Posts and Forts of the North American Fur Trade

Historic Fort Edmonton 1846

The conceptualization 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.

These changes will be evident in the interactive Fur Trade (Web) Map currently under construction. To date, there are over 2200 sites captured in the spatial database that encompass those that were operated by the North West Company, Hudson’s Bay Company, XY Company, Canadian Independents, French Colonial, American Independents, American Fur Company, British Colonial, Columbia Fur Company, King’s Post Company, Missouri Fur Company, Pacific Fur Company, Rocky Mountain Fur Company, Russian, Spanish, Union Fur Company, and Unknown operators.