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7. Northern and Western Exploration
From Canadian History Portal - HCO
| D. British North America →→ 1. American Revolution Background → 2. American Revolution Battles → 3. Coming of the Loyalists → 4. Rise of Montreal → 5. Province of Upper Canada → 6. War of 1812 → 7. Northern and Western Exploration →→ E. Conflict and Change |
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The Voyages of Samuel Hearne
Hearne began his voyages of exploration in 1769 at the request of the company in London. They wanted him to map the interior west of Hudson Bay, look for metals and find a passage, by river or sea, across the Barren Lands.
On November 6, Hearne set out from Fort Prince of Wales on a warmiup expedition, and was away for five weeks. The following year, on February 23, he set out on a second expedition over the Barrens with Chipewyan chief Matonabbee; their intention - to find the headwaters of the Coppermine River. They reached as far as Dubawnt Lake, about 640 km from Coppermine on August 12, but were forced to turn back because of a broken quadrant.
Hearne and Matonabbee set off again on December 7, travelled to Alcantara Lake, and then trekked north along the Coppermine River. On July 14, 1771, Hearne witnessed a bloody massacre of Inuits at Bloody Falls. Three days later they reached the partially frozen Arctic Ocean, Hearne becoming the first European to reach the Arctic overland.
A year later, on June 30, 1772, Hearne and Matonabbee were back at Fort Prince of Wales from the Arctic, proving that no river in the tundra regions flowed west and that there was definitely not a passage to Asia through Hudson Bay.
Hearne wrote up an account of the journey, published in 1795. He wrote about the native copper, and was the first to describe Inuit life in Coppermine area. Based on Hearne's information, the British Admiralty advised Captain James Cook not to make any serious search for a northwest passage from the Pacific side below 65º north latitude.
wo years later, in 1774, Hearne was on the Saskatchewan River, helping Matthew Cocking meet the threat from the Norwesters by building Cumberland House. It was the company's first permanent western inland settlement, and today is the oldest continuously occupied settlement west of Ontario.
The French Attack
Back in York Factory, Samuel Hearne heard the news about the outbreak of the American Revolution, and in 1782 was shocked to find himself right in the thick of the battle. In early August, a French force of 3 ships and 300 soldiers led by Jean-François de Galaup, Count de Lapérouse appeared off Fort Prince of Wales. The French fleet fired on the massive stone fort built to protect the HBC fur trade on the Churchill River; it was defended by only 39 fur traders and labourers. They damaged the Fort and burned York Factory before Hearne ordered a surrender. The fort was returned to the HBC in 1783, and Hearne returned to Hudson Bay to build Fort Churchill. He retired a few years later, and in 1795 published his Journey to the Northern Ocean; from 1769-72.
Hearne's successors carried on his legacy of competing head to head with the Norwesters, and in 1795, the Hudson Bay Company started building Edmonton House, a fortified fur trade post on a sheltered curve of the North Saskatchewan River, close to the rival North West Company post. The NWCo post was closed after the two companies amalgamated in 1821; the HBC fort was rebuilt on a bluff near the present day Alberta Legislature in 1830, after severe flooding. Fort Edmonton was dismantled in 1915 to make way for and expanded legislature, and reconstructed as Fort Edmonton Park in the 1960s.
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Lord Selkirk's Settlement
In its efforts to compete with the Norwesters from Montreal, the Hudson's Bay Company determined to try other means to cement its ownership and rights in Rupert's Land. One way was to colonize the fertile parts of its territory, which would also have the advantage of providing another outlet for its trade goods. And so in 1811, it decided to grant land in Red River to one of its shareholders, Thomas Douglas, 5th Earl of Selkirk. Selkirk had already attempted, with limited success, to settle displaced Scots farmers in two other British North American colonies, at Belfast, PEI, and at Baldoon in western Upper Canada.
On May 30, Selkirk was granted over 70 million acres (300 000 km2 or 116,000 square miles) along the Red and Assiniboine Rivers in present-day Manitoba and North Dakota by the Hudson's Bay Company. For the territory he called "Assiniboia," five times bigger than his native Scotland, Selkirk agreed to pay an annual rental of 10 shillings a year on the land, and supply 200 able-bodied men each year for the next 10 years.
Miles Macdonnell, Lord Selkirk's agent and a former soldier, led the advance party of colonists, who reached York Factory on September 24, wintered there. They travelled upriver in the Spring, reaching the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers on August 30, 1812. Macdonnell proclaimed the founding of the Red River Settlement, and Lord Selkirk's ownership of the 185,000 square kilometres that constituted Assiniboia, on September 4.
