Hesperus Arts -- Fur Trade Posts of the Oregon Country

Data layer: Fur Trade Posts of the Oregon Country, 1793 - 1872

A few caveats before we get to the download links:

Only fur trade posts belonging to the North West Company or the Hudson's Bay Company are in this layer.

With a few exceptions, only fur trade posts in the Oregon Country (that is, west of the Rockies) are in the layer.

The data field From indicates the year that the post opened, and the To field indicates the last year it was operated. In cases where a post was closed for a while and then re-opened, there are two separate objects in the data, with separate date ranges.

Although the fur trade in the Oregon Country was dominated by the North West Company (NWC) and the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC), there were other, smaller companies present. Sometimes the notes field (Location_n) will indicate that a post was originally built by another fur trading company (such as the Pacific Fur Company) and subsequently sold to the NWC or the HBC. As well, Location_n may indicate that a post continued to operate after being sold by the HBC. In this case, the From and To fields do not give the years the post existed, but only the years the post was operated by the NWC or the HBC.

The layer was made for display at 1:8,000,000, and is really valid for display only at scales smaller than 1:500,000. Zoom in further than that (to say 1:100,000 or 1:50,000), and the exact locations of the posts may not be right. (In Google Earth, a rough equivalent to 1:500,000 is an eye altitude of 150 km.)

"3000" appearing in the To field indicates that it is unclear (to me, at least) what year the post stopped operating (for dates after 1872).

A point offshore appears for the S. S. Beaver, a steamship operated by the Hudson's Bay Company from 1836 to 1858 as a kind of mobile fur trading post. Its precise location has no significance.

Post locations and years of operation are based on Bruce McIntyre Watson's exhaustively researched book, Lives Lived West of the Divide, A Biographical Dictionary of Fur Traders Working West of the Rockies, 1793-1858.