Tom Holloway
Tom H. Holloway, a research volunteer at the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, sent me this piece. He’d been asked how common Hudson’s Bay blankets with a multicolored stripe (or candy stripe) were in the West Coast fur trade. To answer it, he did in-depth research, which he then published in the fall 2025 edition of the Tomahawk & Long Rifle quarterly magazine of the American Mountain Men (https://americanmountainmen.org/).
He welcomes your comments at tomholloway62@)gmail.com.
I’ve enjoyed being warmed by those colorful point blankets, and I’ve had fun writing about them in my blog. Merci to Tom for this thoughtful research and clear discussion. He discovered something that surprised me, who lives in a region where the four-color point blankets are common. Apparently not so everywhere!
HBC POINT BLANKETS in the PACIFIC NORTHWEST in the FUR TRADE ERA
Question: Did point blankets with four bands on each end, in four different colors (indigo blue, yellow, red, green), similar to the modern blanket in the photo below, exist in the Pacific Northwest in the fur trade era, circa 1820-45?
Answer: Probably, but if so, only in extremely limited quantities, both in absolute numbers and compared to all the point blankets imported into the region.
Question: Could such four-band, four-color blankets be considered typical or representative of the point blankets traded and used in the Pacific Northwest in the fur trade era?
Answer: Absolutely not.
This shows a modern four-band, four-color blanket, in four-point size, of the type widely sold (until mid-2025) in Hudson’s Bay Company stores across Canada. From the early 1900s, such blankets became popular as markers of Canadian history and identity.
These blankets are the focus of a book by Harold Tichenor, “The Blanket: An Illustrated History of the Hudson’s Bay Point Blanket” (Toronto: Quantum/ HBC, 2002).
BACKGROUND:
It is well known that from the beginning of the North American fur trade in the 1600s, woolen blankets manufactured in Europe, with short dark lines woven into one edge, known as points, which indicated the size of the blanket, were among the most important trade items. From the 1780s, the Hudson’s Bay Company contracted with textile mills in England to supply point blankets for its trade with Natives inland from Hudson Bay.
The earliest known reference in HBC records to four-band, four-color blankets (today sometimes called “candy stripe” for short), appears in an order dated January 18, 1798, for “30 pairs of 3 points to be striped with four colours (red, blue, green, yellow) according to your judgment.” 1 Due to the popularity of such candy stripe blankets in more recent times, and without much evidence one way or another, the question arises as to whether such blankets were the dominant or a common design during the fur trade era.
The Hudson’s Bay Company Archives (now part of the Archives of Manitoba in Winnipeg) have made historical documents available to the public in digitized form, which make it possible to answer this and related questions. The three types of records most relevant for discovering 2 what types of blankets the Hudson’s Bay Company imported into North America are:
- requisitions (orders sent annually to London for supplies and trade goods to be shipped to North American regional headquarters),
- cargo manifests of supply ships,
- and inventories of supplies on hand.
REQUISITIONS:
The requisition sent from York Factory, the HBC headquarters on the west side of Hudson Bay, to London in 1823, for goods to be shipped out to York Factory in 1824, included the following list of blankets: 3
The first line reads: “50 pairs HBay striped Blankets 3 points (Yellow, red, green & blue stripes).” The second line is for 50 pairs of 2 1/2 point blankets of the same description, followed by “common” blankets (Dark blue Bar) in a range of sizes. (The first column on the right shows the wholesale cost per pair, in shillings/pence, followed by the aggregate wholesale cost, in pounds, shillings, pence.) Doubling the numbers of pairs, we see that the total order was for 3,000 individual blankets, 200 of which (6.7%) were candy stripe.
Similar annual requisitions show that from 1823 to 1845 the York Factory depot ordered 118,515 point blankets, of which 11,430 (9.6 %) were candy stripe, an average of about 500 per year. 4 Although they were a small fraction of all point blankets, it is clear that an appreciable number of four-band, four-color blankets were available for distribution to trading posts across the territory known as Rupert’s Land — from Hudson Bay westward to the Rocky Mountains.
Shifting the focus west of the Rockies, to the Columbia District, the picture is quite different. Whereas the supplies and trade goods for Rupert’s Land went from London to York Factory, shipments for the Pacific Northwest went around South America to the Columbia River, first to Fort George (formerly Astoria, acquired by the North West Company from John Jacob Astor’s Pacific Fur Company in 1813), then to Fort Vancouver, after it was established in 1825. Thus the bookkeeping at the time, and the historical records available now, are distinct for the Columbia District — today’s Pacific Northwest.
The available information on Columbia District requisitions is not as extensive as for York Factory, but the records are complete from 1828 through 1845. Over that period, the Columbia District ordered a total of 153,902 point blankets, an average of 8,550 per year. This is from the requisition to be shipped in 1836, for Outfit 1838: 5
The first line is for “130 Green Blankets 4 Points,” followed by plain (off white) “B.B.” (Blue Bar) blankets in a range of sizes.
The last line is for “100 Large blankets, blue, Green Red & yellow stripes.” These were the only candy stripe blankets ordered for the Columbia District over the 18 years from 1828 to 1845 (100 out of 153,902).
SHIPPING MANIFESTS
The available records on actual deliveries of goods to the Columbia District are not as complete or consistent as for requisitions, but they are still helpful in addressing the question at hand. This is the list, by ship, Outfit year, and (total number of blankets on board):
William & Ann, 1825, (307);
William & Ann, 1827 (2,654);
Ganymede, 1829, (4,088);
Isabella, 1830, (4,808);
Eagle, 1830, (5,649);
Dryad, 1831, (5,040);
Ganymede, 1831, (11,400);
Eagle, 1832, (6,892);
Eagle, 1834, (2,856);
Ganymede, 1835, (13,320);
Columbia, 1836, (20,700);
Columbia, 1839 (2,800);
Brothers, 1844 (4,230).
