*Elements of the video have been paraphrased for readability.
Charles, LIDD Founder & President:
Gabrielle! It’s the end of the week. Welcome to the show. We’re very excited to have Gabrielle. For anyone who doesn’t know, because you don’t know this Gabrielle, but we have this rapidly expanding audience of strangers. So to introduce you, you are a senior partner here at LIDD and have been for a long time.
Gabrielle, Senior Partner at LIDD:
It’s been almost eight years.
Charles:
You’re one of the OGs of LIDD.
Gabrielle:
Long time.
Charles:
This is gonna be an exciting episode because this is the first time we’re going to attempt to add visual aids to the conversation. We’ll see how it goes. So people who are tired of looking at me, I promise there’ll be some, there’ll be some pictures that will make everything look a lot better.
So we’re gonna go back way back in history and talk about Canada’s fur trade. And before we do that, it’d be fun to just talk about, as people don’t know this either, you are essentially a New York native, although at this point you’ve become a Montreal native.
Gabrielle:
Well, thank you. Pretty close. I’m six years,
Charles:
Six years. Yeah. But as an American, you have an interest in this topic, which for us Canadians, it’s always, you know, we always get this kind of warm fuzzy that there’s an American interested in our history.
Gabrielle:
I say it’s the the zeal of the convert. You know, when you’re new to something, then you’re really into it. <laugh>
Charles:
The zeal of a convert. Right.
Gabrielle:
Um, I’ve always been interested in this part of American history and North American history. And so I’d read about the fur trade. I’d thought about it. And then what spurred me onto this project with got me into in the last couple years was I was taking my dog for a walk, and I found a box that someone had left out with their trash. And it was full of stamps, letters, postcards, canceled checks, but it didn’t look kind of antique. And so I started looking through it, and it was with the trash. So I was like, I just took it home and I took it home. And I kind of looked through it and it was cool, but I put it away. And that was like, in 2019, fast forward, it’s covid like the dark era of Covid when there was nothing to do. Yeah. And depressed.
Charles:
Need to do anything to entertain yourself, anything!
Gabrielle:
And I thought taking a look at the box would be interesting. And I was like, huh. And I pulled it out of the closet and I started looking through it, and it had all this cool stuff in it. So, um, there were hundreds of antique postage stamps. So I got really into postage stamps and I started looking through the letters. And one night I started googling some of the names of the people that were in the letters, which is kind of silly because they’d been dead for a very long time. These letters, everything it’s clear in the box was from the late 1890s to the early 19 hundreds.
Charles:
Yeah. That’s crazy.
Gabrielle:
So cool. So anyway, so one of the guys I googled came up with like a ton of results and I was like, oh. And it turns out he worked for the Hudson’s Bay Company, and the Hudson’s Bay Company archives are digitized and, and you can all indexed. And so there’s all this stuff about him. And it was like super cool. And I was like, oh, this guy in this letter is like here. And so that got me into Hudson’s Bay Company, the archives, looking at it. And that’s sort of how I dove into this. And again, it was covid. So I got a lot of time.
Charles:
So, and for folks who haven’t visited our offices this culminates your passion for the Hudson’s Bay and the fur trade culminates in essentially a museum exhibit in our new offices Yes. That walk people through, um, through that, that, that very vital and important part of Canada’s history. Yeah. Um, from a very special lens, and we’ll get into that lens in a second. Yeah. The first thing is, so why is the fur trade important?
Gabrielle:
Yeah. It’s fundamental to the founding of Canada. And Canadian history, let’s say Canadian history of the last couple hundred years is a story of extractive resources. And beaver fur were one of the first things that were extracted. So European settlers came to North America. They could see that there were a lot of beavers and beaver hats were very popular in Europe at the time. So all men had different kinds of hats. Men of all different walks of life. They all had these hats made of beaver fur. And the Europeans, they had hunted their own European beaver to extinction. So they needed a new source of beavers. And people, these Europeans realized that they were in North America. And at the same time the industrial revolution was getting going. There were all these manufactured goods and the, the people making these goods wanted more markets to sell them to. So the idea came up of this trait that the Europeans would bring manufactured goods to North America where they would trade them for furs that the indigenous communities would capture. And, and that was, that was the crux of the trade.
Charles:
Yeah. So, but what’s interesting then, if we go one step further Yeah. And back to the, back to why we would put up an exhibit, a museum quality exhibit on our walls, is as a logistics person, you had a special interest in the fur trade and, and, and Yeah. And what it implied about a supply chain. Yes.
