Maryland

Maryland was chartered in 1632 as a refuge for English Catholics, although the colony’s religious mission was ultimately undermined by internal disputes. As did neighboring Virginia, colonial Maryland maintained an economy based on tobacco and bound labor.

Since the Reformation, Roman Catholics in England had faced persecution. Wanting to provide a place where they could worship freely, George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore, envisioned an American haven for Catholics. Baltimore was a recent convert to Catholicism and had previously invested in several colonization schemes.

In 1632, King Charles I granted Baltimore’s request and issued a charter for a colony in the upper Chesapeake. The king was sympathetic to the plight of Catholics and Maryland was named in honor of his Catholic wife, Henrietta Maria. Unlike previous charters, Maryland’s named Baltimore and his heirs “absolute Lords and Proprietors,” essentially giving the Calvert family total control over the colony.

English colonists first reached Maryland in 1634, settling on the north side of the Potomac River at St. Mary’s City, the colony’s first capital. Within the first decade, settlers began erecting tobacco plantations and importing indentured servants to work them. The colonists established an elective assembly in 1638, although the governor and governor’s council were appointed by Lord Baltimore.


Economic success ensued, but religious tensions threatened the colony’s stability. Maryland had attracted both Protestants and Catholics from the start, although Baltimore gave the best lands to Catholic gentlemen and appointed Catholic governors and councilors.

In contrast, Protestants came over largely as indentured servants and were shut out of the political process. Inspired by the English Civil War, Protestant colonists seized control of the colony in 1644 in what was termed “the plundering time.”

Hoping to prevent future confrontation, Baltimore granted An Act Concerning Religion in 1649, guaranteeing that no person “professing to believe in Jesus Christ” would be “any ways troubled, molested, or discountenanced.” The first American law to ensure religious liberty, the act was intended to preserve the rights of Catholics, who had already become a minority in their own colony.

Religious strife continued nonetheless. During the Glorious Revolution of 1689, Protestants led by John Coode again seized the colony. This time, the Calverts did not regain control until 1715, when the family converted to Protestantism.

During the interim, the colonial assembly established the Anglican Church and barred Catholics from owning firearms and holding office. Thereafter religious conflicts abated as the population and economy diversified. In the late 17th century, African slaves replaced servants and became an important minority in the colony, constituting a third of Maryland’s population at the revolution.

In the northern counties, iron foundries were established and wheat farming appeared in the 1740s. Annapolis became the capital in 1694 and soon grew into a center of culture, boasting a newspaper, academy, and several clubs by the middle of the 18th century.

To the end of the colonial period, Catholics remained an important minority in Maryland. When the Maryland delegates signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776, one of the signatures belonged to Charles Carroll of Carrollton, a Catholic.

Maroon Societies in the Americas

Maroon societies is a term designating communities of runaway slaves in the Americas, the formation of which constituted a recurrent feature of the history of African slavery over nearly 400 years, from the first importation of African slaves in the early 1500s through the selesai abolition of slavery in the Western Hemisphere in Brazil in 1888. The term derives from the Spanish cimarrón, originally referring to feral cattle but by the early 1500s also signifying runaway slaves.

Maroon societies were most common in the Caribbean and Brazil but were also widespread in North America and elsewhere. To slave owners and ruling groups they represented a constant and serious challenge to the institution of African slavery generally, while to slaves they represented the possibility of life outside the shackles of the slave regime. Often called palenques in the Caribbean region and Quilombos in Brazil, they had a history closely linked to the hundreds of slave rebellions that also mark the history of the Americas.

Ranging from small nomadic bands to extensive settled communities of thousands of people that endured for decades, even centuries, on the fringes of the plantation economy, Maroon societies came into existence almost as soon as African slavery in the Americas did. Most of their members were African-born, as they reproduced many of the social and cultural features of their homeland in their new surroundings.

Among the first official acknowledgments of the existence of such communities was a report to the Council of the Indies from Hispaniola of March 1542, in which Archdeacon Álvaro de Castro estimated that 2,000 to 3,000 runaway slaves were at large on the island. A follow-up report of July 1546 described some of the island’s numerous Maroon communities, some hundreds strong, and the mixed success of Spanish efforts to subdue them.


