Not just fur: How the Hudson's Bay Company built a BC outpost on salmon, butter, and gold

It was as hot as the hinges on the gates of hell inside the reconstructed Fort Langley stockade building.

You can almost imagine Vancouver Sun journalist Paul St. Pierre wiping the sweat off his forehead as he wrote the phrase down in his notebook, while he and hundreds others waited for the official opening of the Fort Langley National Historic Site in 1958.

Royalty was in town for the occasion, and as St. Pierre waited for Princess Margaret to step up to the microphone and start speaking, he made notes on her dress, her shoes, her blue eyes. It was a big occasion, even if shoddy reception and an overhead plane obscured most of Margaret’s speech.

“... to see what 100 years have done for British Columbia,” St. Pierre reported her saying. “...most fitting that the reopening of Fort Langley should have been chosen as one of the main projects… feel sure this will continue to be a source of pride …”

The fort was a Canadian landmark. But it was also an example of how intertwined the nation was with a single company.

Today, the 355-year-old Hudson’s Bay Company owes nearly $1 billion and is selling all but six of its stores to pay off its debts. That will include Langley’s store, as well as nearly 90 others across the country.

By the time Princess Margaret visited the fort to open the new historic site, the Hudson’s Bay Company was no longer the fur-trading company that had established trade routes and British governance across Indigenous land.

The company had abandoned its Fort Langley post more than half a century before, and zealous local historians had taken over the “Birthplace of British Columbia” in an attempt to preserve its history. The Bay, as it became known, was turning its eyes towards other, more lucrative endeavours in the Canadian retail scene. And that led it not just out of the fort, but out of Langley altogether. It only returned in 1990 with the expansion of the community’s Willowbrook Mall.

The first fort

Despite its enduring presence in the Fraser Valley today, Fort Langley was only an active trading post for 40 years. It was built to connect and facilitate trade not just between the British subjects who were colonizing western Canada, but also between Indigenous nations, Americans, and even Russians. The fort extended the rule of law over eager gold prospectors (or tried to, anyway), and eventually led to the establishment of official British control over the region.

Its story began in 1827, when James McMillan and 24 other men set off from Fort Vancouver in what is now Washington to find a spot for the new western headquarters for the Hudson’s Bay Company. Six years prior, the HBC had merged with its rival North West Company, establishing a monopoly over the fur trade in what is now Canada. Having solidified the interior, it turned its attention to coastal trade.

The crew left Fort Vancouver, on the Columbia River near the growing community of Portland, at the end of June. It took them nearly a month to reach the mouth of Stó:lō, a river recently renamed for Simon Fraser by European explorers. Travelling in a schooner, they passed three Cowichan villages near Lulu Island, and noted two trees marked with the letters HBC, left there by a previous expedition.

On July 30, 1827, the men disembarked near the junction of the Fraser and Salmon Rivers, near what is today Derby Reach.

By that time the crew, which included at least one Haudenosaunee man and one native Hawai’ian, had been severely incapacitated by problems of their own making: five men had caught debilitating gonorrhea, and another is recorded as “suffering dreadfully from Venereal.” The majority of the crew’s horses had also died on the voyage.

(The first recorded instance of gonorrhea in Stó:lō communities was in 1827, according to the Stó:lō Historical Atlas, the same year the Fort Langley crew and their diseased members arrived in the region.)

Despite the decrease in manpower, the crew went to work clearing the forest by the river. The trees were dense and thick, with underbrush interwoven with brambles. It was slow going.

“The country here is very unfavourable for hurry in building Forts,” James MacMillan, the head of the Fort Langley crew, noted dryly.

The fort did get built though. Fort Langley was officially finished in November 1827, although building continued throughout the winter. It was then time for the men to turn their minds to their real purpose: trading furs.

It faced two major difficulties: poor relations with local Indigenous nations and fierce competition from Americans.

The trade war

In order to get the furs it needed to send back to England, the Hudson’s Bay Company had always worked with First Nation and Metis trappers, and the company’s white employees often married Indigenous women—a practice encouraged by the company to build better connections to the local nations. (You can read more about that history here.) The men at Fort Langley also married Indigenous women, often from the Kwantlen Nation, which had a village of around 300 people near the fort.

Trading was challenged by ongoing raids on local nations, however. Across the region, Indigenous communities had been decimated by smallpox which had arrived in Stó:lō territory in 1782. And those weakened nations were at risk from raids by other, stronger Indigenous communities, often from Vancouver Island.

According to McMillan, two war parties from the Cowichan Nation passed the fort on their way to raid the Ts'elxwéyeqw Nation near present-day Chilliwack. The Fort Langley Journal notes at least 30 local raids during the first three years of the fort’s existence, not including ones that were only rumoured to happen. Oral histories also note counter raids were common, although not as well-organized as the raids against the Stó:lō.

The fort drew Indigenous people to the area to trade. But it also made them ready targets for raiders from Vancouver Island.