Total blankets in these 13 shipments: 84,774.
Number of four-color candy stripe blankets: zero.
INVENTORIES
In July 1821, the North West Company, which after 1813 was the only land-based fur company west of the Rockies, merged with the Hudson’s Bay Company. In the run-up to the coalition, the NWC took an inventory of its property in the Columbia District. The blankets in that stock taking in spring 1821 were as follows: 6
The listing shows one 4 point green blanket, followed by 3,182 plain blankets in a range of sizes, then 57 “Stript HB” blankets (1.8% of the total).
Note that in the 1823 York Factory indent above, the candy stripe blankets were called “HBay striped.” It seems likely that the “Stript HB” blankets in this NWC list were also candy stripe.
Columbia District inventories are available for every year from 1825 through 1845. They were normally taken at the beginning of each Outfit, HBC’s fiscal year, which ran from June 1 to May 31. Through 1830 only residual amounts of goods were left on hand each spring, waiting for the annual supply ship to arrive, also sometime in the spring — if it arrived.
The loss of the supply ship William & Ann and all its cargo on the notoriously risky bar of the Columbia River, in March 1829, reinforced the advisability of a policy that Chief Factor John McLoughlin, superintendent of the Columbia District, had already advocated: that a full year’s stock of supplies and trade goods be kept in reserve at all times.
Thus from 1825 to 1830, an average of 755 blankets were left on hand each spring. But from 1831 to 1845, an average of 15,335 blankets were in the Fort Vancouver warehouse each spring. Some of them were left over from previous years, but beginning in 1831, the bulk of the blankets in any given inventory was made up of the full year’s shipment that had arrived a year prior.
A complete tally of all the Fort Vancouver inventories from 1825 through 1845 shows that over those 21 years a total of 234,557 blankets were counted and described, of which 50 can be identified as probably being of the candy stripe variety. (That is not a typo: 50 out of nearly a quarter of a million.)
In the inventory of Spring 1840, the count begins (on the previous page) with 532 large green blankets and 530 plain Blue Bar 3 1/2 point blankets, followed by the list reproduced below, for a total of 12,920 blankets.7
The last line reads: “50 HB Striped Blankets,” the same as the shorthand label in the 1823 York Factory requisition, and the 1821 North West Company inventory.
More tellingly, it is consistent with the requisition for Outfit 1838 for 100 blankets with “blue, Green Red & yellow stripes.”
The discrepancy between the 100 blankets ordered for Outfit 1838 and the 50 that appeared in the spring 1840 inventory might be explained by only half of the order being belatedly filled, but the connection helps confirm that “HB striped” was shorthand for blankets with four stripes, one in each of the four colors blue, green, red, and yellow.
CONCLUSION
The available documentation shows that point blankets with four bands on each end, in four different colors, probably existed west of the Rocky Mountains, but if so only in extremely limited quantities, both in absolute numbers and relative to all the blankets imported into the region. The numbers are so small that such candy stripe blankets must be considered insignificant—in no way typical or representative of the point blankets traded and used in the Pacific Northwest in the fur trade era.
ADDENDUM
The document snippets included above also show that the overwhelming majority of point blankets had a single bar on each end, similar to these modern examples. Blue bars designated better quality, red bars a somewhat lesser quality (labeled “inferior” in the records, but at only a small reduction in wholesale cost per blanket). A relatively few large green blankets, at a premium cost, appear consistently.
But what about the “large striped yellow and green” blankets on the line above the “HB striped” in the 1840 inventory? It turns out that there were a total of 2,240 blankets with green and yellow stripes in Fort Vancouver inventories from 1825 through 1845, in contrast to the total of just 50 four-color candy stripe blankets.
The list below, from the Columbia District requisition of supplies to be shipped in 1837, for Outfit 1839, provides more detail on the configuration of the yellow and green striped blankets. It shows a total of 2,800 blankets, 50 of which were “Large w[ith] 2 yellow & 2 green stripes.” 8
Point blanket sizes
This illustration below, used by the HBC in the 1930s, indicates the traditional sizes of point blankets, and shows the configuration of a single bar across each end. Perhaps to reduce clutter in the graphic, the 3-point size was not included — by interpolation, it would have been approximately 73 inches long by 56 inches wide.
NOTES and SOURCES
1 York Factory to Thomas Empson, January 18, 1798, General Correspondence Outward, 1796-1808, Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, Archives of Manitoba (hereafter HBCA), A.5/4, folio 26.
2 To access the documents, go to <https://www.gov.mb.ca/chc/archives/hbca/hbca_microfilm_digitization.html> and click on the “search listings” link at lower center.
3 York Factory Indent Books, 1823-38, HBCA B.239/n/71, folio 2d.
4 York Factory Indent Books, 1823-38, HBCA B.239/n/71, and 1831-48, HBCA B.239/n/72.
5 Requisition for Columbia District, Shipment 1836 for Outfit 1838, HBCA B.239/n/71, folio 156d.
6 North West Company Account Book, 1821, HBCA F.4/54, folio 2.
7 Fort Vancouver Depot Inventory, Spring 1840, HBCA B.223/d/126, folios 34-34d.
8 Requisition for Columbia District, Shipment 1837 for Outfit 1839, HBCA B.223/d/112, folio 2.
9 Douglas MacKay, “Blanket Coverage,” The Beaver, June 1935, p. 52.
Final Thoughts
- Read more about the fur trade through the eyes of a too-young boy in this series of the Chronicles of an Unlikely Voyager: Book 1: “Waters Like the Sky”, Book 2: “Treacherous Waters” and Book 3: “Uncharted Waters”.
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