Daily Inspiration Quote by Ernest Thompson Seton

Calling the Hudson's Bay Company a "guardian angel" is a velvet-glove myth of empire: protection framed as benevolence, extraction rebranded as caretaking. Seton chooses the language of Providence - not policy - and that’s the point. Angels don’t negotiate treaties, set prices, or enforce territorial claims; they hover above the mess, morally weightless. The phrase launders a hard-edged corporate state into something paternal, almost holy, implying the North needed saving and that the saver was self-evidently virtuous.

In Seton’s era, this kind of rhetoric fit neatly into a national story Canadians and Britons wanted to tell themselves: the frontier wasn’t conquered, it was managed; Indigenous peoples weren’t displaced, they were "looked after"; commerce wasn’t coercion, it was order. The Hudson’s Bay Company did provide infrastructure and a kind of stability - posts, supply lines, information networks - but "guardian" also implies authority over the guarded. It naturalizes corporate sovereignty, treating a profit-driven monopoly as the rightful custodian of a vast region and its people.

Seton’s own brand mattered here. As a celebrated naturalist and storyteller shaping popular ideas about wilderness, he helped build the romantic North: a place of moral clarity, rugged virtue, and clean narratives. The subtext is an invitation to trust the institution that made the North legible to southern readers. It’s not just praise; it’s a permission slip for forgetting what guardianship cost, and who paid it.