Erland Erlandson

He also established several outposts in the interior, including the successful Fort Nascopie, but, effectively barred from further promotion owing to his low and foreign birth, he eventually retired to a homestead in Canada West (present-day Ontario).

Hostilities between Britain and Denmark ended the next year, and the Hudson's Bay Company hired Erlandson and other Scandinavians to work in northern and western Canada.

Finlayson and Erlandson quickly discovered the rosy portrayal of the area in the journals of the Moravian missionaries Kohlmeister and Kmoch[4] had been wildly inaccurate or become outdated.

They followed the Whale River to Lakes Petitsikapau and Michikamau, at which point Erlandson found his guides—whose repeated bouts of snowblindness had exasperated him to no end[7]—had decided to travel east to the Atlantic rather than south as ordered.

[1][8][6][a] Erlandson found a rival company operating there[6] and returned north on a longer but lower route further to the west, passing Lakes Wakuach and Chakonipau[1] and following the Swampy Bay River[6] and Kaniapiskau to the Koksoak; he reached Fort Chimo on 17 July.

Simpson sympathized with Erlandson's ability and disappointment at his continued demotion, but understood that the voting officers of the company refused to elect "a foreigner... raised from the ranks"[1] to the status of chief trader.

[1] Despite failing health,[1] on 18 June 1838, Erlandson led a team of nine HBC servants and two Innu guides south along the Koksoak, Kaniapiskau, and Swampy Bay Rivers to erect Fort Nascopie on Lake Petitsikapau.

[1] (The year after he left, McLean used HBC reports[10] and further information from local guides[11] to find a practical riverine route up the George, across a series of small lakes,[12] and down the Naskaupi to Groswater Bay.

[1] Still single, he got a home in Port Hope, Canada West (now Ontario), near the homestead and store operated by George Gladman, a retired chief trader who had been Erlandson's colleague at East Main and Moose Factory.

[1] Leaving an estate of C$14,000 (most of it donated to the Toronto General Hospital although they found it expedient to settle a probate dispute with "the Misses Olsen of Copenhagen" for £100),[15] Erlandson has subsequently been suspected of the theft at McLean's bank, although others allow that it may have come from transactions during his European trip.