After the merger of the North West Company (NWC) and Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) in 1821, many Métis employees across the Homeland were faced with the decision to stay with the Company in its amalgamated form or become independent ‘freemen.’
John Charles Sayer, brother of Henry and Pierre Guillaume Sayer, was one such Métis HBC employee. John Charles had been working with the Company since about 1811. By the time of the merger, he was working as a clerk in the Lac La Pluie (Rainy Lake) District.
After refusing to take a significant salary reduction in the newly amalgamated Company, John Charles terminated his employment. However, he remained a fixture of the Rainy Lake District fur trade for many years as a “freeman” hunter and trapper.
In the 1825-26 post journal, John Dugald Cameron, the HBC’s Chief Factor at Rainy Lake, wrote a colourful description of the Métis freeman Sayer, undoubtedly tainted by Sayer’s decision to leave the Company’s direct employ:
“. . .Sayer the Free Man got afraid of the high water and has abandoned his usual Haunt. He arrived here last Night. He says [he] intends going to the Plains. I have advised him to go to red River and become a Settler. He is however a Lazy drunken Scamp and prefers leading a Vagabond Life from one turn to an other than to settle when in a Place when he would be obliged to work.”
Despite Cameron's recommendation to head west, as his brothers Pierre Guillaume and Henry had, John Charles Sayer returned to his family’s original home in the Upper Great Lakes. By the mid-1830s, Sayer was residing at Grand Portage with his wife and children and trading at Fort William.
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