Norman Kittson
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Norman Wolfred Kittson (5 March 1814 – 10 May 1888) was variously a fur trader, steamboat-line operator, and railway entrepreneur.
Although born in Chambly, Quebec (then Lower Canada), Kittson had by 1830 apprenticed with the American Fur Company, and relocated first to Minnesota and then to the Dakota Territory of the United States. He used Pembina, North Dakota as a base of his increasingly independent fur-trading operations. Pembina was only approximately 100 km south of the Hudson's Bay Company-controlled Red River Settlement in Rupert's Land, and Kittson's operation was by the 1840s threatening the trade monopoly exerted by the HBC. He established strong connections to the local Métis population, and obtained many of his furs by trade with them. Kittson was instrumental in the end of the HBC monopoly in 1849, as it was with Kittson that trapper Guillaume Sayer was trading prior to his trial that effectively broke the monopoly.
In 1852 Kittson relocated his main post from Pembina to St. Joseph to avoid the periodic flooding of the Red River. In 1855, Kittson moved to St. Paul, where he operated a fur and goods business. From 1858 – 1859 he served as mayor. During this period, his business interests extended into the Red River Settlement, including a store in St. Boniface, now modern Winnipeg, Manitoba. Kittson was a long-time operator of Red River cart brigades on the Red River Trails between the Red River Colony and St. Paul, which served his trading businesses.
By 1872, Kittson joined with former competitor James Jerome Hill to establish the Red River Transportation Company, which owned five steamboats and exerted an effective monopoly on traffic on the Red River between the railhead and the Manitoba settlements.
In 1879, Kittson became a railway entrepreneur when he joined forces with Hill, HBC representative Donald Alexander Smith and banker George Stephen to purchase the financially troubled St. Paul and Pacific Railroad, which they reorganized into the St. Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba Railway. This railway established the first rail link between St. Boniface and St. Paul, and was financially successful — the sale of his shares in 1881 made Kittson a very wealthy man. These same three men later formed the nucleus of a syndicate established in 1880 that led to the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway.
Kittson died 10 May 1888 in a dining car after ordering dinner while traveling on the Chicago and North Western Railway towards St. Paul.
Kittson County in northwestern Minnesota is named for him.
[edit] References
- Minnesota Place Names - People Information. Accessed 2006-07-16.
- Gilman, Rhoda R.; Carolyn Gilman & Deborah M. Stultz (1979). The Red River Trails. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press. ISBN 0-8735-1133-6.
[edit] External links
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