The Story of Isabel Gunn

The Only European Woman Known to Have Worked in the Fur Trade

Jun 7, 2009

Isabel Gunn was a remarkable woman who disguised herself as a man to work in the male dominated world of the fur trade as a labourer for the Hudson's Bay Company.

Early life of Isabel Gunn

Very little is known about her early life, other than she was born Isabel Fubbister near Kirkwall, Orkney in 1780, the daughter of John Gunn and Isobel Leask. She had six siblings and her older brother George worked in the fur trade, employed by the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC).

Her life in Orkney would have prepared her in many ways for work in the fur trade. Living on a croft introduced her to intense labour, hardship and poverty. The women of her family would have looked after the farm as the men were forced to join the British army to help defeat Napoleon, or for income fished or joined the fur trade.

According to two different sources, William Harper, a schoolmaster and HBC employee Peter Fidler, Isabel travelled to Hudson’s Bay following her lover, John Scarth of the parish of Firth in Orkney, an experienced HBC labourer who was at home on leave in the fall of 1805.

As women were not allowed to work as fur traders and European women had been forbidden passage to Hudson Bay following a bad experience in the 1680’s involving a governor’s wife, Isabel disguised herself as a young man, in order to stay with Scarth upon his return. She signed on with the HBC for a three year term at 8 pounds a year, under the name John Fubbister. The two left Scotland together for Hudson’s Bay on the Prince of Wales in June of 1806.

Work in the Fur Trade

Outside of aboriginal women who worked as domestic servants and cooks, Isabel would have been the only European women to set foot into the trading posts since the resolution. At first, her disguise worked. She was posted along with John Scarth at Fort Albany, in what is now Northern Ontario. They worked the boats running a route up the Albany River, but at the end of June, 1807 the couple was separated. John Scarth went to East Main on the eastern coasts of Hudson and James Bays, while Isabel was sent with a crew on a 1,800 mile canoe trek that ended at the post in Pembina (North Dakota).

Whether Isabel knew that she was pregnant when she started this trek we cannot know, but working on the boats, collecting furs and running supplies, was dangerous work, not to mention physically demanding. Isabel had to carry up to ninety pounds on her back in harsh weather, while traveling great distances in the mosquito infested wilderness. Food was hard to come by at times, sanitation was practically non-existent and illness was frequent. This life would have been difficult for most men, one cannot imagine how a pregnant Isabel survived it, but survived it she did.

While no one in authority realized John Fubbister was a woman in disguise, it is likely that some of her co-workers knew her identity, for a great many were from the Orkneys and would have concealed her identity out of a sense of loyalty.

For nineteen months she remained anonymous to her superiors, until the December night that she went into labour, banging on the door of Alexander Henry’s house, head of the North West Company’s post at Pembina, revealing her secrets.

Isabel gave birth to James Scarth on Henry’s floor on December 29, 1807, becoming the first European women to give birth in the North West.

There is some question as to whether John Scarth was in fact the father of Isabel’s child, despite her giving the baby his surname. According to one account, she had the child with a man she accompanied on the canoe trek. There is another theory that she was raped. The dates, however, do not support this theory. If she had the baby in December, having departed Albany at the end of June, she would have been roughly three months pregnant when she separated from John Scarth.

Once Isabel’s true identity was discovered she was no longer allowed to work with the men and was sent back to Albany in the spring of 1808 as a washerwoman. For reasons we will never know Isabel remained unmarried and therefore, was considered ‘ruined’. She did not want to return home to Orkney, but it was against company policy for a white woman to remain at the posts and HBC were concerned about how it looked supporting a woman of ‘bad character’. So, in the fall of 1809 the company sent her and her son James back to the Orkneys. Isabel never returned to Canada.

Return to Orkney

Little is known of Isabel’s life upon returning to the Orkneys, except that she lived in Stromness, never returning to her own community where she was likely an outcast even to her own family. She would have lived in loneliness and poverty, taking on menial jobs while raising her son, possibly resorting to prostitution to survive.

John Scarth returned to Orkney one last time in 1812, before residing in Canada permanently, marrying a Cree widow in 1822, and settling at Red River where he died in 1833.

The copyright of the article The Story of Isabel Gunn in Historical Biographies is owned by Michelle MacNeill. Permission to republish The Story of Isabel Gunn in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.