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As first Governor, his duty was to establish the colony and protect it, and one of his first acts is to build Fort Douglas, in sight of the North West Company's Fort Gibraltar. A second party of Selkirk settlers arrived at Red River on October 27, and his days were spent preparing the settlers for their first winter on Red River. The following June, he presided over the First Council of Assiniboia meeting in Fort Garry.
Macdonnell and The Pemmican War
In the year 1814, Governor Miles Macdonnell felt he was in a strong enough position to put into force the second aim of his mandate - to control the fur trade, bring the free-trading Métis to heel, and drive the Norwesters out of the territory.
On January 8, he took his first step, issuing the so-called Pemmican Proclamation, forbidding any export of pemmican or other provisions from Assiniboia, unless by the Hudson's Bay Company, or with HBC permission. While this was a way to protect the settlers from starvation, it was also a direct attack on the supply system of the North West Company and its Métis and Saulteaux contractors.
On October 21, he took his second major step, and issued an order to the Norwesters to quit their posts throughout Assiniboia. This order forced to NWCo to operate entirely away from the Red River, whether from their post at Fort William, or in the Saskatchewan Valley.
While the Norwesters did not directly attack Macdonnell, their Métis allies had no hesitation, and on June 15, 1815, many of the Selkirk settlers, including a new group of highlanders, were forced to leave their homes because of harassment by Métis hunters. After suffering from floods and grasshoppers, the settlers had relied on Métis pemmican for survival, and they were caught between North West Company traders and the diminished authority of the Hudson's Bay Company.
On September 25, Métis leader Cuthbert Grant attacked Fort Douglas, and the following June 1, the Norwesters captured and plundered Brandon House. Many of the Red River settlers fleeing Métis and Norwester violence took refuge at Norway House, the Hudson's Bay Company post at the north end of Lake Winnipeg.
Massacre at Seven Oaks
The HBC forces fought back when new Rupert's Land Governor Robert Semple, determined to exercise his authority, ordered Fort Gibraltar, a North West Company fort and pemmican store, captured and burned. In response, Cuthbert Grant and his men seized HBC posts and stores on the Assiniboine River.
Then on June 19, Semple and 28 men intercepted Cuthbert Grant and a Métis party of 61 people on the Frog Plain outside Fort Douglas, transporting pemmican to Fort Bas de la Riviere on Lake Winnipeg. There was an argument about the legality of their trade, insults were swapped and then shots were fired. Semple was left dead with 20 of his men, while only one of the Métis perished in the gunfire. Grant kept one of the HBC men prisoner, and demanded the surrender of Fort Douglas, which was immediately granted.
The legend of "The Seven Oaks Massacre" grew more gruesome with the telling, that a posse of mounted, well-armed Norwesters and Métis had attacked a group of innocent settlers at Selkirk, gruesomely murdering, disemboweling and scalping 21 of them, smashing in the skulls and leaving the bodies on the plain to be scavenged by wolves. In fact, the first shot was most likely fired by an HBC employee, against men known to be sharpshooters.
Selkirk Counter-Attacks
With total war now declared, on August 15, Lord Selkirk himself attacked and captured the North West Company stronghold of Fort William on Lake Superior with a private army of discharged War of 1812 veterans, many of them Swiss mercenaries. He arrested William McGillivray and sixteen other Norwesters for the Seven Oaks Massacre, and sent them to trial in Montreal on charges of high-treason, conspiracy and murder. Selkirk then sent Miles Macdonnell and 140 men on to recapture Fort Douglas, as well as Ft. Daer, in Pembina, North Dakota.
When Selkirk arrived in Montreal and told authorities about the Seven Oaks Massacre, a shocked Governor Sherbrooke asked William B. Coltman, a prominent lawyer, to report into the conditions which led to the bloody battle. On October 30, 1816, Coltman and John Fletcher opened a commission of enquiry to mediate between Lord Selkirk, the Hudson's Bay Company and the Norwesters.
On June 21, 1817, Selkirk arrived back at Fort Douglas with Coltman and his agent Colin Robertson, and a legal order to the North West Company to restore goods seized in the dispute. The Norwesters refused and fled to avoid arrest.
Selkirk then went about trying to restore order in the Settlement. On July 18, he signed what is known as the Selkirk Treaty with Chief Peguis and his local Ojibway (Saulteaux) and Swampy Cree people, where he gave them an annual gift of 200 lbs of tobacco in return for them confirming his land rights in the Colony and agreeing not to harm the colonists. Two days later, he welcomed his 300 odd exiled settlers back from Norway House.
