This chapter explores fur trade societies in the British Northwest, including the emergence of a Métis people resulting from “county marriages” between French fur traders and Indigenous women. After 1763, competition between the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) and Montreal-based traders, brought together in the Northwest Company (NWC), resulted in an explosion of posts throughout the interior and beyond the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific coast, which was also being approached by European explorers by sea. Britain vied with Russia, Spain, and the United States for control of the Pacific Northwest, avoiding wars by negotiating territorial boundaries that were largely set by 1846. Most Indigenous peoples welcomed the opportunities generated by European rivalries but conditions changed after Lord Selkirk sponsored a settlement in Red River (now Winnipeg) in 1812. Escalating violence between the rival companies and a depleted animal population forced a merger of the two companies in 1821. Under George Simpson’s management (1821-60), the HBC streamlined its operations to the disadvantage of their Indigenous trading partners. The HBC held a monopoly of trade in the Great Northwest, but its power and the numerical dominance of Indigenous peoples were increasingly threatened. In 1849, Vancouver Island became a Crown colony and the Métis successfully challenged the monopoly of the HBC

This chapter explores the conditions leading to the expansion of Europeans in the late fourteenth century; their tentative efforts to establish colonies in northern North America; and the impact of European contact on the Indigenous peoples who interacted with the intruders. The time frame is bounded by the Viking settlement at L’Anse-aux-Meadows in Newfoundland more than a thousand years ago and the founding by the English of the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1670, which claimed trading rights in Rupert’s Land, the vast area whose rivers drained into Hudson Bay. It focuses on the reasons for and the range of European exploration and settlement in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the rivalry among European countries (especially England and France) for dominance in North America; and the role of the cod fisheries and the fur trade in luring people across the Atlantic to exploit North American resources and to interact with local inhabitants in what was seen by Europeans as a “new world.” The chapter includes a discussion of the efforts by England, Scotland, and France to plant colonies in eastern North America (Newfoundland, Acadie/Nova Scotia, and Canada) in the early sixteenth century.

The First Voyage of Captain Cook on the Endeavour is often seen as inaugurating a new kind of scientific expedition in which ships functioned both as the primary instrument for the production of global maps and as floating natural history laboratories in which information concerning indigenous people, plants, and animals extended across the globe. This chapter examines the intellectual links between these forms of colonial knowledge-making by discussing the manner in which they first came together in Canada in Moses Harris’s Porcupine Map (1750). The map provides the first published illustrations of Canadian insects; it is also one of the last maps to include representations of indigenous flora and fauna. The task of visualizing global natures would be taken up by the descriptive technologies of natural history. As Cook and Banks were renaming the landforms and biota of the South Pacific, the Hudson’s Bay Company was mapping places and animals, drawing on the knowledge and names provided by indigenous peoples. Although the indigenous understanding of places and animals underwent erasure, these early maps and natural histories are valuable for voicing both European conceptions of new and unfamiliar places and natures and those of indigenous peoples.