By the mid-1800’s the Métis community at Sault Ste. Marie had built a vibrant and thriving way of life around their Métis River Lots on the north shore of the St Mary’s River—the international border between the United States and what was then claimed as British territory. These customary family allotments were well-known throughout the region and widely recognized by the Métis community and outsiders alike. In 1826, for example, U.S. Indian Affairs Superintendent, Thomas L.

Following his apprenticeship at the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Island Lake District headquarters near Lake Winnipeg, Joseph Turner Jr. briefly returned east to the HBC’s coastal port of York Factory. There, Joseph Jr. served as a labourer for only a year before moving westward again to the Cumberland District on the Saskatchewan River in 1837. The HBC’s Cumberland District headquarters, Cumberland House, was a major site of pemmican production and an important stopping point for

The merger of the North West Company and Hudson’s Bay Company in 1821 marked a turning point in the fur trade. For Métis fur trade employees like Henry, Pierre Guillaume, and John Charles Sayer, the merger of the two companies brought uncertainty, as positions were reduced and once important trade routes shifted. Each of the Sayer brothers experienced and navigated this changing fur trade environment in their own way. At the time of the merger, for example, John Charles S

In letters, journals, and reports from the 1820s through the 1850s, missionaries, government officials, and Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) personnel frequently identified Métis people and families in the vicinity of Mattawa-area fur trade posts on the Ottawa River. Métis people in the Mattawa region were often documented and referred to by various names such as ‘bois brulees’ and ‘halfbreeds’. For example, in the journal of his 1821 tour of Canada, Lord Dalhousie, the new Governo