De Troyes completed the French roll of triumph with the bloodless capture of the strongest of the James Bay outposts, Albany Fort. After a bombardment from siege guns brought from Rupert House, the fort's defenders saluted their besiegers with loud cries of the French battle shout "vive le roi," then they threw open the gates.

Samuel Hearne directed the 1774 construction of Cumberland House, the HBC's first inland post. Appointed Chief of Prince of Wales's Fort in 1776.

In the summer of 1697, when France and England were still gripped in King William's War (as the conflict was formally known), d'Iberville returned. Arriving off the mouth of the Nelson River, a tributary of Hudson's Bay, on September 3 aboard the 44-gun Pelican of the French navy, he confronted three British ships, Dering, Hudson's Bay and Royal Navy frigate Hampshire.

By land, d'Iberville was threatened by the guns of York Factory, the company's strongest fort. By sea, he faced the combined firepower of three English warships. Wasting no time on indecision, d'Iberville did what he was most conditioned to do-he attacked.

Hudson's Bay Company territory 1670 to 1763

For four hours the sea battle raged across the ice-cold bay. The Hampshire fired a murderous broadside of disabling chain shot that sheared through Pelican's rigging, making it virtually impossible for the ship's crew to clamber aloft to control the all-important sails. Dering blew off the ornate, hand-carved prow of the French ship, while Dering and Hudson's Bay peppered the wounded Pelican with a hailstorm of man-shredding grapeshot and musket balls.In a lull in the action, as the captains of Pelican andHampshire maneuvered to find the best position to continue the action (a tactic called "seeking the weather gauge"), the English captain and d'Iberville saluted each other's valor with a toast of vintage wine. It was the last glass of wine ever to touch the Englishman's lips. Moments later, d'Iberville came up alongside of Hampshire and gutted the Britisher below the waterline with a killing volley.

The ship sank to the bottom with all hands, including the chivalrous British captain. The loss of Hampshire, the only real ship of war among the three, broke the back of British resistance. Hudson's Bay, in the timeless tradition of 18th-century warfare, fired off one more volley to defend its honor and then surrendered by striking her colors. Dering, taking cover in a sudden squall, fled up the Nelson River.

The Battle in the Bay (the sinking of the Hampshire)

Soon, mauled by the savage duel, Pelican herself slid beneath the frigid waters. However, d'Iberville and most of his crew made it safely to shore.Undaunted by his close escape from a watery grave, d'Iberville awaited the arrival of the rest of the French squadron before launching an assault on York Factory, the most important of the Hudson's Bay trading posts. To distract the British cannoneers from the vulnerable fleet, d'Iberville mounted a bold feint that completely took the British garrison by surprise. Before the company men realized their predicament, French sailors had dragged heavy cannons from their ships to bombard York Factory. The factory's defenders were now in a decidedly uncomfortable position. The resident factor, Henry Baley, quickly decided that discretion was the smarter half of valor-he surrendered.

With the capitulation of York Factory, d'Iberville had effectively swept from the map British control of Hudson's Bay and opened to France the precious treasure of brown gold: la pelletrie, the fur trade. It would not be until the Peace of Utrecht ended the war in 1713, a full 16 years later, that the factors of the Hudson's Bay Company would return to the desolate land.Toward the end of the 18th century, an even greater threat to the survival of the Hudson's Bay Company loomed before it than French warships. The threat was all the more severe because it came from the company's own English countrymen-the aggressive agents of the North West Fur Company.

Major fur trade routes.

The menace that was the North West Company began innocently enough, its origins in the bands of hardy French Canadian traders and trappers whose sires were the coureurs de bois, the "runners of the woods," who had opened up la pelletrie when France still held Canada. These modern coureurs de bois combined a freedom of initiative denied the servants of the bureaucratic Hudson's Bay Company with a knack for supplying their Indian customers with goods unthought of by company men.The inroads these freewheeling trappers had on company revenues soon began to be substantial. Matthew Cocking was sent into the interior in 1773 to assess the effects of the competition of these free traders, who were based by and large in Montreal. To the shock of Hudson's Bay's governors, Cocking reported that York Factory's yearly return had plummeted from an annual average of 30,000 beaver in the decade before 1766 to only 8,000 in 1773.

