Our Nest on Wheels

by Steve

Welcome to the Great Hall! And thanks for joining us on this tour of Grand Portage National Monument, where we are volunteering this summer. (If you missed the previous posts in this series, you can find links at the bottom of the page.)

This is the inland headquarters for the North West Company, the largest fur trade company of the day, around three times the size of Hudson Bay Company. The partners who own the company, also called "Gentlemen," are here for a few weeks during the summer to conduct their business meetings. They travel here from Montreal, London, perhaps Scotland, to meet with the wintering partners who stay at the inland trading posts. They also meet with the clerks and interpreters who run the trading posts. They will inspect and review all the furs acquired over the winter and manage all the resupply orders for trade goods that come from all over the world.

You can also see that this hall is set up for fancy dining, and that although we are in the middle of nowhere--we are 1200 miles from Montreal--we still have china, linens, and elegant glassware. Because these are wealthy gentlemen, anything they want here they will have. On some evenings, they will push the chairs and tables to the side and have dances with local Ojibwe and Metis women in attendance. So this is a business hall, dining hall, and party hall.

You can see that the guides, clerks, and interpreters are also welcome to join the gentlemen in this hall for dinners. They get the same fancy food served from the kitchen next door, and while their seating accommodations are not quite as nice as those the gentlemen enjoy, it is certainly better than being outside the fence cooking your own supper of peas and corn as the voyageurs, the real workers of the company, have to do. They are not welcome in the Great Hall; in fact, they are not really welcome inside the stockade. The societal class structure of the period is echoed by a similar class structure within the company: owners, managers, and workers. Perhaps not much has changed in 240 years.

This hall has a room at each of the four corners. Those would have been bedrooms for the partners to use while on site. There were additional partner accommodations in another building. We've left one room set up as a bedroom for Alexander MacKenzie. He's our famous partner who found the route to the Pacific Ocean 11 years before Lewis and Clark even left St. Louis. You can see the style in which he was accustomed to living while here.

The second corner room is set up as a hat-making shop in Europe. Most of the furs the company acquires are beaver, and most of the beaver goes into making the beaver felt hats that are the style for the upper class in Europe from 1550 to 1850. In that room you can see how the hat-making process is done.

The third corner room is set up as a typical trading post. We have over 100 of them in the western and northwestern parts of Canada, some as far away as the Great Slave Lake, and we'd also have one of them on site here at the depot in Grand Portage. You can see all the goods that are being brought here from all over the world to trade for furs. That includes textiles, metal tools, pots and pans, guns, ammo, and gunpowder, tobacco from Brazil, beads from Italy, and ostrich feathers from Africa. And you can see all the furs that we are taking in as trade. There are minks and martens, beavers and badgers and bears and everything in between. And you can touch and feel the furs to your hearts content.

The fourth room we have set up as a street of shops in London. The shops are closed now, but you can do a little window shopping. Everything for sale with a tan-colored label is an item that is made with furs that are acquired through the fur trade.

We hope you've enjoyed this brief look at the Great Hall. There's a lot more to see and experience here, but we just can't cover everything in a simple blog post. Maybe you need to make a visit!

Previous installments:  Overview, Ojibwe Village, Canoe Warehouse

by Steve

Welcome to the Canoe Warehouse. And thanks for joining us on this tour of Grand Portage National Monument, where we are volunteering this summer. (If you missed the previous posts in this series, you can find links at the bottom of this page.

The park uses this warehouse to display the canoes used in the fur trade, as well as the woodworking skills from the 1790s that supported the depot. 

The park plans to build another canoe on site next summer, so we had the opportunity to harvest the birchbark for this. Birchbark harvesting can be done at one particular time of the year, which is usually mid-July. At that time, the bark will easily separate from the trunk once you have made a vertical cut through the bark. By making only a vertical cut, you can remove the bark, and the tree will grow new bark. The second-growth bark will look more like scar tissue, and can't be used for canoe building. But at least the tree is unharmed.