Chapter 8. Rupert’s Land and the Northern Plains, 1690–1870
Chapter 8. Rupert’s Land and the Northern Plains, 1690–1870
8.12 Summary
The Napoleonic Wars, of which the War of 1812 was a part, barely touched the Prairie West. The Battle at Seven Oaks was an entirely separate event, one that reflected the isolation of the region from global events. Having said that, the region was fully vulnerable to global trade, and it was competition in Atlantic marketplaces that brought the HBC, the NWC, and their respective allies to blows in 1816. The theme of competing visions of the economy and orientation of the economy of the West was, in fact, to dominate debate and life on the Plains for the next 60 years. The consolidation of the NWC into the HBC left many of the Métis on the outside looking in. The fur trade’s best years, however, were behind it and the years ahead were nothing like those that had passed. The subsequent crash of beaver and, slightly later, bison populations brought to an end nearly a century of flourishing Plains cultures, culminating in some of the bloodiest wars in Canadian history and, thereafter, the arrival of a new imperial master from the east and the signing of treaties.
Overall, we may characterize the history of the West and the North in the years from 1670 to 1870 as an age of Indigenous dynamism and continuity and European/Canadian intrusion on an almost haphazard basis. It is one region in what is now Canada where we can observe Indigenous agendas playing out over a sustained period of time without being drawn into intercolonial wars. The transformation of pedestrian and clannish people from the Hudson Bay Lowlands into a mounted and armed Plains cavalry capable of reaching far greater numbers and conducting dramatic raids and hunts across a huge range tells us two things. First, Indigenous peoples were never static and always adaptable and that there is no single typology for historic Indigenous peoples that suffices. Second, it shows how the world that Canadians encountered in the West in the late 19th century was a changed place, turning on a series of revolutions in social and economic organization. The Canadians who arrived on the scene in the 1860s and 1870s, however, would mistake what they saw for a timeless and primitive land of warring and starving Natives lorded over by an autocratic HBC. This unsophisticated view would lead the Canadians to make a series of fateful errors as they sought to expand their own vision of a unified British North America.
Key Terms
Assiniboia: Synonymous with Selkirk Colony or Red River Colony. The Treaty of 1818 divided it at the 49th parallel, thereby reducing Assiniboia significantly. After Confederation and the creation of the province of Manitoba, the name was applied to a new regional administrative unit in the North West Territories. This District of Assiniboia ran horizontally across the southern Canadian Prairies and was bounded on the east by Manitoba, on the south by the 49th parallel and the United States, on the west by the Distri