Long before Syncrude, Suncor, Exxon, or Shell, there was the Hudson’s Bay Company. “The Company,” as it came to be known, was the continent’s first industrial-scale resource extractor, and it pioneered an approach to business, markets, employees, and the natural world that together could be called “wildfire economics.” Using furs as fuel, the European market as fire, and credit as oxygen, the Hudson’s Bay Company burned its way across the North American continent, altering it forever while generating extraordinary wealth for a handful of men an ocean away.