Posts and Forts of the North American Fur Trade

Historic Fort Edmonton 1846

The conceptualisation of a Post and Fort database began in earnest in 1992 with the establishment of a small database that began with the addition of French, North West Company, Hudson Bay Company, XY Company, and Canadian Independent posts and forts that total just over 900 sites.

That initial research led to the addition of American fur trade companies and during that research came an invitation to participate in the 9th North American Fur Trade Conference in St. Louis Missouri in 2006. The paper written for that conference discussed combining the disciplines of History, Cartography, and Information Technology to create a modern Geographical Information System aimed at comprising all fur trade fort and post sites of North America.

Since the presentation in St. Louis, the database has grown substantially both in numbers and structurally and now encompasses posts and forts throughout North America. Each post is classified by the quality of the source information and quality of the spatial coordinates assigned each site. The class system devised was based on location description and the coordinate precision of the site derived from the description. As such, one of the following classes was assigned each site in the database:

Since the conference in St. Louis, the database has grown even larger and presently holds 2030 fur trade sites and will be shown in the interactive Fur Trade Geographic Information Map currently under construction. The companies and number of sites for each respectively are shown below: