HBC+Fur Trade Timeline

Before

Before the HBC started, beaver hats were already the height of fashion for men and women of wealth and power in the 1600s.

HBC's Birth + Britain

established the HBC

• The Hudson’s Bay Company, the world’s oldest continuously operating trading company, is born with the signing of the Royal Charter on May 2nd.
• Britain established the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) in 1670.

The birth helped the company get started and to flourish into trading and etc. This also helped the fur trade industry to get bigger and to be more involved with other groups.

The HBC competed directly with France in the fur trade. To set up the company, Britain offered a group of merchants a monopoly on

trade in an area it claimed as Rupert’s Land.

HBC Expands

From 1673 to 1684, HBC builds trading posts as the Company expands along the Hudson and James Bay routes.

Hudson's Bay got bigger and was able to trade with more groups around them. The HBC was more common/ popular to trade with in 1673 and on.

Britain .vs. France

Britain and France are at war. Soldiers from New France begin to attack and take over HBC's posts with anger (HBC competed with New France).

It was a tremendous loss for the company but with time they were able to recover and go back into business.

Travelling Traders

Traders from Quebec continue to follow inland lakes and rivers to trade with native people.

They could find more groups to trade with further inland which would mean more beaver pelts, buffalo robes, pemmican, moccasins, and more to give to their country or others to create $money.

The Significant

Point Blanket

Thomas Empson of Witney, Oxfordshire, is contracted to make the first point blanket.

The Point Blanket goes on to become one of HBC's most valued trade goods (mainly for warmth even when wet). The multistripe point blanket is introduced around 1800 and the coloured stripes become an unofficial identifier of HBC.

The

Merge

Hudson’s Bay Company and North West Company merge. George Simpson implements a plan for reorganizing HBC.

It expanded the whole company and together have a massive trading business. It was definitely a huge jump forward to help the HBC.

After

In the end, after all those years, the HBC did produce its first mail order catalogue and opened its first retail store in 1881, so it became the store it is today.

#1

In the North American fur trade, wool blankets were one of the main European items wanted by native people in exchange for beaver pelts, buffalo robes, pemmican, moccasins, and other trade goods. They were desired because of wool's ability to hold in heat even when wet, also because they were easier to sew than bison, deer or seal skins.

Wool cloth of one kind or another was traded as far back as the French regime in North America (1534–1765), but HBC point blankets were introduced in 1780 to compete with similar blankets offered by the Montreal-based private traders.

The blankets were often produced with a green stripe, red stripe, yellow stripe and indigo stripe on a white background. The four stripe colours were popular and easily produced using good colourfast dyes at that time. As well as the traditional stripes, the iconic blanket was also known for its “points”, a series of thin black lines located just above the lower stripes. These “points” were not, as is sometimes commonly believed, an indicator of how many pelts the blanket was worth in trade, but an easy-to-read measurement of how large the blanket was. When folded, the lines, or “points” would be displayed, easily indicating the exact size of the blanket.

From the early days of the fur trade, wool blankets were made into hooded coats called capotes by both natives and French Canadian voyageurs, which were perfectly suited to Canada's cold winters.

#1

#2

3. Still made here today, Hainsworth is so prestigious, it was worn by both Prince William and Harry at the 2011 royal wedding.

4. Their wool was known for being well-made, and had been used in everything from billiard tables to the felt on piano hammers.

There are many stores around Canada called the Bay.

1. The Hudson’s Bay Company is now a well-known retail group that claims to be the oldest company in North America, and it includes Saks Fifth Avenue and Lord and Taylor among its department stores.

2. Today the company is one of the oldest existing in the world, and still bears the distinctive colored stripes on some versions of its logo, iPhone cases, golf balls, beach chairs, and etc. But the blanket itself is still for sale, looking much as it did when the original orders were placed in London over 230 years ago, paving the way for the birth of modern Canada.

Changed what they sell, how they would sell it, the design/ display, the locations, etc.

#3

4. The Foxe Basin, Hudson Bay and Hudson Strait create a large inland sea system in Canada that is characterized by the mixing of Arctic marine seawater coming in from the North and vast amounts of freshwater runoff flowing in from terrestrial river systems (traders still shouldn’t get their drinking water source from the bay).

5. The bay was 1.23 million km² so it was a large amount of space to trade, plus expanding in the James Bay routes and etc. would mean there is even more space provided for everything.

#3

1. In many of the farther regions, the Hudson’s Bay Company was the effective government of the vast territory, and was at one point the largest landowner in the world, controlling over approximately 15 percent of North America.

2. Also operated as a fur trading business, pioneering the exploration and settling of Canada.

3. Hudson Bay is a large sea in northeastern Canada. It is named for Henry Hudson, an English explorer. Hudson discovered the bay in 1610 while looking for a way to sail west from Europe to Asia.