It can be confidently stated that the single most important reason that Canada came to be a country was the increasingly frenzied search for fur pelts; in particular the luxuriant skin of the indominable
Beaver. For approximately two hundred years, between 1700 to 1900, various interests, both national and commercial, competed for the valuable commodity. The fur primarily sustained a ravenous European appetite for felt hats, and that hunger in turn produced a supply system that extended into the vast, undiscovered territory that would become Canada. This was the lengendary Fur Trade Route: an invention of the entrepeneurial
North West Company from Montreal, ultimately the possession of
The Hudson's Bay Company. Stretching over 3,000 miles each way from Montreal to the North country beyond Superior, Algoma and Northern Ontario were at the route's critical crossroads. All the supplies that went north and all the furs that went south and east had to be portaged around the
great rapids at Sault Ste. Marie. The waters and shore of Lake Superior have silently recorded the passage of the heroic
voyageurs, the solitary
coureurs du bois and the stoic and long suffering
natives, all who played a critical role in a route that created a country, yet no longer exists.
