Hudson's Bay

I got a DVD that contained three episodes of this series from 1959 that I have absolutely no memory of as a kid. Perhaps I was watching something else or perhaps it was simply not shown in the New York City area. In any event this was my first viewing of Hudson's Bay.

Named after the large body of water that nearly slices mainland Canada in half, the Hudson's Bay Company was law in the frontier areas of what eventually became Canada. While the British and French had their rivalry in the east over what was then called Upper and Lower Canada, the areas that became the western provinces were under the control of the Hudson's Bay Company who bought the furs of the trappers of French, British and mixed descent called Metis. They were in fact the only law.

Barry Nelson and George Tobias played a Hudson's Bay company man and a French trapper who did a little espionage work among the trappers who were a closemouthed lot to outsiders. One of the episodes I saw had Pedro Gonzalez-Gonzalez as Nelson's sidekick and he was identified as a Mexican. I don't think of those folks got as far north as what eventually became Manitoba or Saskatchewan, how the series explained him must have been interesting. But that was an episode I didn't see.

It looked like an interesting show, maybe with a little color cinematography it would have had a longer run. The Canadian woods or what passed for them looked beautiful