Hudson's Bay Company

 Today was the last day of HBC existence. Although my son said, 355 years is a good run. But how can you not market a name like Hudson's Bay Company? It's synonymous with North America. A friend of ours took his son to a store that HBC ran in Montreal, The Bay. He said there was no HBC branded merchandise. How can you run a store where you don't even market your own merchandise. I'd pay big bucks for a sweatshirt that said Hudson's Bay Company 1670 and I live in Oregon. And speaking of Oregon, it would have had a rougher time getting started if not for John McLoughlin, the HBC factor at Ft. Vancouver, who helped more than a few Oregon pioneers with a few cows and seed to get started, much to the dismay of his minders in Montreal, who were trying to keep the Americans out. Maybe this was the start of their demise. HBC was cutthroat fighting their fur trapping competition and I'm not sure of their record in their dealings with First Nations peoples, but I'm sure they helped their share of wayward travelers.

My family and I were at a cider tasting event today at Stone Circle Cidery. We were talking this and that and got to talking about the Snake River canyon, which made me think of the Snake River dams, which brought up that my 5th grade granddaughter went on a field trip to the Clackamas River dams. So the day before all the 5th graders came home and announced, Oh! my DAM field trip is tomorrow. Which made me think of beavers, the original hydrological engineers. Their dams and dens are structures of perfection. Maybe HBC's demise is their comeuppance for hunting to near extinction a lot of the beaver population in North America.

Good and bad, HBC has left their mark on North America, and they will be missed.