Taissumani, Jan. 27
Mary Edmunds Ford: Fur Trade Wife
Mary Edmunds grew up in isolation at Whale River in Ungava Bay, the daughter of Job Edmunds, the Hudson’s Bay Co. post manager, and his wife Clara. Her grandfather, William Edmunds, had come from Scotland in the early to mid 1800s and set about the precarious life of a settler on the Labrador coast. He took an Inuk wife with whom he raised a large family.
In the peculiar ethnic milieu of Labrador at the time, the family identified as “settlers,” the name given to the white men who lived on the coast as hunters and fishermen. William Edmunds was certainly a settler and his children inherited the designation, despite their mixed heritage.
The Hudson’s Bay Co. recognized the skills which the young men of the Labrador settler families grew up with, and took them into the service of the company. Job Edmunds, like so many others, left Labrador and moved farther north.
When the explorer Dillon Wallace travelled in Ungava Bay in 1905, he met Edmunds, whom he described as “the half-breed Hudson’s Bay Company officer from Whale River.”
Wallace and his partner were in bad shape, but Edmunds treated them with a small dose of port wine which he inexplicably had with him on his sled, a change of fur clothing, and two slices of bread which he toasted and buttered.
This was a man of experience. Wallace wrote simply, “He was very kind and considerate. Edmunds has saved many lives in his day.”
“He had a splendid team of dogs, wonderfully trained,” Wallace wrote. His dogs “loved him and feared him” and he almost never had to use his walrus hide whip. “There was a power in his voice that governed them like magic.”
The Whale River post was about 10 miles up the river from the bay. There Wallace met Clara Edmunds (daughter of another settler family, the Lanes), who was overjoyed to have visitors. “For two-score years,” wrote Wallace, “they had lived in that desolate place and never before had a traveler come to visit them.”
In all that time the only non-Inuit they ever met were the three or four connected with the post at Fort Chimo (now Kuujjuaq.) The annual ship never called directly at Whale River. Rather, Edmunds brought the provisions over from Fort Chimo in a small schooner. This was indeed isolation of a kind that is difficult to comprehend in today’s modern north.
There were five in the Edmunds family: Job and Clara, their daughter, Mary, who was 20, Mary’s husband, Sam Ford, whose parents also served the company in Ungava Bay, at George River, and Sam and Mary’s baby.
Dillon Wallace described Mary’s aptitude for the hunting life:
“Mary inherits her father’s hunting instincts. In the morning she would put her baby in the hood…, shoulder her gun, don her snowshoes, and go to tend her traps. One day she did not take her gun, and when she had made her rounds of the traps and started homeward, discovered that she was being followed by a big gray timber wolf. When she stopped, the wolf stopped; when she went on, it followed, stealing gradually closer and closer to her, almost imperceptibly, but still gaining upon her. She wanted to run, but she realized that if she did the wolf would know at once that she was afraid and would attack and kill her and her baby; so without hastening her pace, and only looking back now and again to note the wolf’s gain, she reached the door of the house and entered with the animal not ten paces away. Now she always carries a gun and feels no fear, for she can shoot.”
Sam and Mary had eight children. One of their daughters, Charlotte, married Henry Voisey, from another large and well-known Labrador settler family.
The mine at Voisey’s Bay bears the family name. Charlotte and Henry served the company at one of the most isolated posts in the Northwest Territories, Padley, in the Kivalliq region.
Graham Rowley, who visited Coral Harbour in 1936, wrote that Mary played the accordion well and was a popular entertainer at square dances in the community when her husband was stationed there as HBC trader.
It’s possible that Rowley has her confused with her daughter Charlotte, for at least one document claims that she had died earlier than that. One of Sam and Mary’s daughters, Harriet, died in Coral Harbour in 1933, and is buried there.
Little is known of Mary’s life after she and Sam Ford left Whale River to pursue his career elsewhere, but always in the north. She was with Sam at all his postings, both for the HBC and its competitor, Revillon Freres.
She left no journals. And without other travellers such as Dillon Wallace to write her praises, she disappeared into anonymity, as did so many fur trade wives.
Taissumani recounts a specific event of historic interest. Kenn Harper is a historian, writer and linguist who lives in Iqaluit. Feedback? Send your comments and questions to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
