Chantal Nadeua's cultural history of the fur trade in Canada extends and complicates the homosociality that marks the origins of the Western Canadian fur trade, but her complicatations and extending suggest that the politics and social policy that allowed for a theological and social openness were retained: “Most studies on the Hudson's Bay Company advocate a purely mercantile and racially sanitized approach to the colonial excutsions into Canada and North America. Such accounts frame the Company's interests as strictly a matter of the colonial exonom,oy and later on the nascent capitaliziation of exploration. In the HBC World, there is no room for religious conversions, priests, “slaves” or finical deeds with the church, and no room for misisons, wives and contentionus interracial marraiges: just a bunch of adventures in the w ilderness and the bliss of fur plets (Nadeua, 32).
There were all of the people that Nadeua claims absent with iin the cultural context of the canadian fur trade, but they lacked the social and political power that the Catholic church had in Quebec, or the Presbyterian and Anglicans had in what would become Ontario. The church grew as an outsider tradition in these parts, with their rites and rituals partially devoted to the fur trade, and partially devoted to what was remembered from their ecclestical histories. The western Canadian religious immigration was ersatz and ad hoc; just as the sexual lives, and the cultural and historical lives. 1
This ersatz and ad-hoc construction was found not only in t he presence of religious and social systems, but in family life as well. Naduea quoting the establishment historian Peter C Newman about the presence of what were called country wives, or women (often native or metis) who were married in the colonies, in addition to the wives who were married at home.: “Country wives were common, and increasinlgy tolerated by the Company, right into the 19th century, although mixed race wiman later became the preferred brides. What finally ended the custom, was the arrival at Red River, in 1830 of George Simpson's English bride France, Overnight, she created a shaion for white, church-wed wives” (ibid, 33)
Newman, from Ontario, and understanding the power of cultural influence from the centres to the edges, assumes that with the marriage of George Simpson to an English wife, would suggest that the homosocial tolerance of sexual and religious otherness would have been shut down. There could be an argument made that in calgary society this might be case. But there was a much wider varation in the form of marriage, and of desire in the west then there was in the east. The cultural memory of the country wife, the found religious practices, the suspicion of the east, and the accidental breaking of (or at least refusal to continue) sexual and spiritual codes of acceptable behaviour gave dissidents a palce to breathe; and in many ways a safe refuge.