page_title: Factory (trading post)
section_title: North American factories (1697 to 1822)
hierarchical_section_title: Factory (trading post) / North American factories (1697 to 1822)
caption_attribution_description: English: en:Fort Osage in March 2007 from west. The "factory" trading post is on the left. Photo by poster.
context_page_description: "Factory" was the common name during the medieval and early modern eras for an entrepôt – which was essentially an early form of free-trade zone or transshipment point. At a factory, local inhabitants could interact with foreign merchants, often known as factors. First established in Europe, factories eventually spread to many other parts of the world.
  The factories established by European states in Africa, Asia and the Americas from the 15th century onward also tended to be official political dependencies of those states. These have been seen, in retrospect, as the precursors of colonial expansion.
  A factory could serve simultaneously as market, warehouse, customs, defense and support to navigation exploration, headquarters or de facto government of local communities.
  In North America, Europeans began to trade with the natives during the 16th century. Colonists created factories, known as trading posts, at which furs could be traded, in Native American territory.
context_section_description: The American factories often played a strategic role as well, sometimes operating as forts, providing a degree of protection for colonists and their allies from hostile Indians and foreign colonists. 
  York Factory was founded by the chartered Hudson's Bay Company in 1697. It was headquarters of the company for a long time, and was once the de facto government in parts of North America such as Rupert's Land, before European-based colonies existed. It controlled the fur trade throughout much of British-controlled North America for several centuries, undertaking early exploration. Its traders and trappers forged early relationships with many groups of American Indians, and a network of trading posts formed the nucleus for later official authority in many areas of Western Canada and the United States.
  The early coastal factory model contrasted with the system of the French, who established an extensive system of inland posts and sent traders to live among the tribes of the region. When war broke out in the 1680s between France and England, the two nations regularly sent expeditions to raid and capture each other's fur trading posts. In March 1686, the French sent a raiding party under Chevalier des Troyes over 1,300 km (810 mi) to capture the company's posts along James Bay. In 1697, Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville, commander of the company's captured posts, defeated three ships of the Royal Navy in the Battle of the Bay on his way to capture York Factory by a ruse. York Factory changed hands several times in the next decade and was finally ceded permanently in the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht. After the treaty, the Hudson Bay Company rebuilt York Factory as a brick star fort at the mouth of the nearby Hayes River, its present location.
  The United States government sanctioned a factory system from 1796 to 1822, with factories scattered through the mostly territorial portion of the country.
  The factories were officially intended to protect Indians from exploitation through a series of legislation called the Indian Intercourse Acts. However, in practice, numerous tribes conceded extensive territory in exchange for the trading posts, as happened in the Treaty of Fort Clark in which the Osage Nation ceded most of Missouri at Fort Clark.
  A blacksmith was usually assigned to the factory to repair utensils and build or maintain plows.  The factories frequently also had some sort of milling operation associated with them.
  The factories marked the United States' attempt to continue a process originally pioneered by the French and then by the Spanish to officially license the fur trade in Upper Louisiana.
  Factories were frequently called "forts" and often had numerous unofficial names. Legislation was often passed calling for military garrisons at the fort but their de facto purpose was a trading post.
caption: The factory trading post building at Fort Clark on the left, which in turn was within a walled fort
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