Archives of Manitoba

North West Company servants' contracts

1787-1822

11 cm of textual records

Series consists of contracts of North West Company servants. The contracts generally include employee names, length of contract, terms of service (including salary and equipment to be supplied by the North West Company), position to be held and the employee's wintering post.

There are no restrictions on access to these records.

Researchers are responsible for observing copyright legislation. Permission may be required for any form of publication or exhibition where records are not in the public domain.

These records probably came into the possession of the Hudson's Bay Company after the amalgamation with the North West Company in 1821.
The Archives Department of the Hudson's Bay Company was created in London in the 1920s. The Archives Department had custody of the records until they were transferred on deposit to the Archives of Manitoba in 1974, according to the 1973 Agreement between the HBC and the Province of Manitoba. In 1994, the HBC donated the records to the Province to be maintained permanently by the Archives of Manitoba.
Some of these records were presented to the Manitoba Historical Society on an unknown date by Alex L. Russell, Dominion Land Surveyor, Port Arthur, Ontario (now Thunder Bay). On July 21, 1950, the records were recovered from the basement of the Main Branch of the Winnipeg Public Library and returned to the Manitoba Historical Society which, in turn, donated them to the Provincial Archives of Manitoba. In 2012, the Government and Private Sector Archives of the Archives of Manitoba transferred these records to the Hudson's Bay Company Archives.

Other North West Company servants' contracts can be found in the Warren Baker collection.

The microfilm copies of some of these records have been digitized and a link to PDF copies can be found in the listings database.

These records are in French.

Some records in this series were transferred to the Hudson's Bay Company Archives from the Government and Private Sector Archives of the Archives of Manitoba. These records bear an “MG1” stamp as well as pagination from their previous archival classification.

F.5 MG1 C1/31-32 MG1 C1-1/39