A lively recounting of the tough men and heroic but overworked packhorses who broke open B.C. to the big business of the 19th-century fur trade.

Facing a gruelling thousand-mile trail, the brigades of the Hudson Bay Company (HBC) pushed onward over mountains and through ferocious river crossings to reach the isolated fur-trading posts. But it wasn't just the landscape the brigades faced, as First Nations people struggled with the desire to resist, or assist, the fur company's attempts to build their brigade trails over the Aboriginal trails that led between Indigenous communities, which surrounded the trading posts. Nancy Marguerite Anderson reveals how the devastating Cayuse War of 1847 forced the HBC men over a newly-explored overland trail to Fort Langley. The journey was a disaster-in-waiting.

Literary Nonfiction. History. Native American Studies.

Nancy Marguerite Anderson is Mé tis, and an accepted member of Mé tis Nation British Columbia. She is descended from a North West Company voyageur known to have lived and worked in Red River District for many years, who crossed the Rocky Mountains with explorer David Thompson, and whose daughter married a Scottish gentleman. Because of her Scottish ancestors’ involvement with the HBC Brigades on the Pacific Slopes, she has (to her surprise) become a transportation historian of sorts, writing about the journeys of the Hudson’ s Bay Company men east and west of the Rocky Mountains.

List of Maps Introduction Prologue 1. 1826– 1847: Old Brigade Trail to Fort Vancouver 2. 1828: Governor Simpson Explores the Fraser River 3. May 1846: Expedition, Kamloops to Fort Langley 4. June 1846: Fort Langley to Kamloops 5. May 1847: Kamloops to Fort Langley 6. June 1847: Exploration, Fort Langley to Kamloops 7. 1847: Fort Vancouver and Waiilatpu Mission 8. 1848 Brigades: Anderson’ s River Trail 9. 1849 Brigades: The Fort Hope Trail 10. 1850 Brigades: The Brigade Horses 11. 1851 Brigades: The Road Crew 12. 1852 Brigades: The Bully 13. 1853 Brigades: Club Law 14. 1854 Brigades: Horse Raid 15. 1855 Brigades: Death on the Trail 16. 1856 Brigades: Fort Shepherd 17. 1857 Brigades: The Gold Rush 18. 1858 Brigades: The Fraser Canyon War 19. 1859 Brigades and Epilogue: British Columbia’ s Future Notes Illustration Credits Index