Often mixing with indigenous groups and allying with their slave masters’ enemies, Maroon communities displayed tremendous resilience in the face of persistent efforts to eradicate them and horrific punishments meted out to captured runaways, which included castration, amputation of limbs, branding, garroting, and burning alive.

The hinterlands of plantation economies throughout the Caribbean, Mexico, Brazil, North America, and elsewhere witnessed the formation of Maroon societies alongside the very introduction of slavery.

In Mexico, rapid Indian depopulation prompted colonists to import upward of 120,000 African slaves in the years between 1521 and 1650. Many thousands were compelled to work in the silver mines and ranches north of Mexico City centered on Zacatecas.

From the 1560s to the 1580s, a series of revolts and uprisings rocked the region, as runaway African slaves joined forces with besieged Indians to raid ranches and storehouses, attack travelers, and return to their hidden hamlets in caves, arroyos, and other places beyond the reach of the authorities.

Jungles of Veracruz

In the 1570s, the Crown issued a series of draconian laws intended to discourage such uprisings, which nonetheless failed to have the desired effect. In 1609, a rebel Maroon community in the jungles of Veracruz, led by Yanga, successfully negotiated a peace treaty with the Spanish authorities that granted them their freedom. Nearly a century later, the community was thriving. Slave uprisings and the formation of Maroon societies continued until the selesai abolition of slavery in Mexico in 1829.

Some palenques survived for decades, later becoming towns and municipalities, such as El Cobre in eastern Cuba, where a slave uprising in 1731 led to the creation of a stable community that 50 years later had a fugitive slave population of over 1,000 scattered throughout the Sierra del Cobre.

In 1800, following a recommendation of the Council of the Indies, the Crown declared the slave-descended inhabitants of El Cobre free. Other well-known palenques in eastern Cuba included El Frijol and Ciénaga de Zapata, which survived through much of the 19th century.

Despite their best efforts to extinguish such fugitive slave communities, colonial authorities were often compelled to negotiate with them—as in the district of Popayán in Colombia, where in 1732 the Audiencia of Quito authorized a local official to offer a treaty of peace to the palenque called El Castillo, granting its inhabitants their freedom if they would agree to accept no more runaway slaves. The palenque refused the offer, and in 1745 a series of military expeditions finally captured and defeated El Castillo.

More than a century earlier, in the early 1600s, in the Cartagena district of Colombia, a runaway slave named Domingo Bioho, claiming to be African royalty and adopting the title King Benkos, staged a series of raids on plantations and farms around Cartagena and founded a fortified palenque called San Basilio.

After defeating two expeditions sent to subdue his independent kingdom, in 1619 King Benkos negotiated a favorable treaty with the Spanish authorities, only to be betrayed, captured, and hanged. Despite this setback, San Basilio survived for another century and was finally suppressed in 1713–17.

Similar episodes unfolded in the British and French Caribbean islands. In Martinique in 1665, a Maroon who called himself by his master’s name, Francisque Fabulé, led a group of 400–500 Maroons who staged repeated attacks against plantations and settlements. The French Sovereign Council negotiated a treaty with Fabulé that granted him his freedom and a promise that his band would not be punished. He was later condemned to life in the galleys.

In 1771, a decree of the Supreme Council of Martinique lamented the existence of fugitive slave communities on the island, where they had built huts, cleared land, and planted crops, and from which they sallied forth to commit various depredations. In the French island of Guadeloupe in 1668, the governor reported more than 30 Maroons living in Grande-Terre and recommended an example be made by capturing and beheading them.

Despite the authorities’ best efforts, however, the Maroon societies could not be eradicated. Nearly 70 years later in Guadeloupe, in 1737, a group of 48 Maroons led by one Bordebois was put on trial; eight were sentenced to be garroted. Similar events transpired on Jamaica, Antigua, Barbados, and other islands in the British Antilles.

North American Societiea

Slave hunt in Dismal Swamp area

In British North America and, after 1783, the United States of America, Maroon societies formed and reformed repeatedly. There is evidence for at least 50 such communities during the period 1672–1864 in the mountains, forests, and swamps from Florida to Louisiana to Virginia.

