Ripples from La Prairie Voyageur Canoes: Chapter Six: Freeman Between Empires, (1813

The fur trade had always been a contest of empires dressed in the language of profit. By 1813 the contest on the Columbia had narrowed to two main players still standing: the North West Company, hard-driving and Canadian, and John Jacob Astor’s Pacific Fur Company, ambitious, underfunded, and far from its New York base. François Rivet, freeman, interpreter, and family man, moved between them with the careful step of a man who had already survived one massacre and had no intention of dying for either flag.

He was now firmly attached to the North West Company interest, though never as a wintering partner or even a regular engagé. The arrangement was the classic one for a useful freeman: he trapped, he interpreted, he guided, and he sold his packs where the terms suited him. In a list compiled at Astoria he appears as a freeman hired for one year as interpreter at 600 livres—a respectable sum that reflected both his skill with the Salish language and his long experience in the country. The same understanding continued at Spokane House into 1816. When the Pacific Fur Company men still held Astoria and the lower river, Rivet kept a middle ground. He would trade with them if the price was better; he would not bind himself so tightly that a change in ownership left him stranded. In the winter of 1813–14 the change came. The Pacific Fur Company, starved of supply and pressed by the North West Company, sold out. The British flag rose over Astoria, soon renamed Fort George. Rivet’s careful neutrality became simply loyalty to the winning side.

Through all of it the family remained the true center of his life. Therese Tête Platte ran the lodge with the quiet authority of a Salish woman who had known both loss and endurance. The boys—François, Antoine, and Joseph—grew up in the saddle and on the trapline, speaking French and Salish with equal ease, learning the thousand small skills that kept a mobile household alive. Julia, Therese’s daughter by her first marriage, was becoming a young woman of noticeable presence. The household moved with the Salish bands when the buffalo hunts or the seasonal rounds required it, and returned to the orbit of Spokane House or Flathead Post when trade or company business called. In June 1811, while David Thompson was traveling from Spokane House toward Kettle Falls on his way to the lower Columbia, he had come upon the Rivet family already camped along the trail with four tents of Salish. The meeting was ordinary at the time—just another freeman and his Indian relatives on the move—yet it fixed them in the documentary record as a settled presence in the country.

The years after the absorption of the Pacific Fur Company brought a kind of hard stability. The North West Company now controlled the Columbia trade from the mountains to the sea, but the control was never comfortable. Supply from Montreal was long and uncertain. The American threat had not disappeared; it had only stepped back for a moment. And the free hunters, the men like Rivet who lived with the tribes and sold their furs where they chose, remained both necessary and slightly suspect. They knew too much. They were too independent. Yet the company could not operate without them.

In the autumn of 1818 a new factor entered the family’s life. Peter Skene Ogden, a young, energetic, and sometimes ruthless North West Company trader, arrived at Spokane House. Ogden was already carrying a complicated personal history, including a Cree wife and child left behind in the east. At Spokane he formed a new country relationship with Julia, Rivet’s stepdaughter. The connection was formalized in the fashion of the country: gifts, negotiations, the acceptance of the woman’s family. In time Ogden would pay a steep bride price in horses—fifty head, according to later memory—a measure of both Julia’s standing and his own determination. Their son Charles was born on 5 September 1819. Through Julia, François Rivet became tied by kinship to one of the most capable and controversial men in the western trade.

Rivet himself continued the work he knew. He interpreted. He trapped. He traveled with the Salish. He watched his sons grow into young men who could handle a canoe or a packhorse with equal confidence. He was in his middle sixties now, a lean, weathered figure whose hair had gone gray and whose authority came less from company rank than from simple survival. Men who had entered the country with him were already dead or gone back east. He remained.

In 1821 the long, destructive rivalry between the North West Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company finally ended in forced merger. The two companies, exhausted by competition and pressured by the British government, became one under the Hudson’s Bay Company name. For many North West Company men the change was bitter. Old scores, old ranks, and old loyalties had to be renegotiated under a new and often unsympathetic regime. For François Rivet the shift was simpler. He had never been a partner. He had been a freeman who sold his skills and his knowledge. The new Hudson’s Bay Company still needed interpreters who spoke Salish and who understood the free-hunter life. It still needed men who could travel with the brigades and keep the tribal relations from exploding.

At sixty-seven, Rivet prepared to transfer his allegiance once more. The Missouri was a long way behind him. The Bitterroot graves of McClellan’s party were farther still. What remained was the family, the country, and the next contract. The empires had collided and then fused. The freeman adapted, as he had always adapted, and kept moving.

NEXT

Chapter Seven: Snake Country and “Old Rivet”, (1822–1829)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-seven-snake-country-and-old.html

Rivet of the Rivers: The Extraordinary Life of François Rivet, Voyageur, Mountain Man, and Patriarch of the Pacific Northwest

Chapter One: Blood of the Voyageurs, (1754–1790s)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/rivet-of-rivers-extraordinary-life-of.html

Chapter Two: The Missouri Beckons, (Late 1790s–1803)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-two-missouri-beckons-late.html

Chapter Three: Engagé of the Corps, (1804–Spring 1805)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-three-engage-of-corps.html

Chapter Four: Free Trapper on the Missouri, (1805–1808)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-four-free-trapper-on-missouri.html