After incorporation by English royal charter in 1670, the Hudson’s Bay Company was granted a right of “sole trade and commerce” over an expansive area of land known as Rupert’s Land, comprising much of the Hudson Bay drainage basin. [1]

The charter was conferred by Charles II on his “dear and entirely beloved Cousin, Prince Rupert,” and a group of associates incorporated as “The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England trading into Hudson’s Bay.” With the charter the King gave a province named in honor of the cherished kinsman “Rupert’s Land.” The bounds of the province no man knew. The grant was described in the deed as embracing the lands and waters draining into Hudson Bay and Hudson Straits. That meant extension on the east nearly to the shores of Labrador; on the south to the northern watershed of the St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes and the upper Missouri; on the west to the Rocky Mountain divide of the Saskatchewan River and the eastern divide of the Athabasca River, Great Slave Lake and Back’s River; and on the north to the line of the watershed of Hudson Straits. This immense territory was granted free from seignorial reservations; it was given to the Governor and Company to hold as “absolute lords and proprietors” in “free and common soccage.”

— Merk [2]

See also
James Knight, York Fort Journals,1717 [3]
Samuel Hearne, Journey to the Northern Ocean, 1772 [4]
George Simpson, Fur trade and empire, 1825 [5]
James McMillan, Portion of letter to William Connelly, 1825 [6]
Aborigines’ Protection Society, Canada West and the Hudson’s-Bay Company1856, [7]
Edward Ermatinger], York Factory Express Journal, 1828 [8]
Harold Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada 1930 [9]
Ball, Georgina. “Monopoly system of wildlife management, ” 1985 [10]

From Merk’s introduction to Fur Trade and Empire:

Rupert’s Land under this charter was the proprietary colony of the Hudson’s Bay Company [1670–] and as such for two centuries it was held. But it was not held in peace. The gifts of the charter were challenged in England and abroad. France had claims to the territory as part of the province of New France; she had bestowed the region on one of her colonizing companies much before 167o and she was not disposed to give up her rights there without a struggle. This was one of the questions that was fought over in the long Anglo-French duel for mastery in the New World; and Rupert’s Land, or parts of it, changed hands repeatedly with the fortunes of war before its fate was finally determined in 1763 by the expulsion of France from the continent of North America.

But the removal of this foreign threat served only to stimulate domestic challenge to the charter. Almost from the beginning there had been question as to the charter’s validity on the ground that it emanated from royal authority without legislative ratification, and that it granted monopoly rights which, after the Statute of Monopolies of 1623, the crown could not legally bestow. It was argued also in later years that in 167o Rupert’s Land was not Charles Il’s to give, being then the soil of France, that England gained it first in 1763, when it came by conquest and unencumbered by Stuart gifts of monopoly. Supported by such arguments, free traders from England and Canada defied the exclusive privileges of the Hudson’s Bay Company and after 1763 did so with increasing determination and success.

Among the free traders who intruded on Rupert’s Land was a group which in 1787 united to form the North West Company of Montreal. This was a redoubtable organization, characterized on the one hand by the dash and aggressiveness of adventurers, and on the other by the stability and the foresight of men of money. Two classes of shareholders were in it: eastern partners, merchants of substance in Montreal and Quebec, who supplied the capital, and the so-called “wintering partners” who contributed the skill and experience which went into leadership in the field. Zeal on the part of employees was stimulated by holding out to promising young men brought into the service the prospect of promotion to the wintering-partner status. There were in the employ of the Company at one time not far from two thousand men clerks, voyageurs, laborers, interpreters, guides and various other functionaries of the trade. The Company had a route to the interior, less direct, to be sure, than the Hudson Bay passage but advantageous in other respects. This was the southern highway consisting of the broad St. Lawrence and the Ottawa to the Great Lakes, and the Rainy Lake passage thence to the waters of the Saskatchewan. At Montreal and at Fort William on the western shore of Lake Superior the Company had great warehouses assuring to interior posts regularity of supply. This was no mean antagonist for the great British chartered monopoly.

For fifteen years the North West Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company clashed in the forests of Rupert’s Land. It was a bitter war in which each party wielded weapons of trade and of violence mercilessly in turn. Rival posts fought each other at close range; there was undercutting and overbidding; Indians were competitively plied with liquor; there was covert bargaining by each side with faithless employees of the other, and seizure and confiscation of each other’s supplies and furs. Such was the musketry of trade. From the arsenal of war were drawn raids, the levelling of each other’s trading posts, incitation of Indians and of half-breeds to violence, open fighting and secret stabbing and shooting in the shadows of the forest. Red River Colony, established in 18r under the aegis of the Hudson’s Bay Company, was in 1816 the scene of a pitched battle in which Governor Semple of the Hudson’s Bay Company Territories and twenty men fell before the fire of a party of half-breed retainers of the North West Company. Violence was succeeded after this “Battle of Seven Oaks” by a renewal of cut-throat competition and by litigation in the courts of Upper and Lower Canada.

