DCHP-1 Online

freeman Fur Trade, Hist.

• 1a n. a former employee of a fur company who elected to remain in the interior as a free hunter or, sometimes, as a free trader.

  See also: free trader (def. 1)  

  • 1793  (1889)  Peltier, old Robert Taylor, (freeman from the Missouri) . . . and Belair started for Pine Fort.
  • 1824  (1931)  In the next place by laying at the Flat Head Post such a length of time the Freemen consume in the course of the Winter their ammunition and other supplies which they receive in the Fall and will not start in the Spring until they have a second outfit which they cannot afford to pay for.
  • 1860  These persons [former company servants] resolve themselves into two classes--the hunter, who follows the pursuits both of bartering for furs and hunting for them--in most cases doing very little in either line of business; and the "freeman," who confines himself almost exclusively to the trade of selling goods to the Indians, receiving their furs in payment.
  • 1921  . . . the only white man living in all that beautiful region was old Malcolm MacLean, a "freeman" of the H.B.Co., who had married an Indian woman and become a trapper.
  • 1963  These were freemen--that is, men not in the service of the Hudson's Bay Company--who had been trappers for the North-West Company before its merger in 1821.

• 1b n. See 1880 quote.

  See also: tripman  

  • 1832  (1851)  Every spring and fall some hundreds of "Freemen," principally French, half-breeds, were, with their families accustomed to leave the Settlement for the plains, taking with them their favorite "Buffalo Runners."
  • 1880  A number of Indians,--"free-men," that is, men not in the regular service of the Company,--live in the neighbourhood, being employed by the Company as occasion may require.
  • 1963  . . . the consensus of opinion among the Company men, missionaries and "freemen" (mostly half breeds) . . . was that the "Boundary, Kootenay and Sinclair Passes" presented fewest difficulties.

• 2 n. a trapper or hunter not in the employ of the fur companies, of a former company servant.

  See also: free hunter  

  • 1953  In the Snake country, where the freemen and engagés called him "M'sieu Pete," he complained that the hard life he led had reduced him to skin and bone.
  • 1961  [They were] a tough, colorful, sometimes cruel, always superbly skilled breed of men called by the French coureurs de bois, by the English woods runners, by the Russians promyshlenniki, and by the American trappers, free men, and mountain men.