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Company of Adventurers #2
Caesars of the Wilderness
The second volume in the history of the Hudson Bay Company reveals the fiercest commercial feud in history--between the Hudson Bay's fur brigades and the Northwest Company
- GenresHistoryNonfictionCanada
480 pages, Hardcover
First published November 2, 1987
About the author
Peter C. Newman
56 books27 followersPeter Charles Newman (born Peta Karel Neuman), CC, journalist, author, newspaper and magazine editor (born 10 May 1929 in Vienna, Austria; died 7 September 2023 in Belleville, ON). Peter C. Newman was one of Canada’s most prominent journalists, biographers and non-fiction authors. After starting out with the Financial Post, he became editor-in-chief of both the Toronto Star and Maclean’s. His 35 books, which have collectively sold more than two million copies, helped make political reporting and business journalism more personalized and evocative. His no-holds-barred, insiders-tell-all accounts of Canada’s business and political elites earned him a reputation as Canada’s “most cussed and discussed” journalist. A recipient of numerous awards and honorary degrees, Newman was elected to the Canadian News Hall of Fame in 1992. He was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1978 and a Companion in 1990.
Early Life and Education
Originally named Peta Karel Neuman by his secularized Jewish parents, Peter C. Newman grew up in the Czech town of Breclav, where his father ran a large sugar beet refinery. As Newman wrote in 2018, “I lived the charmed life of a little rich boy in Moravia, Czechoslovakia — until age nine, that is, when the world as I knew it vanished.” Fleeing the Nazis, his family came to Canada as refugees in 1940.
Newman initially attended Hillfield School in Hamilton, Ontario, a prep school for the Royal Military College of Canada. But, envisaging a business career for his son, Newman's father, Oscar, enrolled him as a “war guest” boarder at Upper Canada College in 1944. There he met future members of the Canadian establishment whose lives he would later document.
After graduating, Newman joined the Canadian Navy Reserves. He was a reservist for decades and eventually reached the rank of captain. For many years, he was rarely seen in public without his signature black sailor cap.
Career Highlights
Once he mastered English, Newman began writing, first for the University of Toronto newspaper, then for the Financial Post in 1951. By 1953, he was Montreal editor of the Post. He held the position for three years before returning to Toronto to be assistant editor, then Ottawa columnist, at Maclean's magazine. In 1959, he published Flame of Power: Intimate Profiles of Canada's Greatest Businessmen. It profiles 11 of the first generation of Canada's business magnates. In 1963, Newman published his masterly and popular political chronicle of John Diefenbaker, Renegade in Power: The Diefenbaker Years (1963). According to the Writers’ Trust of Canada, the book “revolutionized Canadian political reporting with its controversial ‘insiders-tell-all’ approach.” Five years later, Newman published a similar but less successful study of Lester Pearson, The Distemper of Our Times (1968).
In 1969, Newman became editor-in-chief at the Toronto Star. During this period, he published some of his best journalism in Home Country: People, Places and Power Politics (1973). He then published popular studies on the lives of those who wielded financial power in the Canadian business establishment. These included his two-volume The Canadian Establishment (1975, 1981), The Bronfman Dynasty (1978; see also Bronfman Family), and The Establishment Man: A Portrait of Power (1982). A third book called Titans: How the New Canadian Establishment Seized Power was added to this series in 1998.
Newman was also editor of Maclean's from 1971 to 1982. He transformed the magazine from a monthly to a weekly news magazine — the first of its kind in Canada — with a Canadian slant on international and national events. In 1982, he resigned to work on a three-volume history of the Hudson's Bay Company.
Honours
Peter C. Newman received the Canadian Journalism Foundation's Lifetime Achievement Award and the Toronto Star's Excellence in Journalism award in 1998. He received a National Newspaper Award and in 1992 he was elected to the Canadia
Early Life and Education
Originally named Peta Karel Neuman by his secularized Jewish parents, Peter C. Newman grew up in the Czech town of Breclav, where his father ran a large sugar beet refinery. As Newman wrote in 2018, “I lived the charmed life of a little rich boy in Moravia, Czechoslovakia — until age nine, that is, when the world as I knew it vanished.” Fleeing the Nazis, his family came to Canada as refugees in 1940.
