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Thursday, January 01, 1970

Daniel Williams Harmon 1778-1843

Daniel Williams Harmon was born in Bennington, Vermont (then part of New York) on February 19, 1778. The fourth son of a tavernkeeper who had fought on the American side in the Battle of Bennington, Daniel joined the North West Company in the spring of 1800 at the tender age of 22.

Daniel Williams Harmon was a moral man whose passions were conversation, religion, and family. He was intense but not an intellectual, intelligent but not educated. Though one of his brothers went to Dartmouth, Daniel was cut from rougher cloth. The Reverend Daniel Haskell, editor of Daniel's journal, bemoans the fur trader's lack of a classical education as it shows through in his rough writing style. Nicknamed "the priest" by his Canadian companions, Daniel was passionately spiritual, intensely reserved, and extremely hard on himself. Each birthday in his journal finds him condemning his life of "folly and sin," though apart from one or two occasions where he admits to being "three sheets to the wind," it is hard to find evidence of his transgressions. He was serious, earnest and responsible, and inclined to be dry, especially without the society he craved. This was the society of close friends and their books, and his journal constantly laments the lack of good conversation especially about religion. He missed his family intensely, and yearned for their letters; we can only regret that none of his survived.

After a nineteen-year career as a clerk and company factor in the Canadian northwest, Daniel retired from the NWC in 1819 and returned to his native Vermont. The event that has perhaps most distinguished this otherwise typical fur trader's career was his decision to bring with him his mixed-blood wife and children.


With his brothers Argalus and Calvin, Daniel founded the town of Harmonville, later Coventry, Vermont, in 1824, where he kept a trading post and sawmill on the Black River. The family returned to Montreal in the spring of 1843, where Daniel died weeks after the move in March, aged 65. No formal record of his death is known, though he is presumed buried in Montreal. The Harmon family monument in Mount Royal Cemetery is near the grave of his contemporary, the famous Canadian cartographer David Thompson.


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