Rocked out of their complacency by this nerve-shattering news, Hudson's Bay's chieftains set out on a frantic period of expansion into unknown areas, fearful that the devil-maycare French Canadians would push them out of the fur trade entirely. It was a fear made all the more palpable when the competitors, who had started forming business partnerships about 1770, coalesced into the mighty North West Fur Company in 1779. Led by a Scot, Simon McTavish, the so-called Nor'Westers were determined to break forever the Hudson's Bay monopoly on the Canadian fur trade.

Alexander Mackenzie

To show their determination, the Nor'Westers matched Hudson's Bay move for move, like players in a high- stakes poker game. In 1775, Samuel Hearne had established Cumberland House in the western Canadian province of Saskatchewan, thus bringing Hudson's Bay Company into the heart of the continent. To counter this gambit, the Nor'Westers opened an inland command post, Fort William, on the shores of Lake Superior, in 1805.Two of the Nor'Wester explorer-traders, David Thompson and Alexander Mackenzie, would do more to map the face of modern-day Canada than any other men in history. Indeed, it was the very free-spirited atmosphere of the Nor'West Company that enabled these men to become such prodigious travelers.

Thompson, one of the greatest of the Nor'Wester explorers, was no French Canadian. He was born in London in 1770, of a Welsh family whose original name was Ap Thomas. Arriving in Canada for the Hudson's Bay Company in 1784, Thompson transferred his allegiance to the North West Fur Company in 1797. During his tenure as chief topographer for the Nor'Westers, Thompson staked a claim to being one of the greatest-if not the greatest-of the discoverers of North America. He not only charted the course of the Columbia River system to the far Pacific, he also located the sources of the Mississippi River, as well as extensively exploring the Missouri River country. When the tireless Thompson finally retired in 1812, 28 years after he first enlisted in the service of Hudson's Bay Company, he had logged an amazing 55,000 miles of travel by canoe and foot. Few men, in any age, can lay claim to such a herculean feat.

While Thompson was wearing out his moccasins on countless miles of tundra and prairie, another Nor'Wester was pursuing a dream that had spurred on the likes of Christopher Columbus and Sir Francis Drake: a northwest passage across North America to the riches of the exotic Orient.

When Mackenzie reached Bella Coola on the Pacific coast in 1793, he became the first European who systematically set out to penetrate the great western cordillera in order to reach the Pacific. This view by J.D. Kelly depicts Mackenzie's first view of the Pacific.

Born in Scotland, Alexander Mackenzie traveled to New York state with his father, who served in the Loyalist (proBritish) forces during the American Revolution. After the war, young Alexander and his father emigrated to Canada.Joining the North West Fur Company, Mackenzie became the proteacute geacute; of a shadowy transplanted American, Peter Pond. Pond, one of the earliest Nor'Wester explorers, taught young Mackenzie how to find his way through Canada's trackless wilderness. There was just one disagreeable fact about Pond: his trading competitors kept turning up dead. After the second had died in suspicious circumstances, Pond felt it wise to return to the United States, perhaps before a hangman's noose or backwood's justice (shot out in the woods by an unknown assailant) prematurely ended his career.

With none of Pond's vices, Mackenzie continued his patron's career. On June 3, 1789, he set out on the trip that ultimately would lead him to the Arctic Sea. The weather was so miserable-it snowed in June-that the voyageurs and Indians accompanying Mackenzie begged him to turn back.It was not just the misery of their exertions that crushed the spirits of Mackenzie's veterans. They were entering the frozen realm of the Eskimos, whose age-old vendetta against the Copper Indians Samuel Hearne had once seen acted out in blood. On the night of July 14, 1789, as a new age was beginning with the fall of the Bastille in Paris, the dispirited party camped on Garry Island, deep within Eskimo country. Mackenzie suddenly awoke at 4 a.m. to find his belongings wet from an incoming tide. He had found the Arctic Sea.

Hudson’s Bay Company territory 1764 to 1820

Four years later, in May 1793, Mackenzie began the journey that would immortalize his name: the search for an overland passage to the bright waters of the Pacific.Moving through what is now British Columbia, Mackenzie and his party ascended into the harsh beauty of the Canadian Rockies. They then canoed down the flood-swollen Parsnip River. Finally, having made it down the Fraser River and its tributary, the West Road River, the haggard voyagers reached the rain forests of the Pacific Coast. Aided by the friendly coastal Bella Coola tribe, which even lent them a new canoe, Mackenzie and company made the final dash for the Pacific down Dean Channel. On July 22, Mackenzie made dream into reality: he gazed on the shores of the Pacific.