Newman initially attended Hillfield School in Hamilton, Ontario, a prep school for the Royal Military College of Canada. But, envisaging a business career for his son, Newman's father, Oscar, enrolled him as a “war guest” boarder at Upper Canada College in 1944. There he met future members of the Canadian establishment whose lives he would later document.
After graduating, Newman joined the Canadian Navy Reserves. He was a reservist for decades and eventually reached the rank of captain. For many years, he was rarely seen in public without his signature black sailor cap.
Career Highlights
Once he mastered English, Newman began writing, first for the University of Toronto newspaper, then for the Financial Post in 1951. By 1953, he was Montreal editor of the Post. He held the position for three years before returning to Toronto to be assistant editor, then Ottawa columnist, at Maclean's magazine. In 1959, he published Flame of Power: Intimate Profiles of Canada's Greatest Businessmen. It profiles 11 of the first generation of Canada's business magnates. In 1963, Newman published his masterly and popular political chronicle of John Diefenbaker, Renegade in Power: The Diefenbaker Years (1963). According to the Writers’ Trust of Canada, the book “revolutionized Canadian political reporting with its controversial ‘insiders-tell-all’ approach.” Five years later, Newman published a similar but less successful study of Lester Pearson, The Distemper of Our Times (1968).
In 1969, Newman became editor-in-chief at the Toronto Star. During this period, he published some of his best journalism in Home Country: People, Places and Power Politics (1973). He then published popular studies on the lives of those who wielded financial power in the Canadian business establishment. These included his two-volume The Canadian Establishment (1975, 1981), The Bronfman Dynasty (1978; see also Bronfman Family), and The Establishment Man: A Portrait of Power (1982). A third book called Titans: How the New Canadian Establishment Seized Power was added to this series in 1998.
Newman was also editor of Maclean's from 1971 to 1982. He transformed the magazine from a monthly to a weekly news magazine — the first of its kind in Canada — with a Canadian slant on international and national events. In 1982, he resigned to work on a three-volume history of the Hudson's Bay Company.
Honours
Peter C. Newman received the Canadian Journalism Foundation's Lifetime Achievement Award and the Toronto Star's Excellence in Journalism award in 1998. He received a National Newspaper Award and in 1992 he was elected to the Canadia
Ratings & Reviews
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
August 20, 2018
This second-of-three volumes in Newman's history of the Hudson's Bay Co. advances the story to the dawn of the 20th-century. The reader is introduced to a very interesting cast of characters along the way. I'm appreciating to a greater extent just how central a commercial enterprise was to the development of a nation.
May 9, 2024
Such cool history. I wish there were more books about the HBC. I find their early years and the way they basically *were* Canada for decades simply fascinating.
March 27, 2020
CAESARS OF THE WILDERNESS by Peter C Newman
This is the sequel to “Company of Adventurers” which I haven’t read. It is mostly about the rivalry between the NorthWest Company (NWC) and the Hudson Bay Company (HBC) who competed for furs trapped in pre-dominion Canada. At school we were taught they were competitors in opening up the north and west of North America. Newman makes it clear they went at each other with evil intent and along the way brought booze and degradation to the Indians they depended on for the fur trade. Newman notes that Canadians have this smug belief they were better than Americans who were known to have traded liquor at Fort Whoop Up and then details how the NWC diluted 132 proof rum, from the Caribbean, while the HBC diluted gin with the addition of Iodine to give it rummy look. When Iodine was unavailable some chewing tobacco was added to the mix. It was cheaper to transport strong liquor and dilute it anywhere from four parts water to one part rum or seven parts water. The term firewater arose from Indians spitting a mouthful on a fire. If it flared up then the mix was good; if it doused the flames it was unacceptable. On page 145 Newman notes: “… the unrestrained use of liquor in the Canadian fur trade ranks as one of history’s more malevolent crimes against humanity.” The trade in liquor debauched families and decimated Indian culture. Diamond Jenness, a New Zealander, who became an anthropologist flatly declared that “whisky and brandy destroyed the self-respect of the Indians, weakened every family and tribal tie, and made them willing or unwilling, the slaves of trading posts, where liquor was dispensed to them by the keg. If that wasn’t enough the 1837 plague of Smallpox wiped out three-quarters of the Plains Indians in one wave.