Gabrielle:
’cause when you get into, okay, well how did they do this trait of the first for the manufactured goods? So then I started reading about it and it was really cool. And there’s all this supply chain stuff, and that’s what got me super into it. So there were really two major fur trading companies in Canada in the 17 hundreds. Really? It was like the height of it, 17 to the 18 hundreds. And one of them, the biggest one, which is still exists today, is the Hudson’s Bay Company. And they had this, their strategy was they would take manufactured goods on a big ship, which they would go up the, through the straight Hudson, straight into Hudson’s Bay by Greenland, like very far north. And they would land in the bay with the big ship, and then they would offload everything. And then they would trade at the edge of the bay, and then the, and then the trading would go south, where the indigenous communities were trading with each other, going all the way south. And then the first would come north and they would trade at the Bay. They had a big trade going about a hundred years after they started in the late 17 hundreds. Then the Northwest Company opened up and they had a different strategy. So it was like cool, ’cause Okay. They had a different way of doing it, which is that they would bring the ship to Montreal down the St. Lawrence River, so much further south, and then they would portage it overland to lash sheen where you
Charles:
Grew up. My hometown.
Gabrielle:
Exactly. To avoid the rapids in the river. And then they would take canoes and they would bring all the goods by canoe through the river system into the Great Lakes land on the western edge of Lake Superior at the first Grand Portage, and then Fort William. And there they would trade with the community. So the furs would come through the river and lake system from the far west, very deep inland, and come to Fort William. And then that’s where they would trade one for the other. So these were two different strategies. The two companies were hugely competitive with each other, like to the point of war, basically. Um, because they were in, they were encroaching on each other’s…
Charles:
Territory. Right. At some point, those two, the river converges.
Gabrielle:
Exactly. When the, when the Northwest company comes in and starts going south, they cut off the trade that was going to Hudson’s Bay. Yeah. And so the H B C people are like, no one, no one’s coming north anymore. And so they’re in a big, you know, a fight with each other, but they’ve got different strategies, different kinds of boats, different cost structures, different kinds of people in order to move these goods in different ways. And I thought that was really
Charles:
Interesting. And so, so, and we’re gonna get into it. I just, I got it for people who, yeah. When we say the Hudson’s Bay Company Yes. Canadians now know that as the Bay, which is continues to be a retailer, it it is, it is one of, if not the oldest incorporated company on planet Earth.
Gabrielle:
Certainly the oldest in the Western Hemisphere.
Charles:
In the Western Western Hemisphere. And it’s owned by an American private equity guy who owns a bunch of these. They bought…
Gabrielle:
Lord and Taylor,
Charles:
I think. Yeah. Lord and Taylor. And one of the most coveted titles in retail is that when you’re the president of the Hudson’s Bay Company, you still have the title of Governor of the Hudson’s Bay. Yeah. So, so this, this New Yorker probably someone you’ve run into at, you know, is somewhere in Central Park, is still known as, is officially known as the Governor of Hudson’s Bay. Yeah.
Gabrielle:
And then that transition to a department store is very easy to see, like how it morphed. So you have this fur trade. They have, they have big depots where there, where there’s major trading posts like warehouses, and then they have outposts, um, all these different little small trading posts in the, in the interior. So you end up with, you’ve got territory, you got stores kind of all over the place, and they, it’s like, um, kind of like a company town or something. They’re like, the only game in town. If you want stuff, you gotta go to the Hudson Bay trading post to get your stuff. Yep. And so morphing from like a backwater outpost that sells everything, pot pots and pans,
Charles:
General merchandise.
Gabrielle:
You know, you see it becomes a store, and it just morphs into the department store
Charles:
Alright, well let’s get, let’s bring it back to what we’ve talked about when we talked about this, which is just the reason it’s fascinating to us as supply chain consultants is the history, um, of the supply chain. Um, it’s not so much the history of the supply chain, it that these folks who ran both of these trade systems, networks we’re solving supply chain problems. Yeah. The same supply chain problems as we solve today. Just that the technology and the hurdles and the barriers were, were different Yes. And, but, but fundamentally the same problems that you encounter. And, and I mean, let’s go, you start with demand. Right. So I think you addressed that already. There was this, this, this hunger for beaver.
Call us out if you know it’s wrong. But I understood that it was particularly because the beaver pelt was, was waterproof. And that made it very attractive, like it wasn’t just like it’s good looking. But that it actually had a practical benefit.
So we got the demand and we, and as you said, you could create a buyer and seller because there was demand on both sides. The indigenous communities of North America had things they would be willing to buy and saw value in what the, the Europeans could provide. And then they of course, in turn could provide something that was highly valuable to, to the Europeans. So you got that demand, which is great. And, and then you have this concept of a supply network.
