Frances Lake Post Journal 1842

This album contains the page images of the Hudson's Bay Company's Frances Lake post journals kept by Robert Campbell for the outfit year 1842. In its long history, the Hudson's Bay Company managed a chronic internal tension between its fur trade and exploration of its chartered lands. In the period of the late 1830s and early 1840s, HBC Governor George Simpson tipped the scales steeply toward exploration, encouraging expeditions west of the Mackenzie, over the mountains and into the blank portions of Arrowsmith's maps in the London headquarters. By 1840, two candidate routes had emerged. The first followed the Liard (called the West Branch at the time) up from Fort Simpson, past the established Fort Halkett, then up the Frances R. to Frances and Finlayson Lakes, overland to the Pelly headwaters, and down that river to the Lewes (now Yukon). The second route followed the Mackenzie down almost to its delta at the Beaufort Sea, up the Rat R., over the 1000 foot divide, and down the Bell and Porcupine to the Yukon, where the Company would establish Fort Yukon in 1847, deep in Russian territory. This album is concerned with the first route. Robert Campbell had been in the country since 1835. He had led missions to establish a post in the Cassiar at Dease Lake and had explored the route down the Pelly. In 1842, he was chartered to establish a string of posts along the route to the Lewes. The journal here first documents travel from Fort Simpson on the Mackenzie River (now in the Northwest Territories) up the Liard and Frances River (now along the northern edge of British Columbia and the southern edge of Yukon Territories) to the southern end of Frances Lake. The journal continues with description of the building and maintenance of the post. I generated these images using the facilities at the HBC archives at the Archives of Manitoba in Winnipeg in August of 2005. My transcribing the pages into plain text captions is an ongoing project, something to absorb otherwise idle moments for me and my friends. In most places, I've resisted the use of the [sic]s. That's just the way things were spelled and expressed back then. I'm certain my readers can handle it. In some places, I've added in square brackets the modern spelling of some geographic features. The journal page images are used with the permission of the Archives of Manitoba, who hold the original records and the microfilms from which these images were taken. Any further use must conform to their terms. See the website referenced above. Text and transcriptions I've added in the caption areas are copyright Fred Klingener 2005, -6. Any use other than personal or private research requires written permission of the author. In smugmug, I prefer the 'Journal' viewing style (selectable along the upper right side of the webpage), and I developed this album with this preference in mind.