Here are some other notable mentions:
There is no Indian word for wilderness because while we may regard it as something separate from us, for them the wilderness is everything – their dwelling place and source of food, part of their being.
The water highway developed by the early fur traders contained portages around rapids, waterfalls, beaver dams with the longest land gap being twelve miles. The waterways were miraculous in their range and intricacy and the birchbark canoe a miracle of efficiency with a portage no longer than a day they could reach the Pacific Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean, the Arctic Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico.
The Nor’Westerners supply line was 3,000 miles long. Up to thirty months might elapse between the purchase of trade goods and the sale of furs. The Hudson Bay route cut 1,500 canoes miles by going to York Factory.
In a typical year (1798) their catch included: 106,000 beaver skins, 32,000 marten, 17,000 muskrat, 6,000 lynx, 5,500 fox 4,600 otter, 3,800 wolf, 2,100 bear, 1,900 deer, 1,600 fischer, 700 elk, 600 wolverine, and 500 buffalo robes.
The voyageurs were divided into two mutually exclusive societies: those taking freight as far as the head of Lake Superior, hired on a per trip basis; and the aristocrats of the waterways, the Northmen who wintered in the Fur Country and delivered the payloads. The ideal voyageur was five foot five inches tall.
At the peak of its activities the NWC employed more than eleven hundred voyageurs with half of them confined to the shuttle run between Lachine (Montreal) and head of the Great Lakes.
Despite a canoe’s impressive capacity canoemen did not dare change their paddling positions “You had to keep your tongue in the middle of your mouth, otherwise the canoe would capsize.” wrote one HBC trader. The standard canoe cadence was 45 strokes a minute to achieve six knots. Express boats (for message delivery) were driven 60 dips a minute. Each brigade numbered ten or more canoes and were staggered on two-day intervals, in consideration of portages.
At portages each crew member would tuck a ninety pound bale into the small of their back and then their partner would strap another ninety pound bale between the carrier’s shoulder blades. Ambitious voyageurs carrying a third bale could earn a Spanish silver dollar. Peter Bonga, the only black West Indian, once lugged 450 pounds across a portage.
No camel train across Asia Minor moved with the surety and efficiency of the canoe brigades. They held together a territory ten times the size of the Holy Roman Empire.
Their profits helped build the Bank of Montreal what was briefly North America’s largest financial institution.
The book also chronicles many of the characters and explorers of the era. Here a few honourable mentions: James Evans built a tin canoe and took along a soldering iron to make repairs. He is also the one who codified the Cree language into a syllabic alphabet, still in use today. Simpson, head of HBC in the 1840’s put forward a scorched earth policy in the NW of trapping out all the animals so the Americans could not make a go of it. Simpson also diversified the company to trade lumber, cranberries and frozen salmon to Hawaii and even sold ice to California. He set speed records that had never been broken. He embarked on a voyage around the world. He was the first man to circle the earth on the “overland route” and may have been the model for Jules Verne’s “Around the World in 80 Days.”
Although from Canada, Dr. John McLoughlin was accorded the title of “Father of Oregon.” Under his rule the HBC fort was moved from the coast at Astoria to Fort Vancouver, 100 miles inland. He championed returning stolen property. Through his negotiation skills, when the Americans wanted to claim all land between California and Alaska, he prevailed on preserving Vancouver Island for Britain and the 49th parallel as the border.