Most notable among these were those in the Dismal Swamp area in the Virginia–North Carolina borderlands, where thousands of runaway slaves and their descendants survived repeated efforts to capture and subdue them. Sometimes Maroons allied with local Indians, forming mixed communities of Indians and fugitive slaves.

Other times Indian individuals and polities allied with Euro-American authorities, assisting them in their eradication efforts, as occurred among the Notchee Indians in South Carolina in 1744, in Georgia in 1772, and in other places.

Communities descended from Maroon societies can be found in many parts of the Americas. In the 1980s, it was estimated that more than 10 percent of the population of the Republic of Suriname was descended from six Maroon or “Bush Negro” communities or tribes that formed in the 1500s and waged a century-long war for liberation against the Dutch authorities before finally winning their freedom in 1762.

The collective memory of the modern-day descendants of such Maroon societies has provided fertile ground for historians, anthropologists, linguists, and other scholars interested in exploring this chapter of the history of Africans in the Americas.

King Philip’s (Metacom’s) War

King Philip’s War was one of the bloodiest conflicts between English colonists and Native Americans in history. Incited by growing colonial population, the war confirmed white domination of New England and significantly weakened Indian presence in the region.

From the settlement of Plymouth in 1620, the colonial population of New England grew rapidly and displaced many coastal Indians. By 1670, the 52,000 colonists of southern New England outnumbered natives by three to one. As colonial populations grew, they pressed farther inland, seizing Indian land through dishonesty and allowing unfenced livestock to spoil Indian crops.

At the same time, Puritan clergy sought to convert Indians to Christianity by placing them in “praying towns” where their beliefs and behaviors could be closely monitored. Led by the Reverend John Eliot, the praying towns held 1,600 natives by 1674.

In March 1675, the colony of Plymouth accused three Wampanoag Indians of the murder of a praying town Indian and colonial informant. When the three were tried and hanged three months later, the Wampanoag sachem Metacom (known to the colonists as King Philip) retaliated against the town of Swansea.


Throughout the summer of 1675, the conflict escalated from an isolated incident into a regional war. Massachusetts and Connecticut came to the aid of Plymouth and launched indiscriminate attacks on a number of native peoples, which caused the powerful and previously neutral Narragansetts to ally with the Wampanoags.

Over the next few months, the Indians gained the upper hand, using flintlock muskets to launch a total war. Before the end of 1675, Indians had attacked 52 of the region’s 90 towns, destroying buildings, murdering entire families, and obliterating 12 entire settlements.

In early 1676, colonial leaders forged an alliance with the Pequots and Mohegans and gained the advantage by turning the conflict into an Indian civil war. The colonists also became increasingly aggressive in their warfare. In late 1675, they trapped 300 Narragansetts in the Great Swamp and set them on fire. The colonists also attacked women and children, selling the captives as slaves in the Caribbean.

After one battle, Benjamin Church noted that Indians who surrendered “were carried away to Plymouth, there sold, and transported out of the country; being about eight score persons.” True to their Puritan nature, the colonists saw the Indian attacks as God’s punishment for their transgressions.

As Mary Rowlandson remarked after several weeks in Indian captivity, “I see the Lord had his time to scourage and chasten me.” By the summer of 1676, the Indians had run out of supplies and when Metacom was killed in battle in August, the rebellion collapsed.

King Philip’s War brought about the death of 1,000 colonists and 3,000 Indians. It also resulted in the abolition of most of the praying towns, as angry colonists attacked, imprisoned, and even sold the Christian Indians into slavery.

Their hegemony over the region secured, the colonists drove the remaining Native Americans to the frontier. After King Philip’s War, Indians became largely invisible in New England, causing many whites to declare mistakenly a number of tribes extinct.

Jamestown

Jamestown

Jamestown was the first permanent English colony in the New World, founded in 1607 under the direction of the Virginia Company. Although the settlement struggled to survive at first, the discovery of tobacco made Jamestown a success and it remained the capital of the Virginia colony until 1699.

In 1605, a group of influential merchants seeking to profit materially from the natural resources of America petitioned England’s King James I for permission to settle in America. The following April, the king chartered the London Company (later known as the Virginia Company) and granted it the right to settle a colony between 34 and 41 degrees north latitude.