In an effort to heal the breech with the Métis, Selkirk also urged the Roman Catholic Church to send missionaries to the Métis, and in July of 1818 the first Catholic missionaries arrived at Red River. Six months later, on January, 12, 1819, the Collège St-Boniface opened its doors. And in 1820 Roman Catholic missionary Father Norbert Provencher was made a bishop.
The Red River settlers continued to struggle with natural disasters. July 18, a plague of grasshoppers descended on the Settlement, hiding the sun and devouring everything green. The staple potato crop of the settlers and their livestock was completely destroyed in just a few minutes.
Back east, the Norwesters fought Selkirk in the courts, and in September 1818, got a conviction against him in a court in Windsor, Upper Canada, for breaking into Fort William and resisting arrest. In Montreal, the trial for high-treason, conspiracy and murder against William McGillivray and other Norwesters for the Seven Oaks Massacre began, but the NWCo men were acquitted of all charges.
Meanwhile, Selkirk was in London, where Parliament was investigating the Pemmican War, and after the 1819 Publication of a Blue Book called "Papers relating to the Red River Settlement, 1815-1819", the British government urged the the HBC and the NWC to forge a compromise, and Lord Bathurst, the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, formally directed the two companies to cease hostilities.
The stress may have been too much for Thomas Douglas, Earl of Selkirk. The founder of the Red River Colony died on April 8, 1820.
The Fur Companies Make Peace
On March 16, 1821, the Red River settlers and the North-West Company met to end the Pemmican War. And at a meeting in London on March 21, 1821, the North West Company agreed to merge with the Hudson's Bay Company under the leadership of a new Governor, Nicholas Garry. the agreement was effective June 1, to run for 21 years under the name of the Hudson's Bay Company.
On July 2, Parliament passed an Act for Regulation of the Fur Trade; this act extended the Hudson's Bay Company's monopoly of fur trade for another 21 years as well, from Labrador to the Pacific coast.
In Montreal, the affairs of the North West Company were wound up by the founding in 1822 of McGillivrays, Thain and Co., which took over the assets of the old McTavish, McGillivrays and Co. In 1824, the terms of the union of 1821 were revised and the McGillivray brothers passed out of the picture, with only Edward Ellice representing the NWCo, dealing with the angry creditors of the NWCo partners who had been pushed into bankrupcy.
Back in Red River, the colonists continued to suffer. In April, 1826, after a severe winter, the ice on the Red River began to break up, followed by heavy rains, marking the start of the greatest recorded flood in Manitoba history, twice that of the disastrous 1950 flood. Between May 3 and 4 the Red River rose five feet, then the ice broke and the flood swept away 47 houses, killing 5 colonists. The Hudson's Bay Company had to send out boats to rescue stranded colonists from roof tops.
One of the settlers that left Red River for Illinois that year was Peter Rindisbacher, who had come from Switzerland to Lord Selkirk's Red River colony with his family in 1821 believing that he was traveling to the French community of the Red River of Louisiana. Rindisbacher had helped his family by selling watercolours of daily life in the colony; he was the first European artist west of the Great Lakes.
In 1831, the HBC started to build Lower Fort Garry; completed in 1833, it was 32 km downstream from the old fort at the fork of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers.
On May 4, 1836, the Selkirk saga ended when the Hudson's Bay Company acquired the Red River Colony from the sixth Earl of Selkirk for the sum of £15,000.
Pacific Discoveries
The coast of British Columbia was probably first visited by Elizabethan privateer Francis Drake, but the honour of official European discovery goes to the Spanish mariner Juan Jose Perez Hernandez, who sighted the Queen Charlotte Islands on July 15, 1774, met the Haida people, and called the northwestern point of islands Santa Margarita; it was the first BC place named by Europeans.
Sailing south along Vancouver Island, Hernandez discovered Nootka Sound, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, on August 17. He described the local Nootka people as skilled whalers and trappers of sea otters. The following year, on July 14, 1775, at Point Grenville, another Spaniard, Bruno Hecata, officially claimed Vancouver Island for Spain.
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On July 11, 1776, Royal Navy Captain James Cook set sail from Portsmouth on his third and last voyage with the H.M.S. Resolution and H.M.S. Discovery, to seek a North-West Passage round the north coast of America from the Pacific, and win the £20,000 prize offered by Parliament in 1775. Cook made first for Tasmania, then New Zealand and Tahiti, then turned north, arriving along the Oregon Coast by March 1778. On March 15, 1778, he reached Nootka Sound (named King George's Sound by Cook) and dropped anchor on March 29 in Resolution Cove, becoming the first Europeans to set foot on Vancouver Island.
