Norman Kittson

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Norman Kittson as a young man

Norman Kittson in later life

Norman Wolfred Kittson (5 March 1814 – 10 May 1888) was variously a fur trader, steamboat-line operator, and railway entrepreneur.

[edit] Fur trader

Born in Chambly, Quebec (then Lower Canada), Kittson had by 1830 apprenticed with the American Fur Company, and relocated to what became Minnesota Territory in the United States.^[1] He used Pembina (now in 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.

[edit] Transportation enterpreneur

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.

[edit] Thoroughbred racing

Kittson was an owner of thoroughbred racehorses, and his filly Glidelia won the 1880 Alabama Stakes. In 1882 Kittson and his brother James purchased Aristides Welch's renowned Erdenheim Stud farm and the bulk of its bloodstock at Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania. In 1884, Kittson's colt Rataplan won the prestigious Travers Stakes at the Saratoga Race Course. Following his death, in November of 1888 his estate sold the Erdenheim Stud.^[2]

[edit] Death and legacy

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] Notes and references

[edit] Footnotes

[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

• Biography at the Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online