The result of this war was complete disorganization of the northern fur trade. Prices paid to Indians for furs rose to levels which rendered profit out of the question. Ruin faced even the Indians who in competitive traffic were paid for furs in the currency of rum. Game was recklessly wasted. Furs reach prime condition only in the winter, but competition led to the trapping and hunting of pelts in all seasons, which meant not merely defective furs but extermination of the young with the full grown in the breeding season. Discipline among employees became lax; extravagance and waste crept into the conduct of the trade, a disease that spread even to the Oregon Country which lay outside the boundaries of Rupert’s Land and therefore beyond the immediate war zone. By 1820 the struggle had brought the two belligerents to the verge of bankruptcy and to the will to peace.

Peace came by way of a coalition agreement entered into in London in 1821. In the merger the Hudson’s Bay Company retained its identity; it took over the assets of the North West Company, evaluated like its own at €200,000, and to finance the consolidation doubled its outstanding stock. The charter and the ancient privileges of the Hudson’s Bay Company remained undisturbed. To the privileges a princely addition was made. The British government as a reward for the peace and as a means of preventing any future outbreak of war conferred upon the reorganized Company, under an act of Parliament of 1821, exclusive trading rights for twenty-one years in all that part of British North America lying between Rupert’s Land and the Rocky Mountains, and, in addition, the sole British trading rights in the whole of the Oregon Country. Thus the entire area which is now the Dominion of Canada excepting only the valley of the St. Lawrence and the maritime provinces was, after 1821, under the control of the Hudson’s Bay Company, either as proprietor or as possessor of exclusive trading rights, and besides the Company held sole British rights of trade in all of what is now the Pacific Northwest of the United States. [1]

Thompson, a charity pupil at Grey Coat School, London, was apprenticed to the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1784. He joined the North West Company [1779–1821]> as a surveyor in 1797. In 1811 he explored the length of Columbia River, making the first recorded crossing of the Continental Divide via the Athabasca Pass.

Thompson was a member of the British-American Boundary survey from 1815 to 1824. He died of poverty at Longuineil, Quebec, in 1857, age 87. He was never on any of the three Thompson Rivers.

Cheadle accompanied William Wentworth Fitzwilliam Milton [1839–1877] on a journey across Canada in 1862–63. They crossed the Rocky Mountains through Yellowhead Pass, almost starved in the North Thompson country, and eventually straggled into Kamloops. They visited the Cariboo gold fields before returning to England by ship from Victoria.

Cheadle, the older and more resourceful of the two, assumed most of the responsibility for their journey. He spelled out their story in two books, Journal of a Trip across Canada and The North West Passage by Land, which has gone through ten editions. In 1865, Cheadle resumed medical practice in London, and married in the following year. He met with great success in his career, and served as dean of St. Mary’s Medical School from 1869 to 1873. In the face of much opposition, he stood among the early supporters of women’s claims to a right to practice medicine.

Milton and Cheadle named numerous features in the Yellowhead Pass area.

Viscount Milton was a British nobleman, explorer of British North America, and Liberal Party politician.
Fitzwilliam was the eldest son of William Wentworth-FitzWilliam, 6th Earl FitzWilliam, and his wife Lady Frances Harriet, daughter of George Douglas, 17th Earl of Morton, and was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge [1].

In 1860 Milton visited the Red River Settlement and the trip whetted his appetite for more travel in British North America. According to a lecture he gave to a number of British scientific and literary societies in 1864, he was the initiator of a second and more important journey: “In the spring of 1862 I resolved to investigate for myself the nature of the country between the Red River Settlement and the Rocky Mountains; and to penetrate, if possible, by the shortest route to the gold regions of Cariboo.” He rightly considered himself “fortunate to obtain the assistance” of a friend, Dr. Walter Butler Cheadle, who proved to be the real leader of the expedition [2].