The charter created a joint-stock company, which allowed the merchants to seek investors and operate as a private business. The charter provided that the colony would be governed by two councils, one in America and one in England, and guaranteed that colonists would enjoy the “liberties, franchises, and immunities” of English subjects.


On April 26, 1607, the Sarah Constant, Godspeed, and Discovery arrived in Virginia carrying 105 passengers, who named their settlement Jamestown after the king. From the start, the colony was beset by troubles.

The Chesapeake Bay region was then controlled by a confederation of Algonquian Indian tribes led by the paramount chief Powhatan. Powhatan was instrumental in helping provision the colonists in the early years, but the two groups often came into conflict thereafter.

More immediately, the colonists died in large number of disease and starvation: Only 38 of the original passengers survived “seasoning,” or their first winter in America. Ultimately, the colonists proved unwilling to grow their own food, preferring instead to search for gold, leading to internal dissension.

A series of governors tried with varying degrees of success to salvage the colony, including most notably John Smith, who ordered that “he will not work, shall not eat.” Yet such attempts often proved fruitless such as in the winter of 1609–10, appropriately termed “the starving time,” when desperate colonists turned to cannibalism and ate the dead.

Only the constant infusion of new colonists kept Jamestown afloat. Relations with the Indians improved in 1614 when Powhatan’s daughter Pocahontas married John Rolfe, yet it was Rolfe’s introduction of tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum) two years later that finally made the colony profitable.

Because tobacco sold in London for five to 10 times as much as it cost to grow, soon “the marketplace and streets, and all other spare places were planted with tobacco.” Within a decade, Virginia became the wealthiest and most populous colony.

Despite Jamestown’s success, the Virginia Company teetered on the verge of bankruptcy. In the late 1610s, the company tried to make the settlement more profitable by giving more control to colonists.

It instituted the headright system, which gave land to settlers, and the House of Burgesses, the first representative assembly established in America. Yet when a violent Indian attack in 1622 wiped out a fifth of the colony’s population, the king revoked the company’s charter and, in 1624, he placed Virginia under the control of the English government.

Indentured Servitude in Colonial America

Indentured Servitude in Colonial America

This compulsory work system was an important form of labor in colonial America, especially in 17th century Chesapeake. In exchange for several years of labor, English men and women received passage to America and opportunity. A cruel life, servitude was ultimately replaced by African slavery.

Indentured servitude was an American invention with English roots. The idea of serving for a period of years had long been a part of apprenticeships; after 1563, English law had required nearly all wage laborers to contract by the year.

In both cases, masters assumed nearly total control over their workers: They could set them to a variety of tasks and punish them physically but also had to feed and house them. Apprentices and servants were typically young and unmarried people seeking money to establish their own households. A large percentage of English men and women, perhaps a majority, spent a portion of their youth in service.


England’s decision to plant colonies in the New World precipitated the invention of indentured servitude. In 1584, Richard Hakluyt advocated colonization as a solution to England’s “valiant youths, rusting and hurtful by lack of employment” and a number of young laborers accompanied the first settlers to Jamestown in 1607.

However, most colonists expected that Native Americans would work for them and it was only after attempts to enslave the Powhatan Indians failed that the Virginia Company seriously looked to England for workers. In 1616, the company instituted the headright system by which colonists received 50 acres of land for every servant imported. That same year, tobacco was introduced to Virginia and the demand for workers increased dramatically.

In the 17th century, 90,000 of the 120,000 English emigrants to Virginia and Maryland were indentured servants. Most were between the ages of 20 and 24, and men outnumbered women by six to one. Most came from desperately poor backgrounds and had no other opportunities.

Before leaving England, a servant signed (usually with an X) a contract. Two copies of the contract were written on the same sheet of paper and then cut apart, leaving a rough or indented edge, hence “indentured” servitude.

The servant received one copy and the other was sold in America. Typically a servant agreed to serve between four and seven years for passage to America. When the contract ended, a servant received “freedom dues”: clothes, tools, food, and for the first half of the 17th century, 50 acres of land.

Life as an indentured servant was hard and cruel. “Am toiling almost day and night, very often in the horse’s drudgery,” wrote Elizabeth Sprigs. “Scare any thing but Indian corn and salt to eat ... almost naked no shoes nor stockings to wear.” In addition to inadequate food and clothing, beatings were common.

