Fur Trade Places: Fort William
Fort William
If your ancestor went west with the North West Company, the name Fort William is probably somewhere in his papers. It is written into the engagement he signed or marked before a Montréal notary. It heads a column in the company's ledgers. Sometimes it is the last place the books record him at all.
For twenty summers, from 1801 to 1821, this post at the mouth of the Kaministiquia River on Lake Superior was the hinge of the Canadian fur trade. The canoes from Montréal came up to it; the canoes from the North-West came down to it; and for a few crowded weeks each year the two halves of the trade met there and changed places. Knowing what happened at Fort William is the key to reading what a voyageur's contract and account are telling you.
A new headquarters on Lake Superior
Before Fort William, the North West Company's inland depot was Grand Portage, some forty-five miles to the south-west. When the new international boundary placed Grand Portage on the American side, the company needed another road into the interior. In 1798 Roderick McKenzie rediscovered the old French canoe route that began at the mouth of the Kaministiquia, and building began there in 1801. The post was first called Fort Kaministiquia. In 1807 it was renamed for William McGillivray, the company's chief director.
Alexander Henry the younger stopped there in the summer of 1803 and found "great improvements" made in a single winter — the fort, store and shop built, brick kilns turning out bricks, but not yet enough houses: the visitors still slept in tents. Within a few years Fort William had grown into what W. Stewart Wallace, writing in The Beaver in 1949, called the capital of a commercial empire stretching from the Great Lakes to the Pacific and from the Mississippi to the Arctic.
"The appearance of a fort … and that of a pretty village"
The fullest description of the post at its height comes from Gabriel Franchère, a Montréal-born clerk returning overland from the Columbia, who spent a week there in the summer of 1814.
He walked his readers through it: the great hall at the centre of the square, sixty feet long, where agents, partners, clerks, interpreters and guides ate together at separate tables; the ranges of bedrooms for the wintering partners and the clerks; the warehouse where the furs were inspected and repacked; a stone powder magazine roofed with tin; the workshops of the carpenter, the cooper, the tinsmith and the blacksmith; the yards and sheds where canoes were built and repaired. One building was the shop for the equipment of the men. Another sold liquor, bread, pork and butter, and gave each arriving traveller a treat of "a white loaf, half a pound of butter, and a gill of rum." The voyageurs called it the cantine salope. There was also a jail, which they called the pot au beurre — the butter-tub.
Ross Cox, passing through on his way home from the Columbia a few years later, added the doctor's house, the forge, a shipyard for the company's lake vessels, and a dining hall large enough to seat two hundred, hung with portraits of the partners and, at its upper end, David Thompson's great map of the Indian country.
Franchère's last detail is the one a genealogist should notice. Across the river, he wrote, stood "a certain number of log-houses, all inhabited by old Canadian voyageurs, worn out in the service of the company, without having enriched themselves."
The turning point of the route
Fort William sat at the point where one kind of canoe gave way to another. The big Montréal canoes, built for the Ottawa and the Great Lakes, could go no further; the rivers and portages to the west needed the lighter north canoe. So the route — and the workforce — divided there.
The men who paddled up from Montréal each spring and went home in the fall were the mangeurs de lard, the "pork-eaters," named for their rations. The men who spent the winter in the interior were the hivernants, the winterers. Each summer the winterers brought the year's furs down to Fort William, and the Montréal brigades brought up the trade goods for the year ahead. At the height of the season, Wallace wrote, more than three thousand people could be gathered there. The agents from Montréal met the wintering partners in what amounted to the company's annual parliament. Then the canoes turned around.
In the engagement. The destination clause tells you what kind of man he was that year. A contract "to Fort William and back" is a summer voyage: he left in the spring and was home by autumn, and his children can be born and baptized in a Quebec parish every winter. A contract "to winter in the North-West" means one, two or three years away, and a parish register may say so — voyageur hivernant, father absent.
In the wage. Summer men and winterers were paid on different scales. A Berthier man engaged in 1810 as devant, Montréal to Fort William and back, for 400 livres, with 200 more if he were sent on to Lac la Pluie. A wintering bowman in 1820 contracted for 1,200 livres for two winters.
In the ledger. North West Company accounts charge men for goods taken at the depot against the "Fort William book," and wintering engagements often specify that a man's equipment is to be issued at Fort William. A charge there tells you he reached the lake.