‘The favourable effect upon his health produced by the invigorating climate of the Great Plains, and the charm of the wild life there, induced Lord Milton to return there the following year, in company with Dr. Walter Butler Cheadle [1835–1910], with the view of making a more extensive exploration of the North-West Territory. At that time the gold mines of Cariboo, in British Columbia, were attracting much attention, and the only practicable route to them was the extremely circuitous one by Panama, or the little less indirect and more toilsome journey through United States territory by way of California. Although the rich mining districts of British Columbia lie almost in the direct line across the Continent through British territory, the way was barred by the great chain of the Rocky Mountains; and on each side of the main range lay wide extent of rugged country, covered with dense forest, and in great part unexplored. Lord Milton and Dr. Cheadle determined to make the attempt to discover a way through this difficult and trackless region which separated the plains of the Saskatchewan from the mining districts of British Columbia, and they set out on this expedition in the spring of 1863. The story of this adventurous and toilsome journey, graphically related by Lord Milton and his companion in The North-West Passage by Land, is probably familiar to most of us. Provided with very inadequate resources for such an arduous undertaking, the party endured great hardships and privations before they succeeded in forcing their way by the Yellow Head or Leather Pass, and through the dense forest of the North Thompson River, to the plains of Kamloops. Had Lord Milton enjoyed the full vigour of health, his enterprising spirit would have led him to further geographical research. But the renewed strength, which, in spite of its hardships, he eventually obtained from this journey, did not endure. After the lapse of a few years, he was compelled by increasing illness to resign the seat in Parliament to which he had been elected after his return, and he once more crossed the Atlantic to North America. The last few years of his life he spent chiefly in the highlands of Virginia; returning to England, however, shortly before his death [3].

McEvoy, on the staff of the Geological Survey of Canada, made a reconnaissance of the route west of Edmonton through the Yellowhead Pass in 1898, during which he took the first photograph of Mount Robson.

McEvoy’s father was James McEvoy [b. 1818, County Kildare, Ireland – d. 1896, Ottawa, Ontario], a farmer who arrived in Canada before 1833. The elder McEvoy married Margaret McNamara [b. 1820, Tipperary, Ireland—d. 1900] in Ottawa in 1848 [1, 2].

James Jr. was educated in Ottawa public schools and McGill University, graduating in science in 1883. For a short time he taught school and then accepted a position on the staff of the Geological Survey of Canada, where he remained for 15 years [3]. As a young man, he became interested in military affairs, was an officer in the Governor General’s Foot Guards, Ottawa, later a captain in the Kootenay Rifles, having organized two companies in that regiment. In the First World War, with the rank of Major, he was on the staff of the chief instructor in trench warfare at Niagara, London, and border camps [4].

In 1889 he accompanied George Mercer Dawson [1849–1910], the assistant director of the Geological Survey, on geological investigations in British Columbia [5]. In 1898 he made a geological survey of the Yellowhead Pass route from Edmonton to Tête Jaune Cache, passing by Mount Robson:

When we first caught sight of it, a shroud of mist partially enveloped the summit, but this presently rolled away, and we saw its upper portion dimmed by a necklace of feathery clouds, beyond which its pointed apex of ice, glittering in the morning sun, shot up far into the blue heaven above. The top of the mountain is usually completely hidden and rarely indeed is it seen entirely free from clouds. The actual height of the peak is 13,700 feet, or 10,750 feet above the valley.… Although Robson Peak has been long known, its height had never been determined, nor was it supposed to be particularly notable in that respect, but now since the height of Mts. Brown, Hooker and Murchison have been proved to be greatly exaggerated, it has the distinction of being the highest known peak in the Canadian Rockies. [p. 16]

His report included a map showing the Yellowhead Pass route from Edmonton to Tête-Jaune Cache [6]. Arthur Oliver Wheeler [1860–1945] wrote in 1912 [7]:

The splendid report of James McEvoy, published by the Geological Survey of Canada in 1900, dealing with the geology and natural history resources of the country traversed by the Yellowhead Pass route from Edmonton to Tête-Jaune Cache, contains the most comprehensive and reliable geographical information that has yet been published, and also contains the only geographical map published of that route on a sufficiently large scale to be of value.

In 1901 McEvoy became geologist for the Crow’s Nest Pass Coal Company at Fernie, B.C. He married Florence Ray [1876 – d. 1942] in 1902. In 1906 he was appointed chief engineer of the company, but relinquished the position soon afterwards to commencial practice in Toronto. He was regarded as one of the best authorities on coal and his services had been retained for numerous enterprises in connection with coal, iron, and oil operations, not only in Canada but in all parts of the world. He was a member of the Canadian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, the Engineering Institute of Canada, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and of the Mining and Metallurgy Institute, London, England [8].

EARLY CITIZEN DIES SUDDENLY

James E. McEvoy, geologist and mining engineer, of Ottawa, died at Corbin on Friday inst. from a heart attack. Deceased had been reporting on some phosphate claims about six or seven miles from Corbin.

