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If you think the postal service today can be bewildering, consider what it was I ike during the heyday of the fur trade about 150 years ago in the Canadian West.The big trading companies—the Hudson's Bay Company and the North West Company—each had their own system of couriers earn ing company mail from trading post to trading post, and on to a headquarters somewhere. If there was space in the packet, some person;! 1 mail would be carried as wellThese couriers followed fairly predictable routes, and sometimes there was even a rough schedule followed.But mail to or from anyone not on one of the regular trade routes became an entirely different enterprise.I f you wanted to send a letter from your remote location to anyone anywhere, you simply gave it to an Indian who was headed in the right direction. But the Indian would rarely be going all the way to the letter's destination So. upon meeting another Indian going the right way, he'd sell the letter to him to carry for a while.And so it went, the letter being sold by one Indian to another, each time at a higher price, until one of them met the person addressed, who paid the last carrier for it.Sometimes, though, the letter wasn't read when received. An American trader known only as Franchere once passed through Lac la Biche in what is now northeastern Alberta. He later recalled that while he was there a Metis named Antoine Desjarlais produced a letter and asked Franchere to read it to him.Desjarlais had apparently received the letter two years before and had been unable in that time to find anyone who could read it to him.A long time, as one historian commented, to wonder whether the news in the letter was good or bad.Please send comments or suggestions to the author prair iefootnotef^rogers .comHealth Corner
Newspaper Details
Beausejour Clipper Weekly
Beausejour, Manitoba, CA
Mon, Jul 21, 2008
Page 4
Full Page
Clipped by
Anonymous
CA 04 Apr 2017
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