Peter Skene Ogden was the first white man to explore parts of Idaho, California, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming. He was one of the few HBC traders to oppose the indiscriminate slaughter of animals. His wife, Julia Mary River, a Cree, was a legend in her own right. One time she dove into a turbulent river to retrieve a runaway raft loaded with furs. When her husband’s expedition horses were stampeded by a rival she jumped on a horse, rode into the enemy’s camp to rescue her first-born son and galloped off with a stolen nag loaded with furs.
Here is a Cree’s description of bagpipes, to his Chief: “One white man was dressed like a woman, in a skirt of funny color had whiskers growing from his belt and fancy leggings. He carried a black swan which had many legs with ribbons tied to them. The swan’s body he put under his arm upside down and then put its head in his mouth and bit it. At the same time he pinched its neck with his fingers and squeezed the body under his arm until it made a terrible noise.”
This is the sequel to “Company of Adventurers” which I haven’t read. It is mostly about the rivalry between the NorthWest Company (NWC) and the Hudson Bay Company (HBC) who competed for furs trapped in pre-dominion Canada. At school we were taught they were competitors in opening up the north and west of North America. Newman makes it clear they went at each other with evil intent and along the way brought booze and degradation to the Indians they depended on for the fur trade. Newman notes that Canadians have this smug belief they were better than Americans who were known to have traded liquor at Fort Whoop Up and then details how the NWC diluted 132 proof rum, from the Caribbean, while the HBC diluted gin with the addition of Iodine to give it rummy look. When Iodine was unavailable some chewing tobacco was added to the mix. It was cheaper to transport strong liquor and dilute it anywhere from four parts water to one part rum or seven parts water. The term firewater arose from Indians spitting a mouthful on a fire. If it flared up then the mix was good; if it doused the flames it was unacceptable. On page 145 Newman notes: “… the unrestrained use of liquor in the Canadian fur trade ranks as one of history’s more malevolent crimes against humanity.” The trade in liquor debauched families and decimated Indian culture. Diamond Jenness, a New Zealander, who became an anthropologist flatly declared that “whisky and brandy destroyed the self-respect of the Indians, weakened every family and tribal tie, and made them willing or unwilling, the slaves of trading posts, where liquor was dispensed to them by the keg. If that wasn’t enough the 1837 plague of Smallpox wiped out three-quarters of the Plains Indians in one wave.
Here are some other notable mentions:
There is no Indian word for wilderness because while we may regard it as something separate from us, for them the wilderness is everything – their dwelling place and source of food, part of their being.
The water highway developed by the early fur traders contained portages around rapids, waterfalls, beaver dams with the longest land gap being twelve miles. The waterways were miraculous in their range and intricacy and the birchbark canoe a miracle of efficiency with a portage no longer than a day they could reach the Pacific Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean, the Arctic Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico.
The Nor’Westerners supply line was 3,000 miles long. Up to thirty months might elapse between the purchase of trade goods and the sale of furs. The Hudson Bay route cut 1,500 canoes miles by going to York Factory.
In a typical year (1798) their catch included: 106,000 beaver skins, 32,000 marten, 17,000 muskrat, 6,000 lynx, 5,500 fox 4,600 otter, 3,800 wolf, 2,100 bear, 1,900 deer, 1,600 fischer, 700 elk, 600 wolverine, and 500 buffalo robes.
The voyageurs were divided into two mutually exclusive societies: those taking freight as far as the head of Lake Superior, hired on a per trip basis; and the aristocrats of the waterways, the Northmen who wintered in the Fur Country and delivered the payloads. The ideal voyageur was five foot five inches tall.
At the peak of its activities the NWC employed more than eleven hundred voyageurs with half of them confined to the shuttle run between Lachine (Montreal) and head of the Great Lakes.