Although menaced by hostile Indians, he took time with typical Scottish tenacity to record the momentous occasion. On a rock, he painted with vermillion and bear grease, a mixture of Indian war paint, an inscription that the Canadian government still preserves to this day: ALEX MACKENZIE FROM CANADA BY LAND 22d JULY 1793.

As stirring as the sagas of Thompson and Mackenzie were, their dramatic ventures had a single, bottom-line objective: to hew out of the wilderness an ever-greater empire of beaver for the North West Fur Company. Accordingly, the Nor'Westers pursued their campaign of exploration with a vengeance, while such posts as Fort Chipewyan on the Peace River and Fort William on Lake Superior began to close like a steel beaver trap on the Hudson's Bay Company. It is no wonder that the coat of arms of the North West Fur Company bore one bold word in English: "Perseverance."

In the growing rivalry over furs, made worse by a decline in the number of beaver due to frenzied trapping, it was not long before violence entered into the competition for the beaver pelts. Like the American frontier in later decades, the only law that was recognized by Hudson's Bay Company and the Nor'Westers was the law of the gun.

The flashpoint for all-out war between the goliaths of the fur trade came from an unlikely and tragic source: the desire of a man to help his fellows before he departed this life. Thomas Douglas, the fifth Earl of Selkirk, was a Scottish laird driven to do something for the poor Scottish peasants before tuberculosis, then a medical death sentence, ended his life. The Scots Highlanders, once the most stalwart farmers in the British Isles, had been driven from their farms by their own lords, for whom they had fought proudly in many a clan battle, to make room for sheep in the notorious Highland clearances of the late 18th century. Grief-stricken at the poverty in which these loyal people found themselves, Douglas was determined to resettle them in Canada. A colony on Prince Edward Island in 1803 proved a great success, with 800 Highlanders happily transplanted to the New World.

In his search for more available land, Douglas made contact with Alexander Mackenzie, although Douglas was unaware of Mackenzie's true allegiance. When Douglas tried to buy a controlling interest in the Hudson's Bay Company, Mackenzie went along with him in a 19th-century version of Wall Street insider trading. The unsuspecting Douglas bought the controlling interest in the Hudson's Bay Company.

Additional Sources:

www.canadianheritage.org
www.canadianencyclopedia.ca
collections.ic.gc.ca
www.nlc-bnc.ca
www.canadiana.org
www.thelastbestwest.com
www.nlsd.ab.ca
www.globalseek.net

The meaning of the earl's financial coup was that the Bay Company granted him a huge piece of territory that included much of western Canada, plus parts of the states of Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota. Although the company felt empowered to grant Douglas this huge tract of real estate because of its 1670 charter, it deliberately ignored the fact that Douglas' New World empire was at the very heart of land claimed by the Nor'Westers, including their beaver-rich territory around Lake Athabasca. When land-starved Highland peasants began to arrive at the new preserve along the Red River in 1812, they did not realize their coming was the opening move in an increasingly bitter war. The French Canadians and their Meacutetis relations had considered this country their own land, and they deeply resented the Scots' intrusion. Matters were only made worse when the French Canadians and Meacutetis, who usually labored for the NorWesters, began to consider the newcomers covert agents for their Hudson's Bay rivals.

Thomas Douglas Selkirk

Miles Macdonnell, governor of the Selkirk Settlement, seemed intent on bringing the volatile situation to a violent climax. From the colony's headquarters at Fort Douglas, he banned the sending of pemmican, an essential frontier food concocted from dried meat and fat pounded together, to the voyageurs of the North West Company who depended on it. Then he ordered all Nor'Wester stockades on settlement land to be evacuated within six months.

