he was dispensing, he had signed an agreement in 1801 that could dismiss him if incapable of conducting business due to liquor.

He wintered in 1804-05 at the Snake River Post, being closely observed by an NWC agent. It was his last year in the west. He traded in one share for a farm of 1,000 acres on the Ottawa River. By 1807, charged with “irregular behavior,” he was forced to retire from active partnership. Two years later, he sold the farm and his second share, to move near Montreal.

His Ojibwe wife, Obemau-unoqua, and their three sons appear to have been left when Sayer went east, as he married another woman and had a daughter and two sons. Sayer was part of the old guard of the fur trade, seeing it change from a field of independents to being dominated by big companies. He died in 1818, at 68 years old.

His diary covering the 1804-05 winter is included in “Five Fur Traders of the Northwest,” though old editions credit Thomas Connor.

After serving as a soldier and then seafarer, Peter Pond, at age 25, began an independent trading career in Detroit in 1765. At age 31, he began trading — with the Menominees, the Winnebagos (Ho-Chunk), the Foxes, the Sauks — and learned to resupply at Prairie du Chien to trade in southern Minnesota for 2 years. 

Due to his excellent relationships with First Nations people, Peter Pond was trusted as a peace envoy, delivering 3 wampum belts between the Ojibwe and Dakota tribes, and brokered 10 years of peace between them. He discovered that trading for pemmican allowed the fur trade to exploit the far north where beaver were plentiful, and in 1775 moved to trade in Lake Dauphin, exploring and mapping northwest Canada.

By 1780 he became an original member of the North West Company. However, in 1788, after being implicated in the third unlikely death of a rival trader, he returned to the US and sold his NWC share. Peter Pond was an original thinker, mapmaker and entrepreneur. He died in poverty in 1807, at age 67. 

John Macdonell signed on, at age 25 in 1793, as a clerk for £100 a year with the North West Company. His diary about his first trading trip is included in “Five Fur Traders of the Northwest.” By 1797, he became a NWC partner, stationed at Isle à la Cross and Lesser Slave Lake.

In 1812, he left Indian country [In only 17 years, he’d made a fortune!] and saw active service as the captain in a corps of Canadian voyageurs and was taken captive at the Battle of St. Regis.

By 1814, he lived along the Long Sault of the Ottawa River, maintaining ties to the fur trade where an old friend described him as “A cheerful, healthy, and contented old man,” nicknamed “Priest.”  With Magdeleine Poitras, his wife a la façon du pays, Macdonell established a home for his family of 8, kept a store, served as judge and as benefactor of churches and schools. He died in 1850 at age 82, by that time weighed by debt.

Montreal Agents and Owners

Top-tier wealthy men (the bourgeois) who created the fur trade from Montreal. They shipped and sold American furs in Europe and procured an array goods from world markets for trade to the Native Americans. Earned $$$$$

The featured picture above shows re-enactors portraying the wintering partners and bourgeois; it was taken at Grand Portage National Monument during their annual rendezvous.

Simon McTavish came to America penniless at age 13, but had a knack for business. By the time he was 21, in 1771, he was shipping rum and, by 1775, had moved to Montreal to convince traders to band together for their mutual benefit. Those who went into business with him as the head of the North West Company became wealthy. He became the most powerful man in the fur trade, supplying more than 100 Montreal canoes each spring. Then, he was canoed to the summer rendezvous where he’d lead the annual business meeting of the partners, deciding how to distribute the year’s earnings and who might be included as a future shareholder in the company. It was a vast business and McTavish ran it with an iron hand. His control created problems, so a group of frustrated partners formed their own XY Company, with Sir Alexander Mackenzie as their leader. But when McTavish died in 1804, NWC asked XY to rejoin them. McTavish’s nephew, William McGillivray, took over as head of the NWC.

John Jacob Astor arrived from Germany at age 21 with 7 flutes to sell and with an uncanny sense of earning money. Within 10 years, he owned a fleet of ships to transport furs from Canada to Europe (and opium to Chinese ports). To compete with the NWC and trade in the US territories, in 1808 Astor started the American Fur Company and several other fur companies. The AFC became one of the most hated organizations, plying the Indians with alcohol and crushing small traders. President Zachary Taylor considered the AFC employees to be “the greatest scoundrels the world ever knew.” By the 1830s, Astor eased out of the fur trade business to invest in real estate in New York City, becoming the richest person in the United States — at his death in 1848, he was worth $20 million.

Sources

• “Five Fur Traders of the Northwest: Being the Narrative of Peter Pond and the Diaries of John Macdonell … and Thomas Connor (now recognized as John Sayer)” edited by Charles M Gates. Minnesota Historical Society Press (St. Paul, Minnesota, 1965).
  Though Peter Pond’s unconventional spelling and punctuation are quaint, his narrative is authentic and compelling. His papers, written at age 60, are memories, but many of the stories were lost.
  John Macdonell kept a diary of his first years in the fur trade, so readers can feel the journey on the Ottawa and Mattawa rivers, the Great Lakes and further north as he travels to the Assiniboine River.
• “Fur Trade Brigade: A Fur Trade History” by Cris Peterson. Calkins Creek (Honesdale, Pennsylvania, 2009).
• “Harmon’s Journal, 1800-1819, by Daniel Williams Harmon, a Partner in the North West Company” with a forward by Jennifer S.H. Brown. Touchwood Editions (Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 2006).
  Harmon’s accounts tell a more personal side of the life of a fur trader, connecting with First Nations people and some of the notable personalities of the era. His profound reflections are often quoted.
• “John Sayer’s Snake River Journal, 1804-05” edited and with introductory chapters by Douglas A. Birk. Institute for Minnesota Archaeology (Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1989).
• “My First Years in the Fur Trade: The Journals of 1802-1804 by George Nelson” edited by Laura Peers and Theresa Schenck. Minnesota Historical Society Press (St. Paul, Minnesota, 2002).
  This journal is wonderful reading, with more personal observations than most fur trade journals. Nelson reveals his inner feelings about his employees as well as the Ojibwe who trade with him, and actually tells us their names (which few other journal keepers did); he describes places and events in a lively way,.
• Dictionary of Canadian Biography: Simon McTavish
• Dictionary of Canadian Biography: John Sayer
• Wikipedia: John Jacob Astor

Final Thoughts

• André has grown up. Follow him in Book 3, “Uncharted Waters” in paper or ebook.
• Start from the beginning with Books 1 and 2 — buy “Waters Like the Sky” or “Treacherous Waters.”
• Subscribe to this blog and read posts as they are published!
• For what I’m researching or quirky discoveries, visit me on Facebook or Instagram: I love your comments.
• Book me as a speaker.
• Ask your library, local school, gift shop to buy copies.
• Be a voyageur for an hour—come to one of my presentations. Upcoming: “Women in the Fur Trade” at 6 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 25 at Belle Prairie, Minnesota.
• Consider writing your own chapter — fan fiction — about what else could happen.

What I’m currently reading:
“Fur Trade Nation: An Ojibwe’s Graphic History” written and illustrated by Carl Gawboy (AnimikiiMazina’iganan: Thunderbird Press, Cloquet, Minnesota, 2025)
“Our Story of Eagle Woman: Sacagawea, They Got it Wrong” by the Sacagawea Project Board of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Ariakra Nation The paragon Agency, Orange, California, 2021)