The death of James McEvoy recalls the early days of Fernie when he was one of our leading citizens and an official of the Crow’s Nest Pass Coal Co. He was a very clever geologist and made a lot of early surveys of the Crow’s Nest Pass coal fields. Had the C.P.R. paid attention to his reports on the Hosmer coal property they would have been a million or so to the good, his report was that the coal seams at that point could not be mined profitably.

During the time he spent in Fernie he took an active interest in local affairs. He was Instrumental in the forming of two companies of the Kootenay Rifles and was appointed captain of A company.

He severed his connection with the C.N.P. Coal Co. about 1907 and took up his residence in Toronto and later on moved to Ottawa.

— Fernie Free Press, July 26, 1935 [9]

He was survived by his widow and one daughter, Dorothy Ray McEvoy. McEvoy was buried in Beechwood Cemetery, Ottawa.

Frederick Arthur Ambrose Talbot [1880–1924]

b. 1880 — London, England
d. 1924 — Quebec, Canada

I was one of a party of six which set out from the western fringe of civilisation in Alberta to make the “North-West Passage” by land, threading 1,200 miles of wonderful, practically unknown country-the interior of New Caledonia, or, as it is now officially called, New British Columbia. The party consisted of Harry R. Charlton, Montreal ; Robert C. W. Lett, Winnipeg ; H. D. Lowry, Washington, U.S.A.; G. Horne Russell, Montreal; a photographer, and myself. The first and third left the party at Tête Jaune Cache to return. The object of my investigations was to form some notion of the economic and scenic value of the country traversed.

My best thanks are due to the Grand Trunk and Grand Trunk Pacific Railways for their valuable assistance in regard to facilities for making the journey and their courteous provision of the photographer, and for placing at my service the copyright photographs that embellish this volume; also to the hardy, hospitable frontiersmen and sourdoughs who, having themselves got in on the ground floor,” readily afforded me all possible information for the guidance of those who are bent upon wooing Fortune in a country which is being unlocked and rendered more accessible every day.

Stanley Washburn [1878–1950]

b. 1878 — Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
d. 1950

Journalist. Was born at Minneapolis, Feb. 7, 1878; son of William Drew and Elizabeth M. (Muzzy) Washburn. Educated at Williams Colloge, Mass., class of 1901, also short time at the Harvard Law School. Received degrees: A.B.Honorary Member Japanese Red Cross Society: Decorated by Emperor of Japan with order of the Imperial Crown. Was in local journalism in Minneapolis from 1901 to Jan., 1904, serving as police reporter, market editor, Sunday editor and editorial writer. Went to the Far East and became special war correspondent of the Chicago Daily News, commanding their despatch boat Fawan for four months in front of Port Arthur, being twice captured by the Russians. Later jointed the Third Japanese Army under Nogi at the siege of Port Arthur. Covered a war scare in the Balkans, and in 1905 (Jan.) was at St. Petersburg for the Revolution. Rejoined Army in Manchuria, where he remained until end of hostilities. Commanded despatch boat France in the Black Sea during late fall of 1905, on the occasion of Russian Revolution, carrying dispatches and mails for four powers and bringing out cargo of refugees from Batuum, then in state of anarchy. Occasional contributor to magazines. Member Delta Psi Fraternity, Masons, Minneapolis Club, Commercial Club and numerous other organizations.

Buried in Arlington National Cemetery, Virginia, USA, tombstone inscribed:
“Major, U. S. Army, Lt. Col. Military Intelligence Reserves.”

Author of several books, including Trails, Trappers and Tenderfeet in the New Empire of Western Canada, chronicling trips in the Yellowhead Pass area in 1901 and 1909. Stanley’s friend psychologist Lydiard Horton, his classmate at Williams, was the “Mountain Philosopher” of Trails Trappers and Tenderfeet.

John Norman Collie [1859–1942]

b. 1859 — Alderley Edge, Cheshire, England
d. 1942 — Sligachan, Isle of Skye, Scotland

Collie was a chemist and mountaineer who lived at London, England. Between 1897 and 1911, Collie pioneered climbing in the Canadian Rockies, making twenty-one first ascents including Mount Victoria and Mount Athabasca.

Elizabeth Parker [1856–1944]

b. 1856 — Colchester County, Nova Scotia
d. 1944 — Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

Parker was a Canadian journalist in the early 1900s. She attended school in Truro, Nova Scotia, obtained her teaching certificate, married Henry John Parker at the age of 18, moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia and then to Winnipeg. She co-founded the Alpine Club of Canada in 1906 with Arthur Oliver Wheeler [1860–1945].