Rupert's Land

Rupert's Land was the vast territory around Hudson Bay, in what is now northern and western Canada, granted to the Hudson's Bay Company by King Charles II of England in 1670. For two centuries it was governed by a fur-trading company, until it was transferred to Canada in 1870.

The region was home to many Indigenous peoples, including the Cree, Anishinaabe, Assiniboine, Dene, Chipewyan and Inuit. In the 1660s, two French fur traders, Pierre-Esprit Radisson and Médard Chouart des Groseilliers, frustrated with French authorities, persuaded English investors that the best furs could be reached by sea through Hudson Bay. A voyage in 1668–1669 on the ship Nonsuch was a success. In 1670 Charles II granted a charter to "the Governor and Company of Adventurers of England trading into Hudson's Bay", giving them a monopoly of trade and ownership of all lands draining into Hudson Bay. The territory was named after Prince Rupert of the Rhine, the king's cousin and the company's first governor. It covered almost four million square kilometres, about a third of today's Canada, though the charter's authors had little idea of its size.

The company built trading posts, called factories, at the mouths of rivers on Hudson Bay, such as York Factory, Moose Factory and Fort Prince of Wales. Instead of sending traders inland, it waited for Indigenous traders, especially the Cree, who brought beaver pelts, used to make felt hats in Europe, in canoes. They traded for guns, kettles, knives, cloth, blankets, including the famous striped point blankets, beads and tobacco. Indigenous middlemen controlled much of the trade with peoples further inland.

The French, from Montreal, competed for the fur trade, sending traders, voyageurs, inland by canoe, and attacking the company's posts in the 1680s and 1690s. After France ceded Canada in 1763, Scottish and other merchants in Montreal formed the North West Company in 1779, which pushed far inland, sending explorers such as Alexander Mackenzie, who reached the Arctic Ocean in 1789 and the Pacific in 1793, and David Thompson, who mapped much of the west. The Hudson's Bay Company built inland posts in response.

Fur traders often married Indigenous women, in marriages "after the custom of the country", which were important for trade alliances. Their descendants, the Métis, developed their own culture, language, Michif, and economy, based on buffalo hunting, carting and trade, particularly around the Red River.

In 1811 the Scottish Lord Selkirk, a major shareholder in the Hudson's Bay Company, received land to found a farming colony at Red River, near today's Winnipeg. The North West Company and the Métis saw it as a threat to their supply routes and to pemmican, dried buffalo meat that fuelled the fur trade. In 1816, at the Battle of Seven Oaks, Métis led by Cuthbert Grant killed twenty-one colonists and the colony's governor. In 1821, after years of conflict, the two companies merged under the name of the Hudson's Bay Company, led by George Simpson.

After Canada's Confederation in 1867, the new dominion wanted to expand west. In 1869 the Hudson's Bay Company agreed to surrender Rupert's Land to the British crown for transfer to Canada, in return for £300,000, land around its posts and a share of farmland. The Métis of Red River, who had not been consulted, formed a provisional government under Louis Riel and resisted. The Manitoba Act of 1870 created the province of Manitoba, and the rest became the North-West Territories. The Hudson's Bay Company continued as a business, becoming a department store chain.

Our maps show Rupert's Land on the 1715, 1783 and 1800 maps. Its largest outline, about 7.9 million square kilometres on the 1783 map, includes much more than the Hudson Bay drainage basin, covering most of today's Canada west of Quebec, and a small part of the United States. On the 1815 map, the basemap groups the region under Canada.