York Factory

To place conspicuous marks at places where ships might enter, and to deposit information as to the nature of the coast which might be useful to Lieutenant Parry should he succeed in finding a Northwest Passage along the American shore.

Accompanied by Dr. John Richardson, George Back, Robert Hood, and a seaman named Hepburn, Franklin embarked at Gravesend on the 23rd of May, 1819, and reached York Factory, Hudson Bay, at the end of August.

On the 9th of the following month, the explorers set out and traveled a distance of 857 miles to Fort Chipewyan on Lake Athabasca, which was reached on the 8th of February, 1820.

In the summer, the explorers embarked on Lake Athabasca in three canoes, accompanied by 16 Canadian voyagers.

Relief came at last.

Back had lost no time in sending food to the fort, and to do so he had undergone hardships which nothing but the hope of obtaining help for his friends could have enabled him to endure.

The difficulties which afterwards beset Franklin and his companions were slight in comparison with those through which they had already passed, and on the 14th of July, 1822, they reached York Factory, whence they embarked for England.

Thus, says Franklin, ended our long, fatiguing, and disastrous travels in North America, having journeyed by water and by land, including our navigation of the Polar Sea, 5,550 miles.

I'm having a hard time seeing it.

But it's payable at the York Factory in Rupert's Land.

So the York Factory was right on the Hudson Bay on the west side.

So it was kind of like northern Manitoba now.

It wasn't Manitoba then.

Exactly.

So it's, again, one of these things that's designed to make you just do it.

Like having it at the York factory, it's like you pick the most northern one, like...

To Fort Edmonton came the furs of the Athabasca and of the Rockies.

To Fort Pitt came the peltry of the Barren Lands, and all passed down the broad highway of the Saskatchewan to Lake Winnipeg, whence they were sent out to York Factory on Hudson Bay, there to be loaded on ships and taken to the Company's warehouses in London.

Incidentally, the fur hunters were explorers who had blazed a trail across a continent and penetrated to the uttermost reaches of a northern empire the size of Europe.

But it was fur these explorers were seeking when they pushed their canoes up the Saskatchewan, crossed the Rocky Mountains, went down the Columbia.

The ships duly arrived at Fort Charles, and, while Bailey and his men prepared the fort for residence and Groseilliers plied trade with the Indians, Radisson cruised the west coast of the bay on the Waverle.

He made observations at Moose and Albany Rivers and passed north to Nelson Harbor, where Button had wintered half a century before.

Here, on the projection of land between two great rivers, the future site of York Factory, Radisson erected the arms of the English king.

The southern river he named Hayes, after Sir James Hayes, Prince Rupert's secretary.

They're sort of the same.

I mean, obviously the fort has a little more defensive aspect to it, and the factories, well, back then, I mean, the, in an era sort of pre-industrial or pr- or very light industrial era, a lot of so-called manufacturing was done in these places, like on the co- on the h- you know, York Factory.

But from our point of view, y- there's no industrial activity going on there at all.

It's people using hand saws and hammers and scraping furs or whatever, right?

In publishing these myths of the Sioux, I deem it proper to state that I am of one-fourth Sioux blood.

My maternal grandfather, Captain Duncan Graham, a Scotchman by birth, who had seen service in the British Army, was one of a party of Scotch Highlanders who in eighteen eleven arrived in the British Northwest by way of York Factory, Hudson Bay, to found what was known as the Selkirk Colony near Lake Winnipeg, now within the province of Manitoba, Canada.

Soon after his arrival at Lake Winnipeg, he proceeded up the Red River of the North and the western fork thereof to its source, and thence down the Minnesota River to Mendota, the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers, where he located.

My grandmother, Hazahotawin, was a full-blood of the Mendowakinton band of the Sioux tribe of Indians.

And that ancient and honorable body, as the company was called, reaped enormous profits from the bartering of pelts.

But the bartering went on in a prosy, half-alive way, the traders sitting snugly in their forts on Rupert and Severn Rivers or at York Factory, Port Nelson, and Churchill, Prince of Wales.

The French governor down in Quebec issued only a limited number of licenses for the fur trade in Canada, and the old English company had no fear of rivalry in the north.

It never sought inland tribes, but waited with serene apathy for the Indians to come down to its fur posts on the bay.

This was the noisy, blustering, bragging company of gaily bedizened fellows that had turned the streets of Montreal into a roistering booth when the Astorians came to the end of their long eastward journey.

Poor, fool-happy revelers, 18 of them died of starvation in the far cold north, owing to the conflict between Fort Douglas and Gibraltar which delayed supplies.

Beginning in 1811, Lord Selkirk poured a stream of colonists to his newly acquired territory by way of Churchill and York Factory on Hudson Bay.

These people were given lands, and in return expected to defend the Hudson's Bay Company from Nor'westers.