Cook and his crew named the site Resolution Cove, but it was soon called Friendly Cove after a warm reception from the local Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka) people, who traded sea otter pelts with the sailors for iron goods. Cook wrote that "their houses or dwellings are situated close to the shore…Some of these buildings are raised on the side of a bank, theses have a flooring consisting of logs supported by post fixed in the ground….before these houses they make a platform about four feet broad…..so allows of a passage along the front of the building: They assend to this passage (along the front of the building) by steps, not unlike some at our landing places in the River Thames.”[1]
The mariners stayed for a month, repairing the ships and charting the coast, then headed north on April 26, 1778; they failed to find the North-West Passage, and nine months later Cook will be killed by natives on a Hawaiian beach.
In the early years of contact, the Europeans who came to BC were only interested in profit and had no desire to settle or convert the local people to Christianity.
In the next decade, a number of individual traders and trading companies arrived to do business. One of the first was Charles Barkley, captain of the Imperial Eagle, who arrived at Nootka Sound in July of 1787; his 17 year old wife Frances Barkley was the first European woman to visit BC.
Also in that month, George Dixon, a trader with the trader with the King George's Sound Company, arrived in the Haida territory he named the Queen Charlotte Islands. On September 24, 1788, the first shipment of BC furs left Nootka Sound for China.
In that month, American traders John Kendrick & Robert Gray arrived at Nootka Sound in the ships Columbia Rediviva and Lady Washington; Kendrick sailed to Marvinas Bay where he built Fort Washington. British trader John Meares arrived in Nootka Sound shortly after with two trading ships, and opened a trading post at Friendly Cove.
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The Nootka Crisis
On May 5, 1789, the Spanish navy arrived back in Nootka Sound in the person of one Esteban Jose Martinez, captain of the warship Princesa. Martinez again proclaimed the sovereignty of Spain on the west coast, and to enforce his claim, started seizing trading ships for infringing Spanish ownership by right of discovery. In June, he captured trader John Meares' schooner Northwest America near Vancouver Island. On July 4, he seized the British ship Argonaut and on July 14 another British ship, the Princess Royal.
The following year, Spanish captain Francisco de Eliza y Reventa took possession of Nootka Sound and built a fur fort, while Alferez Manuel Quimper explored the Strait of Juan de Fuca and claimed the area for Spain on August 1. Meanwhile, back in Europe, the Spanish agreed to compensate Britain for ships seized in Nootka Sound, and on October 28, the two nations signed the Nootka Sound Convention in Madrid, whereby Spain agreed to surrender exclusive rights on the Pacific coast, and allow British traders to operate.
George Vancouver Charts the Coast
The British moved ahead asserting their own sovereignty over the area, and in 1792, Captain George Vancouver's ship HMS Discovery arrived to begin charting the coast. Vancouver knew that North West Company explorer Alexander Mackenzie was pushing overland from the Prairies, and hoped to join up with the explorer. They missed each other by just a few weeks, as Mackenzie was menaced by hostile native people, and had to retreat.
Over the summer, Vancouver circumnavigated Vancouver Island, and produced detailed charts of the Juan de Fuca Strait, Puget Sound, Howe Sound, Jarvis Inlet and the Strait of Georgia, all of which he claimed for Britain. He also verified that no continuous channel existed between the Pacific Ocean and Hudson Bay.
On June 12, he sailed Discovery into a magnificent inlet - the site of Vancouver - that he thought might lead into the interior. He and Puget took two boats and set out on the survey that included the inner waters of Burrard Inlet, which he named Burrard's Channel after his friend Captain Henry Burrard. On June 13, 1792, they passed through the First Narrows and spend the rest of the day ascertaining the extent of the inlet. They camped for the night on the shore opposite the entrance to Indian Arm, and left the next morning to survey as far north as Jervis Inlet and Texada Island.
Before leaving in October, Vancouver sent one of his captains, William Broughton of the Chatham, to navigate the Columbia River upstream; he travelled as far as the site of Portland, Oregon.
While Vancouver had friendly relations with the Spanish trading ships Sutil and Mexicana, and ensured that Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra evacuated Meares' trading base in Nootka Sound, the issues of sovereignty was still not clear, and the two countries again met in January of 1794, this time in London. The Second Nootka Convention ended the dispute over Nootka Sound, as England and Spain recognized each other's rights of trade, and the Spanish agreed to completely evacuate the trading post at Friendly Cove to the British.
