Fur Trade

14 Apr 2021 Blog Education, Fur Trade

When Is A Box More Than A Box? When It’s A Museum!

The Lac La Biche Museum has been closed for a while now, but we’re still committed to sharing and exploring the region’s history. Currently students can’t come to the museum. So we’re bringing the museum to the students.

The museum has just finished developing our first Museum in a Box. It is, as the name suggests, a box filled with artifacts, photos, maps, and information sheets. With this Box, teachers can recreate a little bit of the museum experience in the classroom.

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It was easy to pick a topic for our first box. We already had feedback from teachers that they were interested in the fur trade and that’s a subject that our collection can support. We even had a previously developed Box focusing on the fur trade, which gave us a leg up in planning.

One of the first things we had to figure out was how the Box would work. What makes a museum special and different is the objects, so one of our top priorities when developing the Box was to get as many things into it as we could. This is especially important right now, since the museum is closed to visitors and so we can’t work with students in person. Our new Museum in a Box features more original artifacts than have ever been offered before.

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Of course, in the era of Covid, there were extra complications to creating a Museum in a Box. Although we wanted learners to be able to interact with the objects, we definitely didn’t want them to be a vector to transfer disease! The solution we came up with was to place every item, except for a few plastic replicas that can be sanitized, in protective bags or cases. These coverings can be wiped down between people or between classes, so items can be shared relatively safely.

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In some ways, these coverings actually worked to our advantage, since we could loan out more delicate items than we had in previous Boxes. The oils in your fingers can be very damaging to a lot of materials, which is why museums tend to be strict on the no touching rule. Keeping everything in containers meant we could loan out things like metals without worrying about the state they’d come back in.

Although it took a lot of work, we’re proud to say that our first loan of the Museum in a Box went out this week. We’ve included a feedback form and we’re eager to hear what teachers think so we can make the next Box even better. Here at the museum, we believe that there’s always room to learn more. And that applies to us, too!

5 Jul 2016 Blog #HistoryWeek2016, Fur Farming, Fur Trade, Lac La Biche, Mink

Canada History Week Day 5: Fur Farming

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Silver foxes raised by Ida and Henry Tatum displayed at the entrance to the Lac La Biche Inn, 1945

Fur farming is the practice of raising animals in captivity for their fur. Furs from animals caught in the wild are known as “wild fur”, as opposed to “farmed fur”. After demand for beaver furs dropped in the mid-nineteenth century, fur farming became more profitable. Fancy furs, such as mink and marten, continued to provide profits for companies in place of beaver, a staple fur. The two most popular furbearing animals farmed in Canada were the mink, Neovison vison, and the silver fox, Vulpes vulpes.

Lac La Biche provided thousands of mink and fox pelts over the period in which fur farms were in operation. While mink were often the most valuable furbearing animals in Canada, as they are today, fox pelts were also extremely popular among women, especially during the 1920s, and their price reflected that. A fox scarf made from a single pelt could range in price from $350 to $1000. In 1945, over $500,000 of mink pelts were sold from Lac La Biche fur farms. This accounts for just over a third of the total value of mink pelts sold from Alberta of that year, $1,487,731. Adjusted for inflation, today’s value of that $500,000 would be several million dollars.

The last mink ranch in Lac La Biche closed in 2007, largely due to lack of fish the rancher, Otto Fyith, was able to procure for his mink. The mass closures of commercial fisheries in lakes surrounding Lac La Biche resulted in a lack of large quantities of fish available for purchase in the area. At the height of Fyith’s career, he was raising around 2500 mink. Today, the Canadian fur trade has two-thirds of its furs produced from fur farms and one-third from trapping. There are many trapping families in Lac La Biche contributing to the number of trappers that gives Alberta one of the highest levels of trapping in the country. Over several hundred years of inclusion in the fur trade, Lac La Biche has managed to shift its fur trade focus from wild furs, to fur farming, and back to wild furs.

2 Jul 2016 Blog, Culture #HistoryWeek2016, Fur Trade, Lac La Biche, Metis 0

Canada History Week Day 2: Early Freemen

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Portage La Biche was used as a transportation corridor by Cree middlemen and Métis fur traders for many years before the arrival of David Thompson in 1798. The route Thompson took to Lac La Biche was shown to him by Laderoote, a guide who met Thompson’s brigade by modern-day Briereville. Laderoote was extremely familiar with the route, suggesting that he had taken it several times.

Freemen, traders not employed by the North West Company (NWC) or Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) moving through the area would not have been living in permanent structures. Instead, according to HBC employee John Lee Lewes (in service 1807-1853), the freemen in the Athabasca region, “get completely attached to the Country and Indian way of living and are all like them constantly moving about living in leathern tents made of the skins of the Moose or Buffaloe [sic]”.

Sketch of Portage La Biche by Peter Fidler, 1800

The first freemen confirmed to have settled permanently in the Lac La Biche region were Antoine Desjarlais (whose brother decided to settle nearby at Lesser Slave Lake) and a Cardinal (or Cardinalle), although it is unclear whether it was Jacques or Joseph Cardinal, as both were frequently reported in the area. While it is clear that the Desjarlais family had found a permanent home at Lac La Biche by 1805, we can also see that their family was in the area numerous times beforehand through records of events such as the birth of Antoine’s nephew, Baptiste “Nishecabo” Desjarlais, at Lac La Biche in 1787. Both families are mentioned several times in records by those passing through the region, such as George Simpson, Gabriel Franchère, David Douglas, and Bishop Alexandre-Antonin Taché.