In 1624, Elizabeth Abbott died at the hands of her master, leaving a corpse “full of sores and holes very dangerously raunckled and putrified above her wa[i]st and upon her hips and thighs.” In the case of Abbott and others, Chesapeake courts habitually sided with the masters. Masters were allowed to sell their servants’ contracts, practically reducing the workers to chattel.

Servants who ran away, killed a master’s pig, or bore an illegitimate child faced extensions of their servitude. Not surprisingly, many died before completing their indentures: Although 15,000 servants arrived in Virginia between 1625 and 1640, the population only increased by 7,000.

Among those who survived, success was attainable, at least at first. For Maryland servants freed before 1660, a majority obtained land and many held public office. Yet the unbalanced sex ratio prevented many freedmen from marrying.

Opportunities for ex-servants declined considerably after midcentury as available land became scarce. As this happened, many ended up working for their former masters for wages. Disgruntled ex-servants were a primary impetus behind several uprisings including Bacon’s Rebellion.

Indentured servitude also existed outside the Chesapeake. Perhaps 20 percent of immigrants to New England in the 1630s came over as servants, while indentured servitude supplied critical labor for the early plantations of Barbados and the Carolinas. However, by the middle of the 17th century, a decline in the English population reduced unemployment and motivation for servitude.

As this happened, planters acquired African slaves. Barbados was the first English colony to switch from servitude to slavery, and by 1660, blacks outnumbered whites. A similar process took place in the Chesapeake in the 1680s and 1690s. Indentured servants fell to less than 5 percent of the population, and by 1710, were outnumbered by slaves six to one.

Indentured servitude remained an important source of labor in the 18th century. Between 1718 and 1775, 50,000 English convicts were sent to America as servants and typically indentured for 14 years. Other servants emigrated from Scotland and Germany and settled in the middle colonies.

In 1760, indentured servants constituted 20 percent of Philadelphia’s workforce, many laboring in trades alongside black slaves. Although servants continued to arrive by the thousands through the 1770s, the American Revolution caused many to question their presence.

In 1784, “a number of respectable Citizens” of New York paid to free a cargo of servants because they found “the traffic of White people” contrary “to the idea of liberty this country has so happily established.” Thereafter indentured servitude rapidly declined and all but disappeared by 1800.

Anne Hutchinson - Puritan Dissenter

Anne Hutchinson - Puritan Dissenter

Born Anne Marbury in 1591, Anne Hutchinson was the daughter of an Anglican priest who was an advocate of church reform. During her childhood, the family moved to London, where she received an excellent education and became well grounded in the tenets of Puritanism. At 21, she married William Hutchinson, a prosperous London cloth merchant, and they settled in Alford, Lincolnshire, Anne’s birthplace.

She attended the church of John Cotton in nearby Boston, and when Cotton migrated to New England, Mrs. Hutchinson convinced her husband that the family should follow. They arrived in Boston sometime in the summer of 1634 and quickly became church members and her husband a community leader. She was skilled in the use of herbal medicine and soon developed a reputation for her medical advice.

She soon moved into religion. An extremely intelligent and thoughtful woman, well versed in theology, she took to expanding on Cotton’s sermons to an ever-increasing group of followers. Taking what she believed to be Cotton’s lead, she stressed a covenant of grace; in her view individuals gained salvation solely through God’s love, and unrelated to their actions, a covenant of works.


Her opponents labeled her an antinomian (against the law), for her doctrine implied the negation of clerical power and church discipline and had unacceptable implications for social order and the authority of the established government. This was of special concern in the Massachusetts Bay Colony; a new colony, isolated in the wilderness, and dedicated to defending its mission to establish a godly community.

Although Hutchinson originally had a large following, including some prominent merchants and even the colony’s governor, she came to be viewed as a threat to Massachusetts’s mission and was eventually banished from the colony and later excommunicated from her congregation.

Because her accusers were also her judges, her trial was unjust by modern standards, but typical of sedition trials at the time; a formal defense was not permitted. Perhaps most importantly, she guaranteed a guilty verdict when she asserted a direct communication with God, a position unacceptable to a society that believed God spoke through the Bible as interpreted by clergymen.