Despite a canoe’s impressive capacity canoemen did not dare change their paddling positions “You had to keep your tongue in the middle of your mouth, otherwise the canoe would capsize.” wrote one HBC trader. The standard canoe cadence was 45 strokes a minute to achieve six knots. Express boats (for message delivery) were driven 60 dips a minute. Each brigade numbered ten or more canoes and were staggered on two-day intervals, in consideration of portages.
At portages each crew member would tuck a ninety pound bale into the small of their back and then their partner would strap another ninety pound bale between the carrier’s shoulder blades. Ambitious voyageurs carrying a third bale could earn a Spanish silver dollar. Peter Bonga, the only black West Indian, once lugged 450 pounds across a portage.
No camel train across Asia Minor moved with the surety and efficiency of the canoe brigades. They held together a territory ten times the size of the Holy Roman Empire.
Their profits helped build the Bank of Montreal what was briefly North America’s largest financial institution.
The book also chronicles many of the characters and explorers of the era. Here a few honourable mentions: James Evans built a tin canoe and took along a soldering iron to make repairs. He is also the one who codified the Cree language into a syllabic alphabet, still in use today. Simpson, head of HBC in the 1840’s put forward a scorched earth policy in the NW of trapping out all the animals so the Americans could not make a go of it. Simpson also diversified the company to trade lumber, cranberries and frozen salmon to Hawaii and even sold ice to California. He set speed records that had never been broken. He embarked on a voyage around the world. He was the first man to circle the earth on the “overland route” and may have been the model for Jules Verne’s “Around the World in 80 Days.”
Although from Canada, Dr. John McLoughlin was accorded the title of “Father of Oregon.” Under his rule the HBC fort was moved from the coast at Astoria to Fort Vancouver, 100 miles inland. He championed returning stolen property. Through his negotiation skills, when the Americans wanted to claim all land between California and Alaska, he prevailed on preserving Vancouver Island for Britain and the 49th parallel as the border.
Peter Skene Ogden was the first white man to explore parts of Idaho, California, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming. He was one of the few HBC traders to oppose the indiscriminate slaughter of animals. His wife, Julia Mary River, a Cree, was a legend in her own right. One time she dove into a turbulent river to retrieve a runaway raft loaded with furs. When her husband’s expedition horses were stampeded by a rival she jumped on a horse, rode into the enemy’s camp to rescue her first-born son and galloped off with a stolen nag loaded with furs.
Here is a Cree’s description of bagpipes, to his Chief: “One white man was dressed like a woman, in a skirt of funny color had whiskers growing from his belt and fancy leggings. He carried a black swan which had many legs with ribbons tied to them. The swan’s body he put under his arm upside down and then put its head in his mouth and bit it. At the same time he pinched its neck with his fingers and squeezed the body under his arm until it made a terrible noise.”
November 30, 2019
I enjoyed volume 2 as much as volume 1. I learned a lot about the exploration and the fur trade in Western Canada that I'd forgotten from my grade 11 Canadian history classes and reading these books many years ago. I particularly liked his information about George Simpson who is such an important figure in North American history but almost unheard of by most Americans. I thought the last few chapters were a little rushed and uneven with the rest of the book. Perhaps even a little preachy.
I am not going to reread volume 3 which was not as good when I read it before.
I am not going to reread volume 3 which was not as good when I read it before.
March 14, 2017
Peter C. Newman is always readable and he weaves a great story in this popular history of the later fur trade in Canada. This is not a history text but something to situate those with an interest in Canadian history or the fur trade. It's substantial, but not academic, telling a story and focusing on characters.
May 2, 2013
This was a very well-written and seemingly well-documented account. Anyone who has ever slogged through Sir Alexander Mackenzie's narratives will probably be surprised at how interesting the subject of the various 18th & early 19th cen. fur companies--and their rivalries and explorations--can be.
February 17, 2012
Wonderful. One of the best works of Canadian historical writing I have ever read.
April 7, 2013
Hudson's bay company, voyageurs etc. great stuff!
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews