THE COMPANY

The Hudson's Bay Company was founded 350 years ago. Its early history is also the origin story of modern Canada.
The Company started out small in 1670,trading practical manufactured goods for furs with the Indigenous inhabitants of inland subarctic Canada. Controlled by a handful of English aristocrats, it expanded into a powerful political force that ruled the lives of thousands of people - from the low lands south and west of Husdon Bay, to the tundra, the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific northwest. It transformed the culture and economy of many Indigenous groups and became the most important political and economic force in northern and western North America.
     When competition arrived from French traders in the 1780s, the result was a bloody corporate battle: the coming of Governor George Simpson- one of the greatest villians in Canadian history- and the Company assuming political control and ruthless dominance. By the time its monopoly was rescinded after two hundred years, the Hudson's Bay Company had reworked the entier nothern North American world.