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Writer's pictureOntario Métis Facts

Sayer Family Pt. 2: A Fur Trading Family


As Métis boys who grew up learning from their fur trader father in the vibrant fur trading posts of the Upper Great Lakes, Henry, Pierre Guillaume, and John Charles Sayer were destined to join the fur trade themselves.


By 1811, Henry, the eldest Sayer brother, had joined the North West Company (NWC). Henry’s younger brother, John Charles, had also joined the NWC by that time and was working in the Lac La Pluie District by the mid 1810s. The youngest brother, Pierre Guillaume Sayer, joined the NWC around 1818, just before it merged with the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) in 1821.


The Sayer brothers reconnected each year during the annual rendezvous at Fort William, on the north shore of Lake Superior—which had been an important gathering location within the historic fur trade since the NWC relocated their Lake Superior district headquarters there in 1803.


Each summer, traders from across west central North America, like the Sayer brothers, gathered at Fort William to discuss business and celebrate with music, dancing, and games.


Pierre Guillaume Sayer was eventually assigned to Cumberland House, an important pemmican depot in present-day northeastern Saskatchewan. There, Pierre Guillaume worked alongside fellow trader Hyppolite Brissette—who, with his Métis wife Archange L'Hirondelle, would later become the parents of a prominent family in the Métis community at Penetanguishene. The two men would later cross paths again at Fort Pelly, working together as part of the supply distribution for the Swan River District.


Henry, Pierre Guillaume, and John Charles Sayer all played a role in the North West Company’s vast trading operations, drawing upon their Métis connections and the skills they learned from their father and other Métis traders growing up in Upper Great Lakes.


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