McMillan wrote: “unless the Company supports them against those lawless villains, little exertions can be expected from them.”

His successor, Archibald McDonald, suggested the company sell guns and ammunition to the locals. The HBC sold the guns at high prices (around 20 beaver skins) but had to lower prices when the Americans threatened to arm Indigenous nations for cheaper. HBC members themselves did drive away a force of 240 Lekwiltok raiders in 1829, and completely destroyed a Klallam village near Fort Vancouver.

According to the Stó:lō Historical Atlas, most Stó:lō chose to continue with their traditional salmon exchange economy rather than participate in the fur trade—despite what is described as “vigorous efforts” by the company.

The Hudson’s Bay Company did manage to barter some beaver and otter skins from Indigenous traders—more than 900 beaver skins and nearly 300 otter pelts traded hands in the fort’s first six months. (The Kwantlen and Musqueam people often acted as middle-men for trappers further south, rather than hunting the animals themselves.) HBC officials needed more though—and the fort’s traders were facing stiff competition.

American traders operating from ships had cornered the fur trade market, undercutting traditional HBC prices and going right to Indigenous communities to conduct trade. Russian ships were also trading on the coast, although they were less of a threat than the Americans.

The men at Fort Langley, with permission from officials higher up, began undercutting American prices—at one point they traded 11 blankets, a pound of copper wire, a pound of beads, and a number of smaller items for 35 beaver pelts and 10 otter skins.

The lower prices worked and drove many of the Americans from the Pacific coast trading area by 1830. That left more time for Fort Langley to focus on a new venture: curing salmon.

The business of salmon

Kwantlen First Nation Chief Whattlekainum was the one to urge the Hudson’s Bay Company to begin trading salmon. Salmon were, and still are, among the most important resources of the Stó:lō people, serving not only as food but also playing a key role in Stó:lō identity and culture.

Stó:lō people fished salmon for most of the year, and dry-rack fisheries in the Fraser Canyon were established each summer at family-held fishing sites. The salmon were eaten and shared between families, as well as traded for profit through Indigenous trade networks. (The Stó:lō Historical Atlas identifies a continuum of trade for Stó:lō people, from gift exchange within families to market exchange for profit and raiding between enemies.)

Whattlekainum had experience with the white men who had been exploring and trading on the Fraser River. In 1808, he met Simon Fraser, saving the explorer’s life by sharing his own goods with young Kwantlen men who had been humiliated by the expeditionary party after a theft. Whattlekainum moved a Kwantlen village to be closer to the Fort for protection, and began promoting the trade of salmon rather than furs.

In 1828, McDonald, the HBC chief trader, began forays into salmon preservation. It started badly.

In 1830, Fort Langley employees salted 220 barrels of salmon, but the casks were so bad that nearly pickling liquid seeped from the barrels. The fort persisted though, and by 1848 salmon sales were more profitable than the fur trade.

The salmon was sent all over the world, though the quality was uneven. In 1855, 100 barrels of Fort Langley salmon were sent to London: the brine escaped and the fish were rendered almost worthless. Barrels from the same season were sent to Hawai’i, where would-be buyers found the fish to be unpleasantly soft and in some cases containing maggots.

“There is no place on the coast where salmon is so abundant or got so cheap as at Fort Langley,” one HBC official wrote. “If we find a sale for salmon, it would alone more than pay for the expense of keeping up that place.”

The eventual success of salmon-curing boosted trade between the HBC and local communities. In the beginning, salmon trading was conducted on a wharf in front of Fort Langley itself, and trade volumes were comparatively small. (The company once acquired 84 barrels of salmon in exchange for an assortment of buttons, looking glasses, brass rings, fish hooks, chisels, combs, tobacco, scalpers, files, vermilion, knives and an axe.)

Later, HBC employees found it easier to go right to the source, setting up trading and curing facilities at Stó:lō fishing spots upriver. One fishing location on the Chilliwack River produced more than 1,000 barrels of salmon.

The new fort

In 1839, the employees at Fort Langley made a big move—a whole two and a half miles upstream. The move took place only 12 years after the original fort had been scraped from the forest, and brought the Hudson’s Bay Company to where the Fort Langley National Historic Site stands today.

“We have abandoned the old Langley establishment, which was in a dilapidated state, as well as inconvenient in some respects for the business,” James Douglas, an HBC official, wrote in 1839.

The new fort was built to be the home for a growing, and diversifying food-supply business. But it didn’t stay new for very long. A year after its construction, all the buildings were destroyed by flames. Despite the fire, the new location was better for the Hudson’s Bay Company. It was less prone to flooding, closer to the fort’s expansive farm in Langley Prairie, and still gave easy access to the river for the salmon trade.

Although HBC had entered the farming business, Douglas warned his company not to get distracted: “The salmon trade must not be sacrificed as it will always yield a more valuable return at less trouble and expense than the farm.”