That she was a woman in a society in which women had no public power only made her ideas all the more threatening. Coupled with the challenges of Roger Williams and others, the Hutchinson affair prompted Massachusetts to ensure religious orthodoxy, at least among its clergy, by establishing Harvard College in 1636.

In the spring of 1638, Mrs. Hutchinson, her family, and a small number of followers moved to Rhode Island and settled at Aquidneck. After the death of her husband in 1642, she moved to Long Island and then to the New York mainland.

In the late summer of 1643, Indians attacked her home, killing all but one member of her household. Long viewed as a victim of Puritan intolerance and a champion of religious freedom, Anne Hutchinson is also recognized for her contribution to the struggle for women’s rights.

Hudson’s Bay Company

Hudson’s Bay Company logo

It is one of the ironies of history that the British owe the beginnings of the famous Hudson’s Bay Company to their traditional enemies in North America: the French. Pierre-Esprit Radisson (who posthumously gave his name to the famed modern hotel chain) and his older brother-in-law, Médard Chouart, sieur des Groseilliers, were two of the famed French coureurs de bois, or “runners of the woods,” who began the trade in beaver skins.

In 1659, the hoard of pelts that Radisson and des Groseilliers brought to Quebec was so great it aroused the greed of the governorgeneral of New France, Pierre de Voyer, the vicomte d’Argenson. He had arrived in Quebec on July 11, 1658, to serve as the fifth governor-general of the colony.

Charles II, enjoying a fortunate beginning to his reign, was never one to miss the opportunity of seeking riches, in part because the British parliament sought to limit his power by the amount of money it voted him each year. According to Empire of the Bay, Radisson wrote, “The King gave good hope that we should have a ship ready for an expedition for the next spring. And he granted us 40 shillings a week for our maintenance.”

Queen Elizabeth I had made her mark by chartering the Honorable East India Company in 1600, and King Charles II had decided to do the same by chartering a company to trade with New France. However, before committing his limited royal funds to outright backing for what would become known as the “Empire of the Bay,” Charles II first commissioned an exploratory voyage.


On June 3, 1668, des Groseilliers and Radisson headed back to New France, this time on two English vessels, the Eaglet and the Nonsuch. The mission was so urgent that Charles sent the ships in 1668, barely a year after the end of the Second Dutch War, a naval conflict with the Netherlands.

Fierce Atlantic storms off the west coast of Ireland buffeted the ships, and the Eaglet was forced to return to England. However, the Nonsuch continued its voyage successfully to New France. To Charles II, the voyage had proved the worth of the dreams of des Groseilliers and Radisson.

The king formally chartered the Governors and Company of Adventurers Trading into Hudson’s Bay, forever known as the Hudson’s Bay Company. To oversee the company, he appointed his relative, Prince Rupert of the Rhine, who had served his father, Charles I, as a commander of cavalry in the English Civil War.

However, it would not be long before the French in New France took action against this new British threat along the remote shores of Hudson’s Bay. In 1686 and 1697, the French mounted combined land and sea assaults that effectively broke the back of the Hudson’s Bay Company.

With the British main effort in the New World fixed on protecting the colonies on the East Coast of the Americas, little could be spared for the outposts in the frozen north. Besides, the French attacking from New France had far less distance to travel to attack the forts of the Hudson’s Bay Company. The main Hudson’s Bay posts, York Factory, Rupert House, and Albany Fort, fell into the hands of the French.

Throughout the 18th century, a series of wars was fought between England and France for the control of New France and the vast wealth in fur in the interior. Called the French and Indian Wars in the United States, the conflicts saw French and English pitted in savage battles along the eastern coast of North America; both sides generally ignored the frozen north of Hudson’s Bay.

On September 13, 1759, a French army under Louis-Joseph, marquis de Montcalm, was soundly defeated outside Quebec by a British force under General James Wolfe. Both men were killed from battle wounds, but the battle marked the decisive defeat of the French in North America. Although the British later lost a battle outside Quebec, the French were finally forced to surrender at Montreal in 1760. By the terms of the Treaty of Paris in 1763, all of New France became part of the British Empire.