In the margin. For a Montréal man engaged to winter, Fort William was where the route committed him to the interior. Some did not go on. A clerk's note such as "deserted from Fort William" closes an account, and may be the only record that he turned back.
Two Joseph Ménards at the lake, 1820
In the winter of 1819–20 two men named Joseph Ménard, from the same corner of the Lac des Deux-Montagnes, engaged with the North West Company six weeks apart. Both were bound for the interior. One, the son-in-law of Gabriel Guilbault, signed his contract as a bowman for two winters; his equipment was to be issued at Fort William. The other, very probably his son, made his mark as a middleman for three winters.
The company's general ledger shows what became of them at the lake. The younger man was charged for a three-point blanket in the Fort William book, and his account ends with a note in a lighter hand: Deserted Fall 1820 from Fort William. The elder went on. He wintered inland while his wife bore a daughter and died at Rigaud, and he came down again with the brigades in the summer of 1821, when the company was being merged into the Hudson's Bay Company. Their story is the subject of the next post in this series.
After 1821
Fort William's great days ended with the merger of 1821. The partners of the North West Company met there one last time, with Nicholas Garry and Simon McGillivray, to settle the terms; afterwards the Hudson's Bay Company sent the trade out through Hudson Bay, and the canoe road from Montréal to Lake Superior fell into disuse. An American visitor in 1823 found the establishment "about to be suffered to fall to ruin." John McLean, passing in 1833, saw "but a shadow of departed greatness." Washington Irving wrote its epitaph in Astoria in 1836:
The post lingered on as a minor Hudson's Bay Company establishment for more than half a century. The railway finished it: in 1883 its buildings were levelled for the Canadian Pacific Railway's yards, and the last of them, the stone powder magazine, was demolished in the early 1900s. Today the fort stands again, reconstructed by the Province of Ontario at Pointe de Meuron, a few kilometres up the Kaministiquia, as Fort William Historical Park; it opened in 1973 and depicts the post as it was about 1815.
About the painting
The watercolour at the top of this page is the work of Robert Irvine, a young Orkneyman who came to Canada about 1811 and served the North West Company as master of the Caledonia, one of its schooners on the upper lakes. He seems to have painted the fort from the river while his ship lay at the company's wharf. In the War of 1812 Irvine and the Caledonia were taken into the Provincial Marine; he was captured at the Battle of Lake Erie and spent a year or more as a prisoner in Kentucky. When W. Stewart Wallace published an Irvine view of the fort in 1949, then newly come to light in a Toronto family's portfolio, he judged it far more trustworthy than the only other early picture of the post, and found that most of its buildings could be matched to Franchère's description — the great hall rising at the centre of the square, the ranges on either side, the boats on the river.
Next in this series: The Winter He Was Away — Joseph Ménard's season in the North-West, 1820–21, and what it cost the family he left at Rigaud.
The documentary case is already published: Joseph Ménard, Voyageur →
Sources
- W. Stewart Wallace, "Fort William of the Fur Trade," The Beaver, Outfit 280 (December 1949), 16–19; quoting Alexander Henry the younger (1803), Gabriel Franchère (1814), Ross Cox, William H. Keating (1823), John McLean (1833) and Washington Irving, Astoria (1836). Online at parkscanadahistory.com.
- Jean Morrison, "Fort William," The Canadian Encyclopedia (Historica Canada, published 4 January 2011; last edited 28 April 2025).
- Robert Irvine, Fort William, an establishment of the North West Company, on Lake Superior, watercolour, ca. 1811. Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. R9266-290, Peter Winkworth Collection of Canadiana.
- Carte des routes de canoës de la Compagnie du Nord-Ouest [digital map], incorporating Irvine's watercolour; routing adapted from David Thompson materials via the Archives of Ontario. Accessed 18 October 2026.
- Fort William Historical Park, Thunder Bay, Ontario (opened 3 July 1973).
- Notarial engagements and North West Company accounts cited in the text: Greffe de John Gerbrand Beek, BAnQ Vieux-Montréal (5 January 1810; 20 December 1819; 4 February 1820); Hudson's Bay Company Archives, F.4/32, fos. 671–672. Full citations on the Joseph Ménard methodology page and in The Voyageur Register.
