The fur trade world depicted here looks almost nothing like the real 18th century fur trade: there are settlements complete with pubs and British women a Metis trader living as a kind of solitary figure moving across the landscape and, most imagined of all, a ruthless, powerful, and militarized HBC able to send troops across the Atlantic from Britain to chase down those challenging its monopoly. Like many portrayals of history on screen, the series is more imagination than fact. Telling the story of how a Metis trader tries to break the Hudson's Bay Company monopoly during the eighteenth century, the series comes across as a kind of Pirates of the Caribbean set in the northern tundra where the "good" and free-spirited Metis trader plays the role of the pirate and the "bad" corporate elites of the Hudson's Bay Company stand in for the British military elites of the East India Company. The 2016 Netflix series, Frontiers, briefly put the western Canadian fur trade on the pop culture map.
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