Ovid Allard: forty years with the Hudson's Bay Company, the last ten at Fort Langley

Ovid Allard spent forty years with the Hudson’s Bay Company and is one of the few fort workers below the rank of officer whose life is well recorded. The Township’s heritage study notes that more than 60 percent of Fort Langley’s staff were French Canadian or French-speaking Métis, and Allard is the best-known of them.

A working life, quickly

All of this is from his entry in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography unless noted.

• 1817 Born in Montreal, July 11, of French descent.
• 1834 Joins the HBC at Lachine, by family tradition, and goes west.
• 1839 Posted to Fort Vancouver, then Fort Langley.
• April 11, 1840 Fort Langley burns; Allard helps rebuild it and works as trader and supervisor.
• 1846 After the border treaty, helps lay out the brigade route from Fort Kamloops to Fort Langley.
• November 1847 Leads six men up the canyon to build Fort Yale, and runs its store. Then helps build Fort Hope.
• 1852 to about 1858 Fort Victoria, then about five years at Nanaimo supervising Indigenous workers at the coal mines.
• 1858 Governor James Douglas sends him to reopen Fort Yale for the gold rush. He stays until 1864.
• 1864 to 1874 Back at Fort Langley, running the company farm and trading for salmon, cranberries and furs.

He never rose above clerk. The Township’s study says he was frustrated that he was never allowed to become chief factor.

Family and community

Allard married Justine, who family tradition says was the sister of a Cowichan chief. They had four children. The Township’s study says their son Jason Ovid Allard was born at the fort in 1848, saw the gold rush miners arrive, worked as an interpreter for Judge Matthew Begbie, and kept a diary that historians still use.

In the young Langley settlement, Ovid chaired the school board in the 1870s and was postmaster from September 2, 1870 until early 1871. His health started failing in 1867, and he died at Fort Langley on August 2, 1874, a year after the Township was incorporated.

Where to find him

He’s buried in the old company graveyard beside St. George’s Anglican Church, now the Hudson’s Bay Company Pioneer Cemetery. A bronze plaque on a granite boulder there, unveiled in 1954, remembers him. For the Allard family of Fort Langley in the world wars, see our Indigenous Veterans Day piece.

Related pages

• People who shaped Langley
• James Murray Yale, his boss through the 1840s
• The history of Langley

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