Hudson's Bay Company Hudson's Bay Company Post, Dog Head [Point], Lake Winnipeg, Man. National Archives of Canada/PA-050764

Tripping and Trapping at Norway House

Adapt or expire - in the 19th century, as the European fur trade pushed inexorably westward, First Nations tribes had little choice but to become part of the advancing economic juggernaut.

At the far northern tip of Lake Winnipeg, the Swampy Cree of the Hudson Bay-Churchill region were drawn to the Hudson's Bay Company's strategic outpost of Norway House. Founded in 1814 as a hastily erected shelter for Norwegian road gangs in the employ of the HBC, the post became a pivotal staging point for fur trade traffic between the company's York Factory headquarters, and the commercial centre of Red River at the south end of Lake Winnipeg. Aboriginal "freighters" and trappers found employment at the

busy northern junction, supplying pelts and joining the fleets of freight canoes plying the lakes and rivers of the region. They joined the fur brigades to Swan River, Lake La Pluie, Island Lake and Red River, often making long and difficult portages. By the 1860's, a large and prosperous aboriginal settlement, known as Rossville, had grown up near the Norway House stockade, and British missionaries had arrived to attend to the business of Christian conversion.

But just as the Cree, encouraged by the missionaries, began to congregate permanently near the Norway House outpost, the era of canoe freighting began to draw to a close. Steamboats were beginning to make an appearance on Lake Winnipeg, and the role of the "tripper" began to decline.