And you said something really interesting just a minute ago about that portage between Montreal and Lachine, which anyone who’s in Montreal knows that Lachine is a 15 minute drive without traffic. It’s nicknamed the first suburb because it is almost as old as Montreal itself. But these were water networks in the 16-1700s. Water is your main transportation method. There’s no railroads, there’s no highways. Right. And water presents all sorts of problems like navigability, right? Yes. You could only bring a boat, an ocean going boat to Montreal because there’s a wall of rapids Atlas sheen that prevent these boats from going any further. Right.
Gabrielle:
And there’s just, they, they use different kinds of boats. There’s big, there’s big ships that come from Europe. There’s large canoes canoe that would go certain distances. Then they had little smaller kind of sprinter canoes. Um, and they, when you look in the course of H B C history over a couple hundred years, they, the, they are constantly innovating and changing with transportation. As transportation technology changes, they add,
Charles:
They rapidly take
Gabrielle:
Advantage. They, they take advantage. And there’s then there’s carts and there’s dog sleds, and later there’s airplanes and railroads, and there’s all these things get added on later on. Right. Um,
Charles:
But what you just said was really interesting to me. Yeah. Um, so you can imagine it’s almost like last mile delivery today. Right? Okay. Yeah. That we start with these ocean going vessels Yeah. As the, the trunk. Yeah. Then you have these giant canoes. Canoes, which is how we describe them, really Giant canoes going up the St. Lawrence, mighty St. Lawrence River. Yeah. Through the Great Lakes. Yeah. But as people branch off into ever smaller lakes,
Gabrielle:
Down off the lakes and into the
Charles:
Rivers, the canoes have to get smaller, more portable. Totally. Right. Yeah. Just like, just like when we see two trailers hooked up in tandem and then ending up with those folks on scooters delivering your meal thanks to Uber. Yeah. Just the other day, you know, I live at the top of a, of a hill. Yeah. And I ordered some Uber and it said that my driver was on bicycle mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And I felt so bad, like, oh, she had to go up because, you know, you, I hope they give you a warning that says like, you’re going up a hill, do you really want on a bike? Do you really want to take this order? And thought, oh, I’m gonna have to extra tip. But thank God it was a motorized bike. So I didn’t feel bad. I just took the food and sitting on your way <laugh>. Um, but so, so that’s like you were explaining the, the, the, the networks then essentially be your, your your market Yeah. Becomes defined by the river network. Yeah. All the river, the drainage basins of the Hudson. And
Gabrielle:
Also you have to imagine these, they had, the Europeans had not explored further away. A lot of this is also exploration. Right. It’s kind of an age and when they’re doing trade, but it’s mixed with a desire to explore, to find new things. Yep. To map. They’re like obsessed with maps and going westward and there’s all these, um, missions sent off to try to go Yep. So that, that’s especially in the 17 hundreds, kind of the also going on at the same time. And they’re trying to push further, further, further westward down, more difficult rivers and more difficult portages to, to get even further.
Charles:
You have a connection to Pittsburgh. I do. I have a deep love of Pittsburgh. Oh yeah. Because of my long standing relationship with my beloved American textile company. Yes. And, um, people don’t know this, but the original Pittsburgh is Fort Duquesne. Yes. A French fort. They’re designed to protect the fir trade. That’s why I was first put there on, that’s
Gabrielle:
Where there’s three rivers,
Charles:
Right. I I mean why they called it Three Rivers. It’s two rivers joined to become an
Gabrielle:
Allegheny. The Monongahela. Yeah.
Charles:
And, and the Ohio. And the Ohio. But I just don’t understand why the Monga hala didn’t just say the Allegheny joins the Monga hala and continues on as the not my business. So, so we, you know, that that canoe, that canoe as the, um, the essential, the, the, the the truck, the, the, the, the truck of the highway. Yes. And
Gabrielle:
The, the canoes were a technology that the indigenous communities brought Yes. To the project here. And they maintain built them, maintained them tr taught the your Europeans about how to, how to build them. So
Charles:
One of the fascinating things that people have to think about when you think about the load, you know, the carrying capacity of the canoe, there’s obviously a weight limit. Yes. There’s also a volume of, of, of, of goods that you can store in there. Yeah. And it, unlike a truck, the human beings compete and their supplies, the food they have to eat, compete with the carrying capacity of you know of the canoe or compete with the goods for that. And they actually had this requirement. They wanted short, lightweight, strong, tough people. They didn’t want lang. I certainly would not qualify. Not ’cause I’m overly tall, but I’m certainly too, too voluminous to, um, to, to meet the stringent
Gabrielle:
Requirements. The who were the people rowing the men who were rowing, they were tended to be kind of short.