The Nor'Westers were not long in retaliating. At an emergency meeting at Fort William, the barons of the North West Company determined to erase the new colony. The man ultimately placed in charge of operations against the ill-starred farmers was Cuthbert Grant, one of the most sinister figures ever to appear in the Canadian West.Like a hired gun in the American West, Grant always seemed to turn up whenever the Nor'Westers appeared threatened by a rival. In January 1806, when Zebulon Pike marched into Minnesota, Grant was the bourgeois, or factor, who greeted him at the Nor'Westers' post on Lower Red Cedar Lake. The meeting took place on January 3. On the night of January 4, Pike's tent caught fire and he was saved only by being awakened by the cries of his yelling soldiers. Although Pike never blamed Grant directly for the blaze, he did confide in his diary on January 5: "Mr. Grant promised to overtake me yesterday, but has not yet arrived. I conceived it would be necessary to attend his motions with careful observation."

Trading ceremony at York Factory

After the council of war in the Great Hall at Fort William, Grant readily went to work. Raiding parties of voyageurs and their Indian allies swept down on unsuspecting farmers in their fields. Meanwhile, nature itself turned against the settlers, as drought and Red River floods took turns ravaging their crops. Finally, by the end of the summer of 1815, all but 13 die-hard households had abandoned their landholdings-and their dreams. Eventually, even these hardy survivors gave up and trudged off, their last sight the howling French Canadians and Métis putting to the torch their beloved cottages.

On their way out, the refugees ran into Colin Robertson, a Hudson's Bay officer, who persuaded them to return to the settlement to harvest what was left of their crops. At the same time, more Scottish immigrants arrived under the leadership of Robert Semple, who was not only the new governor of the colony (the Nor'Westers had jailed the impetuous Mcdonnell) but also the head of the Bay Company's northern and southern departments. There was now no doubt in the mind of the Nor'Westers that the Selkirk Settlement and the Hudson's Bay Company were one and the same.In the growing tension, Robertson struck first. On March 17, 1816, Robertson attacked and seized the Nor'Westers' Fort Gibraltar. In the fort, Robertson found information that the Nor'Westers planned to attack the Red River colony in force that summer. He informed Semple of this alarming news and, before he left the region, told the governor to prepare for war. But he gave Semple no orders to strike first.

Nevertheless, the fire-breathing governor-on the very day in June that Robertson departed-dealt the first blow by torching the captured Fort Gibraltar. Aroused to fury, the voyageurs were led to all-out war by Grant. The result was the fatal confrontation between the Nor'Westers and Semple's party at the Seven Oaks, on June 19, 1816. Semple and his followers were no match for the hard-riding Nor'Westers, who could kill a bull buffalo with one shot from their rifles while at the gallop on their wiry Indian ponies. That night, the mournful cry of the loon was the only sound heard over the mutilated bodies of Semple and his men.The shots fired in Seven Oaks grove transformed a sporadic backwoods conflict between the two companies into full- scale war. On August 12, just two months after the Seven Oaks massacre, Douglas himself led an attack on the Northwest citadel at Fort William with a mercenary army composed of veterans of the de Watteville regiment and others who had fought against Napoleon. Taking the post, Douglas not only captured senior partner William McGillivray, who had raised Grant, but also damning evidence of the rewards paid to the voyageurs for the atrocity at Seven Oaks.

Nowhere did the trade war flare so dangerously as in the Athabasca country, the plentiful beaver area surrounding Lake Athabasca in Saskatchewan and Alberta provinces. The Nor'Westers retaliated for the seizure of Fort William by striking fast and hard to take five Hudson's Bay posts in the Athabasca land. The richer Bay Company, however, responded by sending a brigade of 200 men under Robertson, which quickly shifted the balance of power in the area. Then, in a daring move, Nor'Westers Simon McGillivray, Jr., and Joseph Black kidnapped Robertson at gunpoint while he was outside the Bay Company's Fort Wedderburn reading the funeral service for a man killed in a fishing mishap.But Robertson was not a man to be undone easily. He was imprisoned at Fort Chipewyan in a shack located next door to the outpost's maladorous privy. Yet from his cell, he managed to spirit messages outside the fort to Bay Company comrades in Fort Wedderburn. Discovered one day busily writing another coded note, Robertson was bundled off in a canoe for Montreal, the capital of the North West Fur Company, where he could be kept under more watchful eye. As the birchbark canoe ferrying him tried to shoot the rapids at Ile-á-la-Crosse, the fragile craft capsized. Two of his keepers drowned, but Robertson survived. When the party passed Cumberland House, Robertson asked permission of the voyageurs to go inside to say farewell to some old friends. Once inside, Robertson simply made his escape by having the doors barred and refusing to come out again. The voyageurs, their prize quarry eluding their grasp, traveled on without him.

