THE HBC BRIGADES
Men on horseback leading packhorses on a rocky path with high snow covered hills in the background.
A man stood on a flat of land overlooking the frozen Fraser River, watching as its icy surface shifted and broke in the sun. He heard tremendous explosions that echoed through the deep valley as large cracks shot across the ice. A short time later, the well-worn footpath that crossed the river to the Hudson’s Bay Company post on the opposite bank began to crumble as the ice broke into large chunks that were swept away by the Fraser’s strong current, spreading chaos and ruin everywhere.
That afternoon, while the brown Fraser still rumbled with the noise of the ice’s passing, the first bateaux of the New Caledonia brigades rushed downriver, the flat-bottomed boats filled with Métis and Canadien voyageurs pulling the long oars. All was noise and chaos once again, as the men in what their observer called their “wild mountain dress” leaped ashore and pulled the bateaux onto the beach below the fort. The men from the post ran down to greet them, and all worked together to unload the precious cargo from the boats. Soon hundreds of leather wrapped packs of furs lay in piles on the beach.
While the clerks stood guard, the men packed their valuable loads into the safety of the fort. Then Peter Ogden, gentleman in charge of the northern posts and leader of the New Caledonia brigade, climbed the slope to Fort Alexandria, to be greeted by Ferdinand “Red River” McKenzie, the post’s clerk-in-charge.
The man who watched was Frank Sylvester. He was a packer, a member of one of the many pack trains that in 1859 brought provisions and tools into the goldfields around the Quesnel River and Barkerville. Thousands of gold miners needed their goods, and they needed them yesterday — yet Sylvester stopped to watch the flurry of activity around the Hudson’s Bay Comapny post as the men carried loads into the fort. He knew that the Old Brigade Trail he and others like him followed north had been built by the HBC men, who had been here for fifty years before the packers followed gold miners north into the HBC’s New Caledonia district, with its headquarters at Fort St. James. He was also aware that he and the other packers could only reach the northern goldfields because the HBC men had already opened the territory for them.
A lively recounting of the gruelling thousand mile river and land journey faced by the brigades of the Hudson’s Bay Company.