Charles:
Yeah. Yes. And like, they’d look at me, they’d say, no, this is like 20 beaver hats that I’m ultimately displacing in the boat. Right. Um, the, but as you were doing the research, what I loved what you were sharing with us Yeah. Um, was the whole warehousing piece.
Gabrielle:
Yes. There’s also, the archives are enormous. There’s like millions of pages of digitized. There’s a lot of microfiche from the old style that has been digitized. And you can find inventory records, bills of lading, match of warehouses, and just like, and all these, what I remember finding this one inventory record, like an inventory book. Like they had all these notebooks. They had like, like a ton of notebooks and they all a coding system for how to keep track of the notebooks. So you open it up and it lists all the locations in the, um, outpost or depot that they, um, had stuff in. So it’d be like bail, bail room, ax, room, apothecary. It’s like listed all these places. Numbers them one through like 30. And then you turn the page and the one through 30 is across the top. There’s all these columns, and then it lists the products and it tells you how many are in each location. And I was like, that’s so cool. So like, that’s like they’re taking your inventory by location,
Charles:
Detailed inventory. Very, yes. This is inventory records that they have to send to headquarters back in London. Yeah. So
Gabrielle:
It’s all by hand. So there’s, there’s like a ton of clerks and they’re all writing constantly. And they’re, they’re recording every single transaction, every movement, everything. I mean, I say every maybe not single look thing. We’re not, but they’re recording a lot of
Charles:
Transactions. They’re doing their best to keep an accurate
Gabrielle:
Accurate Yes.
Charles:
Real time quote unquote record of inventory.
Gabrielle:
Yes. And they have different books. So there’s like an inventory books, and then there’s like books of like payments to the employees, um, loans to the employees, all these different things. Then they would copy the books and send one set to London, which is where the headquarters were, and keep one set on site at the outpost or depot, wherever they were. And they just, so they had all these records and that was very cool to see. Yep. Um, that they, how they did that.
Charles:
Yeah. So it’s, here they are, they’re doing their inventory management, they’re recording transactions, they’re duplicating it. So that headquarters had a source of truth. Yes. I mean, these are concepts again, remain relevant today. We’ve just digitized all of this. Exactly. Yeah. And it’s almost funny. You could take someone and flash forward them into the future. And while they would be mystified by the how
Gabrielle:
The technology
Charles:
Right. They would not be mystified by the why Totally. And what that they would say, yes, this is what we wanted.
Gabrielle:
Yes. And there’s some, um, I got to see some of the like reports, like they’re writing, they’re, they’re taking, they’re go, like, they would have these inspectors that would go to the outposts and be like, from the depot to all the outposts would go visit. And like they’re taking notes and describing what’s happening. And these in this way, that’s really like, yeah. They’re, they’re running their business and they’re talking about what’s, what’s coming in, what’s going on, and how, what are the volumes of firsts that they’re able to find and, and
Charles:
Go. Well, and the, the other part, part of the other side of that is these, you know, <laugh>. Well, we like to, we like to talk about when we think engineering principles were first applied in warehouse design, which we, we know is roughly the 1960s is when industrial engineering gets applied to, but of course there’s been engineering and, and good thinking going into the design of a warehouse for, for ages. Yes. Yeah. And, and part of some of the things that you, you dug up from the archives,
Gabrielle:
They, they definitely had a sense of space usage as you were talking about in the canoe, because the space was so precious in the canoes and in the ships. They had a series of different presses where they would press the furs and press the products. So they make them take less space. They had a concept of standard units of sizes so that the bales were in standard sizes, so they would pack nicely together. And then they numbered the bales. They had lists of by number what was in it, who it belonged to, where it was going. Um, yeah. They just, they had a lot of the sort of proto concepts of things that we do today. They
Charles:
Have. Well, and, and when, I remember when you told me that story about the pressing of the furs so that there’s no air. Right, right. Like when I, when I, not that I can bake a cake, but you know, when you, when you pound the cake to get the bubbles out and all that, but it reminded me in ancient Rome, so the amphora Yeah. Which is where you store the wine mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And so the wine’s coming from all over the Mediterranean into Rome, and it’s got the, the bottle’s got this weird design. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s almost like a pinball with a, with a spike on the bottom. Okay. And it’s like, why do they do that? Well, very good reason.
