Northern Trader ― The Last Days of the Fur Trade

First published in 1956, Northern Trader is a historically valuable, intimately personal and vividly expressed memoir of the last days of the fur trade. A gifted writer, Harold Kemp recounts the routines and rhythms of that long-lost way of life; a life that had been "following the same placid course that it had been following for the past two hundred years"; a life in which "bark canoes were still built, muzzle-loaders still used," and where the north was a "vast region of infinite allure in which a young man could test his character, make his name, and earn a living far distant from the mundane familiarities of town or city." Kemp tells how, as a teenager, he was fascinated by a map of northern Saskatchewan with "too many blank, unexplored areas on it, too many lakes half-drawn, too many rivers that terminate only in dotted lines."Kemp's palpable, often gripping prose recounts life on the trail in all seasons: paddling freight canoes, being under sail in a York boat, packing one's own weight on portages, running on snowshoes to break trail for dogs pulling loaded toboggans, and making camp at the end of an exhausting day.Equally impressive, historically, are his depictions of the Cree among whom he lived, whose language he spoke, whose skills he admired, and whose customs he respected.

H.S.M. Kemp was born in the U.K. in 1892 and came to the North-West Territories as a boy. At age sixteen he began working for the Hudson's Bay Company. Three years later he joined Revillon Freres, then the HBC's great rival. His Northern Trader is the only full-scale recollection of the fur trade we have by a "French Company" man.