The Travels of Robert Longmoor 1773-1810

Robert Longmoor was a long-serving employee of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), active from approximately 1770 until his retirement in 1810. Though not one of the Company’s most prominent officers, his career reflects the life of many rank-and-file servants who helped sustain the fur trade during a critical period of expansion inland. Longmoor likely entered HBC service from Scotland, and he is first noted in Company records around 1770, a time when the HBC was transitioning from its older model of trading exclusively at the Bay posts to building inland posts and by the 1790s, Longmoor was considered a veteran HBC servant. He continued to serve in the Saskatchewan district and there is no detailed account survives of his final years, but he appears to have spent nearly three decades in the service of the HBC.

Longmoor represents the men who made the Hudson’s Bay Company function. His life was one of endurance, adaptation, and long service in a demanding and often perilous trade. Existing records document his extensive service for the Hudson’s Bay Company from 1771 through at least 1810 but remain silent on his death. Drawing on Manitoba biographical sources – they offer a fuller arc to his life. It states that Longmoor served in several leadership roles: second-in-command at Churchill (1787–1792), became superintendent at York (1793), and later acted as master of the Swan River District. He retired in 1810 and subsequently died on his farm near Montreal presumably sometime later, but the exact year remains unknown.

Datasets for Robert Longmoor’s travels are currently being researched from unpublished journals and other records. The linear data that is being created contain the fields that includes Year, Route, Leg, Departed, Arrived, Origin, and Destination.