Senior HBC officials didn’t care about the challenge of farming, however. In 1839, the same year the fort moved two miles upriver, the Hudson’s Bay Company signed a trade agreement with the Russian American Company in which HBC promised the Russians with a significant volume of butter, most of which was to be supplied by Fort Langley. (The Russians controlled Alaska until its sale to the United States in 1867.)

James Murray Yale, who was in charge of Fort Langley from 1833 to 1859, was concerned. The Hudson’s Bay Company sent 29 dairy cows (which Yale labelled “wild California cows”) to Fort Langley in 1839, with the hopes that the fort could supply a significant portion of the more than 5,000 pounds of butter required by the Russian contract.

“I shall not presume to express my humble opinion in regard to the Treaty with the Russians,” Yale wrote in a letter, “but judging of their consequence only from the quantity of Butter they require, one would certainly believe them to be very formidable.”

Fort Langley managed to produce significant volumes of butter—around half of the amount required by the agreement in 1840—while also farming grain and salting pork.

Future projects would also be foisted on Fort Langley. As the company’s westernmost mainland establishment, Fort Langley employees were tasked with developing an inland route to Fort Kamloops. Once the route was complete, the fort would be required to supply the coastal trade networks with furs and salmon and the provide the interior with boat building, blacksmithing, and farming.

The fort also briefly tried its hand at exporting cranberries, but was notably poor at it. Would-be American buyers said the berries were “exceedingly foul, being mixed with leaves, moss, and other substances.”

The activities of the new Fort Langley lasted for nearly a decade, but were subdued by a shift in the fate of the region: the beginning of the gold rush.

The Fraser River gold rush

The men at the Hudson’s Bay Company had heard rumblings of gold in the river years before the rush actually began. Small quantities of gold had been found in the Coquihalla River near Fort Hope, and Indigenous traders had brought 49 ounces of gold to Kamloops in the Interior. The rumours trickled south. And when 800 ounces of gold were sent from Fort Victoria to a mint in San Francisco in February of 1858, the media got wind of the find and Americans soon began flooding north, stricken with gold fever. The Fraser River gold rush had begun.

From 1858 to the mid-1860s, roughly 30,000 people travelled up the Fraser River searching for gold. The men—mostly white Americans, but also Chinese, Hawai’ian, and Black prospectors—staked their claims between Hope and Lillooet, searching for the rich gold flour that could be found in the river.

Each man needed to pass Fort Langley to get to the gold district. And that made the fort the de facto administrative and policing centre of both the Hudson’s Bay Company and the new Colony of British Columbia.

Before the gold rush, there was no British Columbia. The Oregon Treaty of 1846 declared that Britain would be able to control and settle the area. (Needless to say, local Indigenous communities were not at the negotiating table.) Abut although Britain had declared Vancouver Island a colony in 1849, it left the mainland for the Hudson’s Bay Company to administer.

The gold rush changed that. Before the discovery of gold, only around 200 non-Indigenous residents lived in what is now British Columbia, and nearly all were employed in some way by the HBC. With the start of the gold rush, thousands more men of different backgrounds arrived in the region, bringing with them the threat of conflict, violence, and banditry.

For the first time in the history of Fort Langley, its officers faced the task of managing the law of the land for other white men.

They began requiring prospectors to purchase a licence for their boats, and two revenue officers were stationed at Fort Langley to seize contraband goods and take unlicensed canoes into custody.

The arrival of Americans in the Fraser Canyon significantly changed relations between incoming Europeans and local Stó:lō and Nlakaʼpamux communities. While the HBC’s business depended on working with nations, American gold-seekers sought to take land and resources from them. Tensions grew between white prospectors and the Nlaka’pamux people of the Fraser Canyon, triggering the short-lived Fraser Canyon War in August of 1858.

Angered by two deaths near Yale, miners invaded Nlaka’pamux territory in mid-August. They killed dozens of people, including five chiefs and burned five villages before retreating downriver. The conflict ended after Nlaka’pamux Chief David Spintlum (Sexpínlhemx) negotiated a settlement during a meeting at what is now Lytton.

The influx of American settlers and the threat of violence and, potentially, US annexation of the territory led the British government to formally create the Colony of British Columbia.

Newly appointed Governor James Douglas visited the Fraser Canyon in late August. But it wasn’t until late fall that an official ceremony was held to proclaim the new colony. On Nov. 19, 1858, in the streaming rain, 55-year-old Douglas and a handful of other dignitaries trudged through the mud at Fort Langley.

The procession was greeted with an 18-gun salute, and the Union Jack “was floating, or, to speak the truth, dripping over the principal entrance,” the Victoria Gazette reported. Roughly 100 people crowded into a large room in the Big House, with officials taking their new oaths to King, country, and the new colony.

Read next half of the HBC’s history in Langley, from the decline and fall of the fort to the return of The Bay in the 1990s, here.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified Fort Vancouver as being in present-day Oregon. It is actually in present-day Washington; the state border runs through the Columbia River, and the fort is on the northern bank, rather than the southern bank.