American Traders on the Coast
Conflict again returned to the Pacific coast with the arrival of the fur traders from New York and Montreal. It appears the local aboriginals were not overly fond of the Americans. In March of 1803, Nootka chief Maquinna led a massacre of 25 crew of the US trading ship Boston in Nootka Sound. The event was chronicled by blacksmith John Jewitt, whose life was spared, and who spent several years living with Maquinna's family. He recounted this adventure in his 1815 book, Narrative of the adventures and sufferings of John R. Jewitt.
Eight years after the Boston incident, John Jacob Astor's ship Tonquin was attacked by local Nootka who killed the sailors and destroyed the ship the next day; it seemed the end of the New York fur trader's hopes for northwest coast trade in competition with North West Company.
The outbreak of the War of 1812 made matters far worse for the traders at Fort Astoria, and without provisions from the east, they were half starved. So on October 16, 1813, Astor and his Pacific Fur Company partners secretly sold Fort Astoria to the North West Company for $58 000, and a month later John McTavish arrived to take possession for the North West Company. British maritime muscle sailed into at the mouth of Columbia River on November 30 in the person of Captain William Black in the 26-gun Royal Navy sloop Raccoon, who officially took possession of Fort Astoria for Britain and renamed it Fort George.
Astor got the last laugh, however. On October 6, 1818, Fort Astoria was officially returned to the United States under the War of 1812 peace treaty. In the Treaty of London, signed on October 20, Britain and the US agreed that their mutual boundary should run westward "from the Lake of Woods (in Minnesota), along the 49th parallel of north latitude" to the Rocky Mountains, and that (for the time being), the two nations should have joint control of the Oregon country. So Canada lost control of the territories of the Pacific Northwest first explored by Norwesters from Montreal.
Paul Kane's Christmas Feast at Fort Edmonton
Painter Paul Kane arrrived at Edmonton on Dec. 5, 1847, and spent a cold, snowy winter ("ranging 40 to 50 below zero") in Edmonton House.
"On Christmas Day," he wrote, "the flag was hoisted, and all appeared in their best and gaudiest style, to do honour to the holiday. Towards noon every chimney gave evidence of being in full blast, whilst savoury streams of cooking pervaded the atmosphere in all directions."
Dinner commenced at 2 p.m. in the great hall. Kane sat with J.E. Harriet, chief trader John Rowand, Reverend Robert Rundle (the first missionary to reside in Edmonton), Father Jean Thibault ("Mr. Thebo") and three clerks. He wrote:
- "No tablecloth shed its snowy whiteness over the board; no silver candelabra or gaudy china interfered with its simple magnificence. The bright tin plates and dishes reflected jolly faces and burnished gold can give no truer zest to a feast."
- "At the head, before Mr. Harriett, was a large dish of boiled buffalo hump; at the foot smoked a boiled buffalo calf. Start not, gentle reader, the calf is very small, and is taken from the cow by the caesarean operation long before it attains its full growth. This boiled whole, is one of the esteemed dishes amongst the epicures of the interior."
- "My pleasing duty was to help a dish of mouffle, or dried moose nose; the gentleman on my left distributed, with graceful impartiality, the white fish, delicately browned in buffalo marrow. The worthy priest helped the buffalo tongue, whilst Mr. Rundell cut up the beavers' tails. Nor was the other gentleman left unemployed, as all his spare time was occupied in dissecting a roast wild goose. The centre of the table was graced with piles of potatoes, turnips, and bread conveniently placed so that each could help himself. Such was our jolly Christmas dinner at Edmonton, and long will it remain in my memory, although no pies, or puddings, or blanc manges shed their fragrance over the scene."
After dinner the hall was set up for dancing, with a fiddler. Everyone was "gaily dressed," wrote Kane: members of the First Nations "whose chief ornament consisted of paint on the face, voyageurs with bright sashes and neatly ornamented moccasins ...
- "All were laughing, and jabbering in as many different languages as there were styles of dress. English, however, was little used, as none could speak it but those who sat at our dinner table," wrote Kane. All joined in the festivities, and most danced with "boisterous vigour" for several hours until retiring at midnight.
- "Such was our jolly Christmas dinner at Edmonton; and long will it remain in my memory."
SOURCE: Paul Kane, Wanderings of an Artist Among the Indians of North America (London, 1859)
| Northern and Western Exploration - Gallery | Stories and Texts | Web Links | Milestones | Student Activities | Student Projects |
| D. British North America →→ 1. American Revolution Background → 2. American Revolution Battles → 3. Coming of the Loyalists → 4. Rise of Montreal → 5. Province of Upper Canada → 6. War of 1812 → 7. Northern and Western Exploration →→ E. Conflict and Change |
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