Rupert's Land
Two
disaffected French fur traders, Medard Chouart des Groseilliers and his
brother-in-law Pierre-Esprit Radisson, having failed to interest the French
authorities in their scheme to develop a fur trade based on access to the
continental interior via what is now known as Hudson Bay, took their plans
to London and found the necessary financial and political support they
needed there. A group of London merchants won the support of Prince Rupert,
a cousin of King Charles II, and, in 1670, the King granted a charter to
a joint-stock company, the Hudson's Bay Company, giving it a monopoly of
all trade in the Hudson Bay drainage basin, a territory comprising some
4 million square kilometres. For almost 200 years the Hudson's Bay Company
ruled over this region, exploring it and establishing fur trading posts,
initially at the mouths of rivers emptying into the Bay, but eventually
inland as well. In 1870 the Company surrendered its title to Rupert's Land
to the new Canadian federation in return for a cash settlement of 300,000
Pounds Sterling and almost 3 million acres of agricultural land in western
Canada.
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