By Porter Lang
Start with the little lines on the edge. Most people see the stripes on a Hudson’s Bay blanket and never look at the selvage, where the useful information is. Those short woven lines are the points, and they tell you one thing: size.
What a point is
Wikipedia describes the points as short lines woven into the selvage of the blanket along its edge, each about four inches long, with a half point at about two inches. They let you read the finished size at a glance, even with the blanket folded. Wikipedia gives today’s rough equivalents as 3.5 points for a twin, 4 for a double, 6 for a queen and 8 for a king.
Sources differ on the details. One magazine history says a full point measured 4 to 5.5 inches. The Canadian Encyclopedia says points were thin black lines, from one point for small blankets to four for very large ones, while a cabin-lifestyle history says they were indigo lines and that the range ran from 1 to 6 points in half steps. We are reporting the disagreement rather than picking.
The one thing the sources agree on, or nearly, is size. The same magazine gives the standard 1-point blanket as 2 feet 8 inches wide and 8 feet long, weighing 3 pounds 1 ounce. That is the old working size.
There is a popular belief that the points stand for pelts, a price in beaver skins. Wikipedia says that is a misconception, and that points do not indicate price or weight. The Canadian Encyclopedia says something different: that a one-point blanket initially equalled one beaver pelt in value. Those two statements cannot both be right, and we cannot settle it here.
Where the design came from
Blankets were already trade goods before the company had its own pattern. A magazine history says they were first taken to Hudson Bay in 1668, two years before the Hudson’s Bay Company was established under an English royal charter in 1670. The point blanket as we know it came later.
The Canadian Encyclopedia says the first point blankets were made by French weavers in the seventeenth century, and that the word point comes from the French empointer, to make threaded stitches on cloth. The Hudson’s Bay Company, it says, commissioned its own design in 1779 from mills in Witney, Oxfordshire. The first order it quotes asked for 30 pairs of 3-point blankets striped in four colours: red, blue, green and yellow.
The 1779 story has several tellers. Wikipedia says that year saw the first definite record of an order of 500 point blankets. A cabin-lifestyle history credits an independent fur trader, Germain Maugenest, with suggesting the point system. A magazine history names Thomas Empson’s Oxfordshire mill. Each may be describing part of the same event. We would not repeat one name as fact.
The stripes
The stripe set is green, red, yellow and indigo. Wikipedia says that order was not standardised until the middle to the end of the 1800s, and notes an 1798 order for three points striped in four colours, red, blue, green and yellow. The Canadian Encyclopedia says the white ground with red, indigo, green and yellow stripes came to be called Queen Anne’s colours, after the queen who reigned from 1702 to 1714, and that the colours carry no specific meaning. The cabin-lifestyle history offers a practical reason: the four colours were easy to produce with colourfast dyes.
If someone tells you each stripe stands for something, ask where they read it. The two sources that address it say no.
What it was for
A blanket is a good tool, and the trade understood that. The cabin-lifestyle history says wool blankets were valued for warmth in harsh winters and for drying quickly, and says some were cut into winter coats called capotes. The Canadian Encyclopedia lists uses by Indigenous and settler communities as bedding, clothing, room dividers and, at potlatches, ceremonial purposes.
The company stayed with the cloth. The Canadian Encyclopedia lists the Mackinaw coat style in 1811, the first commercial blanket coats in 1922 and a full line for all ages in 1929.
The Blanket Fund
Since 2022, sales of the blanket have been tied to a grant program. The Gord Downie and Chanie Wenjack Fund says Oshki Wupoowane, which it translates from Ojibwe as a new blanket, launched on 30 September 2022. It supports Indigenous-led initiatives and organizations in Canada, and the fund administers it. The Hudson’s Bay Foundation committed 100 per cent of net proceeds from all point blanket sales to it.
What to check if you handle one
Read the selvage and count the points, then compare with the size you expected. Ask who wove the blanket and where. Ask what the wool is. If the label says the stripes mean something, ask for the source.
We follow objects back to places, and this one leads from a Canadian trading post to a mill in Oxfordshire. Roam first. Shop later.