Yes. So that all stacked together in three dimensions, it becomes this unit Yes. Which then can move with the waves. Ah, very cool. You know, and so yeah, I’ve just find, so, so you can go back to ancient Roman probably well before that even and find people thinking about packaging and, and being most economic boat space and uh, in the warehouse and then also in transportation. Yeah. I think the last kind of fun thing, uh, is that, you know, we of course are always dealing with our clients who are complaining about driver shortages, not so much in town. Yeah, right. But long haul driver shortages. Yeah. And so what, tell us a little bit about, well, what was the long haul driver of, of the 16th century? Like?
Gabrielle:
Well, so it’s interesting. So European men who didn’t have a lot of job prospects, the new world was a great place to find a job. Hundred percent. So there’s a whole influx of, of young men who come over and, and work for the company, work for H B C in particular, um, including the guy that I first researched that I mentioned earlier from the letters. He, um, was born in England and comes over as like an 18 or 19 year old and works on the ships, and then it becomes a clerk and spends 20 years working for H B C. Um, so you have that group of people. Um, you also had men who were called pork eaters. And the pork eaters would take the product from Lae to Fort William. So they’re kind of the
Charles:
Modern day Thunder Bay.
Gabrielle:
Yes. In Ontario. So they, the pork eaters, and they were called that ’cause they got pork in their provisions. They wintered in the city, they wintered in Montreal and Lachine. So they were a little bit more urban. Um, and they were maybe a little better fed. And they brought the manufactured goods to Fort William and then brought the furs back from Fort William to Lachine for export. Then you have from Fort William into the, into the interior the Northmen who live in the north and they winter in the countryside and in the, with the indigenous communities.
Charles:
A wild bunch.
Gabrielle:
A Wilder bunch. And the Northwest Company actually encouraged intermarriage. They wanted their men to marry indigenous women because they thought that that would strengthen the bonds,
Charles:
Their bond, the bonds to the territory that they’re working to the territory
Gabrielle:
Organ. But the bonds between, with the communities, with the company. That’s that increases point. That would very good point. Bond the sort of the buyers and sellers together. The Hudson’s Bay Company discouraged intermarriage and didn’t really want that to happen. And had kind of more of a class of clerks and directors that were, that were sort of more
Charles:
Separate. I mean, we never recommend to our clients that they should marry their suppliers <laugh> that we’re neutral on it. Yeah.
Gabrielle:
So the, the marriage, the Northwest Company Voyager and the, um, indigenous museum marriage, that, that created the met kind of mixed community that’s still in…
Charles:
Thriving in Manitoba.
Gabrielle:
Manitoba, Manitoba.
Charles:
That is, I find fascinating. And it’s been great. And as you can see, we’ve see it, it goes so much faster than you think. ’cause you go on for hours. But there’s one little piece that I know I’m not allowed to ask, but it can always be cut <laugh>. So is that your only like wouldn’t you wanna know what would it like, be like to be one of those northman canoeing on the wild rivers?
Gabrielle:
I, yes, in fact, I did wonder that it is true that when I was about 15. I took a month long canoe trip where we pretended to be Voyager. And I was, it was because I was learning French. And I has, I’m sad to say that I think my French at 15 is probably better than my French today.
Charles:
Your French is very good, Gabrielle. Okay, thank you. Um, but
Gabrielle:
Yeah, so we, we, we canoe canoed around Minnesota in the lake, in the lakes, and we ended at a Grand Portage, which is near Thunder Bay. And that’s, and there’s a, for a trading museum there. And I have a very distinct memory of gonna examine and thinking it was really cool, and the whole trip was so cool. And so I kind of always was interested in this topic and then revisited it later
Charles:
On. Two things we learned about Gabrielle on as, as bookends to this very good conversation about the fur trade, is that if you put out semi-interesting materials in your garbage, if Gabrielle will pick it up, <laugh> and that there was a time when Gabrielle went on a month long canoe trip. Something that I never in my life would want to do. So that’s really a pretty cool thing, especially up in black fi country of Minnesota. That would be just the flies alone. Well, I really appreciate that you spent this time. I know that this is gonna get released slower than most because we are gonna add some graphics. We are gonna show off all the amazing images that you’ve collected as part of your research that went into the, the archive, the, the, sorry, the museum display and, the book that you’ve, you’ve put together on it.
Gabrielle:
Yeah. So there’s a book that’s gonna come out soon in a self-published way.
Charles:
I have some folks at Random House who’ve expressed interest, so let’s see what happens. <laugh>. All right. Thank you everyone. Thank you.
Gabrielle:
Good night. Bye.