answers: 1670
context: 1779, other traders founded the North West Company (NWC) in Montreal as a seasonal partnership to provide more capital and to continue competing with the HBC. It became operative for the outfit of 1780 and was the first joint-stock company in Canada and possibly North America. The agreement lasted one year. A second agreement established in 1780 had a three-year term. The company became a permanent entity in 1783. By 1784, the NWC had begun to make serious inroads into the HBC's profits. In 1821, the North West Company of Montreal and Hudson's Bay Company were forcibly merged by intervention </s> the Hudson's Bay Company in 1670, a major player in the fur trade for the next two centuries. French exploration and expansion westward continued with men such as La Salle and Marquette exploring and claiming the Great Lakes as well as the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys. To bolster these territorial claims, the French constructed a series of small fortifications, beginning with Fort Frontenac on Lake Ontario in 1673. Together with the construction of "Le Griffon" in 1679, the first full-sized sailing ship on the Great Lakes, the forts opened the upper Great Lakes to French navigation. More native groups </s> the trail. The company's stranglehold on the region was broken by the first successful large wagon train to reach Oregon in 1843, led by Marcus Whitman. In the years that followed, thousands of emigrants poured into the Willamette Valley of Oregon. In 1846, the United States acquired full authority south of the 49th parallel; the most settled areas of the Oregon Country were south of the Columbia River in what is now Oregon. McLoughlin, who had once turned away would-be settlers as company director, then welcomed them from his general store at Oregon City. He was later proclaimed the "Father
question: when did the hudson 's bay company start