North West Company - Beginnings

Beginnings

There are historical references to a North West Company as early as 1770, involving the Montreal-based traders Benjamin Frobisher, Isaac Todd, Alexander Henry the elder and others, but the standard histories trace the Company to a 16-share organization formed in 1779. For the next four years, it was little more than a loose association of a few Montreal merchants who discussed how they might break the stranglehold the Hudson's Bay Company held on the North American fur trade. In the winter of 1783-84, the North West Company was officially created on a long-term basis, with its corporate offices on Vaudreuil Street in Montreal. It was led by businessmen Benjamin Frobisher, his brother Joseph, and Simon McTavish, along with investor-partners who included Robert Grant, Nicholas Montour, Patrick Small, William Holmes and George McBeath.

In 1787 the North West Company merged with a rival organization, Gregory, McLeod and Co., which brought several more able partners in, including John Gregory, Alexander Mackenzie, and his cousin Roderick Mackenzie. The 1787 Company consisted of twenty shares, some held by the so-called agents at Montreal, and others by wintering partners, who spent the trading season in the fur country and oversaw the trade with the aboriginal peoples there. The wintering partners and the Montreal agents met each July at the Company's depot at Grand Portage on Lake Superior, later moved to Fort William. Also under the auspices of the Company, Alexander Mackenzie conducted two important expeditions of exploration. In 1789, he descended the Grand River (now called the Mackenzie River) to the Arctic Ocean, and in 1793 he went overland from Peace River to the Pacific Ocean Further explorations were performed by David Thompson, starting in 1797, and later by Simon Fraser. These men pushed into the wilderness territories of the Rocky Mountains and all the way to the Gulf of Georgia on the Pacific Coast.