The Travels and Explorations of Henry Kelsey 1690-1692

Henry Kelsey was an English fur trader, explorer, and sailor who played an important role in establishing the Hudson’s Bay Company in Canada. Kelsey was apprenticed in London at age 17 to the Hudson’s Bay Company and was posted at a fort on Hudson’s Bay near present-day York Factory, Manitoba, near the mouth of the Nelson River on Hudson Bay. Kelsey traveled the winter of 1688–1689 overland to the Severn Fort and followed that with a journey to the lands just north of the Churchill River.

In 1690, HBC governor sent Kelsey on a journey up the Nelson River “to call, encourage, and invite the remoter [indigenous peoples] to a trade with us.” Kelsey left York Factory in June of 1690 with a group of indigenous people and reached present-day The Pas, Manitoba. Kelsey then headed into the richer lands of the aspen parkland and prairies to his south and west by ascending the Carrot River by canoe, and into present-day Saskatchewan.

Entering the Touchwood Hills area, Henry Kelsey encountered the buffalo-hunting indigenous peoples of the Great Plains who were still on foot at this time, the later horse culture of the Plains tribes not having yet reached Canada. Kelsey described a “great store of buffalo” and “silver-haired” bears, and became the European of to see buffalo and grizzly bears on the northern Great Plains. Kelsey wintered with the indigenous groups he had travelled with and returned to York Factory in the summer of 1692.

Kelsey’s travels were researched from published journal and other records. From the completed research, spatial data was created and is organized into the fields Year, Route, Leg, Departed, Arrived, Origin, and Destination. The data is in ESRI shapefile format and can be acquired HERE.

A Map of the Travels and Explorations of Henry Kelsey 1690-1692