The wily Scot soon had his revenge. One of the messages he had smuggled out of his evil-smelling confinement bore a message for William Williams, a high-level Bay Company official, alerting Williams that top Nor'Wester officers and a harvest of furs were returning to Montreal by way of Grand Rapids, where the Saskatchewan River joined Lake Winnipeg. Acting on this priceless nugget of intelligence, Williams surprised the Nor'Westers at Grand Rapids with a schooner armed with cannons and an assault team of 20 men. The partners were apprehended and the furs confiscated.Williams' audacious coup-he had even arrested Benjamin Frobisher, a son of one of the North West Company's founders put an effective end to the war in the Athabasca country.

Ironically, it was not the struggle in the woods and marshes of the beaver country that ultimately forced the North West Company to give up the fight. In the end, the Nor'Westers were defeated by the access of Bay Company governors to the corridors of power across the ocean in London. Hudson's Bay could count on loans from the Bank of England to finance its fight against the Nor'Westers in Canada. And it was the Bay Company that still held the never-broken Royal Charter. There seemed no hope for the Nor'Westers but to form an alliance with their old enemies.

Fort St. James, B.C. -
Governor George Simpson welcomed by James Douglas, 7 September 1828

On March 26, 1821, the North West Fur Company officially merged with the Hudson's Bay Company. The name of the new fur trade monopoly? The Hudson's Bay Company. The toughminded business administrators of the Bay Company were now united with the dynamic Scots and voyageurs of the old Nor'Westers. It was not a moment too soon, for the new company would soon be confronting the greatest challenge in its history: the seemingly irresistible flood tide of American empire surging up the Pacific Coast and the Mississippi Valley. The Hudson's Bay Company was the power down in Oregon; for example, until mountain man-turned-cattle driver Ewing Young and other Americans asserted their independence beginning in the late 1830s).

Veterans for Constitution Restoration is a non-profit, non-partisan educational and grassroots activist organization. The primary area of concern to all VetsCoR members is that our national and local educational systems fall short in teaching students and all American citizens the history and underlying principles on which our Constitutional republic-based system of self-government was founded. VetsCoR members are also very concerned that the Federal government long ago over-stepped its limited authority as clearly specified in the United States Constitution, as well as the Founding Fathers' supporting letters, essays, and other public documents.

Actively seeking volunteers to provide this valuable service to Veterans and their families.

UPDATED THROUGH APRIL 2004

The FReeper Foxhole. America's History. America's Soul

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It's a night shift bump for the Hudson Bay Company on the Freeper Foxhole

Regards

alfa6 ;>}

Great thread SAMWolf...just popped in to check it out. Alot of work you do in preparation!!!! Hat's off!

"FALL IN" to the FReeper Foxhole!

Good Wednesday Morning Everyone.

If you want to be added to our ping list, let us know.

If you'd like to drop us a note you can write to:

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I thought you were back on days?

Back on nights for the next 10 days or so. I work tonight, of course, then Fri, Sat, Sun, Mon, Wed and next Thursday nights. It is our new, wonderfull schedule, barf, hack, snort.

Then I am off over the weekend of Jan 22 and back to work Tuesday, Jan 25 on days.

If you figure this out let me know so I can right it down, okay :-)

Regards

alfa6 ;>}

Hiya kids, just stopped by to say "Howdy" ... :)

And to remind everyone of our new tribute website, Portraits of FREEDOM, dedicated to honoring the men and women who have served and/or are serving our Country in defense of FREEDOM. And to those who gave the "last full measure of devotion", the other tribute page, A Tribute to HEROES will be updated with new tributes by weeks end.

±

"The Era of Osama lasted about an hour, from the time the first plane hit the tower to the moment the General Militia of Flight 93 reported for duty."
Toward FREEDOM

Good morning everyone!

To all our military men and women past and present, military family members, and to our allies who stand beside us
Thank You!

Interesting history .. thank you. Here's an interesting parallel history from the HBC website:

Hudson's Bay Company History

Excerpt:

"Our History
The Fur Trade

Two centuries before Confederation a pair of resourceful Frenchmen named Radisson and des Groseilliers discovered a wealth of fur in the interior of the continent – north and west of the Great Lakes – accessible via the great inland sea that is Hudson Bay. Despite their success French and American interests would not back them. It took the vision and connections of Prince Rupert, cousin of King Charles II, to acquire the Royal Charter which, in May, 1670 granted the lands of the Hudson Bay watershed to 'the Governor and Company of Adventurers of England trading into Hudson Bay.'"

The Fur Trade

Its first century of operation found Hbc firmly ensconced in a few forts and posts around the shores of James and Hudson Bays. Natives brought furs annually to these locations to barter for manufactured goods such as knives, kettles, beads, needles, and blankets. By the late 18th c. competition forced Hbc to expand into the interior. A string of posts grew up along the great river networks of the west foreshadowing the modern cities that would succeed them: Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton.

In 1821 Hbc merged with its most successful rival, the North West Company based in Montreal. The resulting commercial enterprise now spanned the continent – all the way to the Pacific Northwest (Oregon, Washington and British Columbia) and the North (Alaska, the Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut). The merger also set the pattern of the Company’s growth, being the first of a series of notable acquisitions."

"............The economic downturn of the 1980s caused Hbc to rethink its priorities and, like many other firms, return to its core business. Non-retail businesses were sold off. The pace of retail acquisition increased with takeovers of Zellers (1978), Simpsons (1978), Fields (1978), Robinson’s (1979), Towers/Bonimart (1990), Woodwards (1994), and K-Mart Canada (1998) following in the tradition of Cairns (1921), Morgan’s (1960) and Freiman’s (1971).

The 21st century finds Hbc well into its fourth century of retailing in Canada. The Hbc Family of Stores – the Bay, Zellers, Home Outfitters and DealsOutlet.ca – together provide more than two-thirds of the retail needs of Canadians. Proof positive, if any were needed, of the aptness of Hbc’s proud claim:"

-------------------

Apparently they sold off Markborough Properties, which was a subsidiary company of HBC I worked at when they were building one of their huge real estate projects in South Florida in the late 70's.

Good morning Snippy.

The greatest tragedy of this history the that the venerable and grand Hudsons Bay Company (older than your nation and mine)is about to be (acquired, subsumed, absorbed, bought out, or what ever you want to call it) by a simplistic and mercenary company (Target, for those who aren't following the saga) with no regard to the history of its potential acquisition.

Target is acting as a predator should; to attack, subdue and consume. The difficulty I have with this is that the HBC created Western Canada, and all its provinces.

I doubt that anyone not Canadian can understand my malaise with the capitalist sacrifice being presented here, but I had to "say my piece".

If Target can make The Bay better, good on them.

Seriously, it's one of the last vestiges of Canada's sovereignity, and we have only our liEberal gov'ts of the last 40 years to thank.

Good morning, snippy and everyone at the Freeper Foxhole.

Good morning

January 12, 2005

Choose To Feel

Read: Hosea 11

My heart churns within Me; My sympathy is stirred. —Hosea 11:8

Bible In One Year: Genesis 37-39

The bumper sticker on the blue van caught my attention:
CHOOSE TO FEEL

As I considered those words, I noticed the billboards I was passing. They urged me to choose things that would keep me from feeling—alcohol to deaden emotional pain; fat-laden food to alleviate feelings of emptiness; luxury cars and other expensive items to lessen feelings of worthlessness.

Many of the temptations that lure us away from God do so by promising to relieve the emotional hurt we all feel because of the consequences of sin—our own sin or someone else's.

God set a different example. Instead of becoming numb to the pain our sin causes, He chose to suffer the results of it. Through the prophet Hosea, God expressed the heart-wrenching pain of losing a wayward child. "I stooped and fed them," He said tenderly. "I drew them with gentle cords, with bands of love" (11:3-4). Still they rejected their heavenly Father. Reluctantly, He let them face the consequences.

When we choose to feel the full range of our emotions, we come to a fuller understanding of the God who created us in His image—the image of One who feels.

It's okay to feel that all is not right in the world. God feels that way too! —Julie Link

God knows each winding way I take,
And every sorrow, pain, and ache;
His children He will not forsake—
He knows and loves His own. —Bosch

Choosing to deaden bad feelings eventually deadens our ability to feel good.

Good Morning to the night shift, alfa6

Morning AZamericonnie. The Hudson's Bay Company played a big pat in Oregon's History. Thought it might be interesting to read about how it all started.

Morning Snippy.