Saskatchewan River fur trade

The Saskatchewan River was a natural highway for furs going east and trade goods going west.

The grassland to the south provided buffalo for food and pemmican to feed to voyageurs in the food-poor country to the north.

The Saskatchewan has no significant portages between the rapids at Rocky Mountain House and its mouth at Lake Winnipeg.

Westbound trade goods in the summer and fall had to deal with low water and there was significant use of poling and tracking on the upper river.

In the La Montee country west of Prince Albert, "bosses" would borrow horses and go buffalo hunting to feed the regular voyageurs who had to stay in their canoes and continue rowing upstream.

Around 1825 a horse track was cut from Fort Assiniboine, Alberta on the Athabasca River to Edmonton.

The boreal forest region to the north was inhabited by Cree who had migrated northwest as middlemen in the fur trade and, in the early and middle 19th century, Saulteaux.

Since the Cree and Saulteaux had beaver-skins to trade and the plains Natives had little more than buffalo and wolf skins, the northern peoples got most of the guns.

[2]) Most of the posts lasted less than ten years because the area became depleted of beaver and because the wooden stockades tended to rot.

Until 1811, fur traders affiliated with the NWC and HBC maintained very amicable relations to the extent that the rival posts were often enclosed within the same palisades for mutual protections.