The leaders of the Hudson’s Bay Company felt they could exploit the great wealth of the fur trade, free from the raids of the French and their Indian allies. The French alliance against England in the American Revolution, however, brought war again to Hudson’s Bay.

The company’s first great explorer, Samuel Hearne, was forced to surrender Fort Prince of Wales to a French squadron under Jean-François de Galoup, comte de La Pérouse. After the Treaty of Paris ended the war, however, Hearne was able to return to open a new post at Churchill. But a new threat came from an unexpected corner: from within the British Empire in North America.

By the 1770s, rival fur traders began to appear to contest the monopoly of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Formally chartered in 1779 as the North West Fur Company in Montreal, the newcomers determined to wrest control of the fur trade from the Hudson’s Bay Company trappers by any means necessary.

The North West Fur Company proved much more aggressive than the Hudson’s Bay Company, whose long monopoly had bred in it a spirit of complacency that the “Nor’westers” were quick to exploit. As a result of this competition, exploration and the expansion of trade moved into the interior of the continent.

The North West Company was much more flexible than the London-based Hudson’s Bay Company; while Hudson’s Bay’s men had to defer to their distant management, the partners in the North West Company were in the field and met every summer on the Lake Superior shore to determine trapping and harvesting strategies for the coming season.

Spurred on by the enterprising spirit of the Nor’westers, the company produced two of the greatest explorers in all of North American history: David Thompson and Alexander Mackenzie. Significantly, Thompson had first signed on the roster of the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1784, moving to the North West Fur Company in 1797.

During his tenure, he charted the course of the Columbia River, located the source of the Mississippi River, and explored throughout the Missouri River area. He retired in 1812, having logged nearly 55,000 miles in the wilderness by canoe and on foot.

Alexander Mackenzie would equal Thompson in the annals of North American exploration. In June 1789, Mackenzie began with a party of Indians to explore for the Arctic Sea, seeking the Northwest Passage to the Orient, which had lured English mariners since the time of Queen Elizabeth I.

On July 14, 1789, Mackenzie found the Arctic Sea. The Scotsman would crown his exploring career with a search for an overland route to the Pacific. He began this trek in May 1793 and with the aid of the Bella Coola tribe reached the Pacific on July 22.

The great explorations of Thompson and Mackenzie opened more territory to the Canadian West for the North West Company at a time when the original territory worked by the trappers of the Hudson’s Bay Company was now suffering from diminishing animal population; the hunters were trapping to the brink of extinction.

The Hudson’s Bay Company was being encircled by the new fur trading posts, and the Nor’westers were moving into the United States as well. In his 1806 expedition to claim the northern regions of the Louisiana Purchase for the United States, the U.S. army explorer Zebulon Pike staked his claim on a North West Company post by having his soldiers shoot down the British flag and raise the American one.

The climax came when Thomas Douglas, the fifth earl of Selkirk, bought a controlling interest in Hudson’s Bay Company. The company awarded the earl a massive tract of land—which was right in the middle of the western territory now being exploited by the North West Company. In 1812 Scottish immigrants arrived in what became known as the Selkirk Settlement.

Many of these were Scots dispersed during the Highland Clearances, when their own lords expelled them from their ancestral “crofter” farms to make room for the raising of sheep. Immediately, the Nor’west Company began a guerrilla war against the newcomers, its ranks filled with métis, the offspring of French Canadians and Native Americans.

The climax came at Seven Oaks, in modern-day Winnipeg, on June 19, 1816. Robert Semple, with a force of Hudson’s Bay men, met a force of Nor’wester Métis under Cuthbert Grant. In the skirmish that followed, Grant and his Nor’westers massacred Semple and the Hudson’s Bay men.

Despite this, the odds were in favor of the Hudson’s Bay Company. The buccaneering tactics of the North West Company frightened off staid City of London investors, and the Hudson’s Bay Company still held the Royal Charter of 1670.

Finally, London stepped in to end the hostilities, essentially giving title of the North West Fur Company to the Hudson’s Bay Company. This gave the Hudson’s Bay Company a tract of nearly 3 million square miles—most of North America. Today, the company still operates, supplying goods and services for remote settlements in western Canada.