Named after the Cree word for
murky water ("win-nipuy"),
Winnipeg owes much of its history
to the Red and Assiniboine rivers,
which meet just south of today's
city centre at the confluence
called
The Forks . The
first European to reach the area
was Pierre Gaultier, Sieur de la Vérendrye,
an enterprising explorer who
founded
Fort Rouge near the
convergence of the two rivers in
1738. This settlement was part of
a chain of fur-trading posts he
built to extend French influence
into the west. Prospering from
good connections north along the
Red River to Lake Winnipeg and
Hudson Bay, and west along the
Assiniboine across the plains, the
fort became one of the region's
most important outposts within
twenty years.
After the defeat of New France
in 1763, local trading activity
was absorbed by the Montréal-based
North West Company , which
came to dominate the fur trade at
the expense of its rival, the Hudson's
Bay Company . The latter
continued to operate from
fortified coastal factories
staffed by British personnel,
expecting their Indian trading
partners to bring their pelts to
them - unlike their rivals, who
were prepared to live and travel
among the natives. This inflexible
policy looked like the ruination
of the company until it was
rescued by Thomas Douglas, the
Earl of Selkirk, who bought a
controlling interest in 1809.
In the three years Lord
Selkirk took to turn the
business round, he resettled many
of his own impoverished Scottish
crofters around The Forks, buying
from his own company a huge tract
of farmland, which he named the Red
River Colony , or Assiniboia.
The arrival of these colonists
infuriated the Nor'Westers, who
saw the Scottish settlement as a
direct threat to their trade
routes. They encouraged their Métis
allies and employees to harry the
Scots and for several years there
was continuous skirmishing, which
reached tragic proportions in
1816, when 21 settlers were killed
by the Métis in the Seven Oaks
Massacre.
Just five years later the two
rival fur-trading firms
amalgamated under the
"Hudson's Bay Company"
trade name, bringing peace and a
degree of prosperity to the area.
Yet the colony remained a
rough-and-ready place, as a
chaplain called John West
lamented: "Almost every
inhabitant we passed bore a gun
upon his shoulder and all appeared
in a wild and hunter-like
state". For the next thirty
years, the colony sustained an
economic structure that suited
both the farmers and the Métis
hunters, and trade routes were
established along the Red River
with Minnesota, south of the
border. But in the 1860s this
balance of interests collapsed
with the decline of the buffalo
herds, and the Métis faced
extreme hardship just at the time
when the Hudson's Bay Company had
itself lost effective
administrative control of its
territories.
At this time of internal
crisis, the politicians of eastern
Canada agreed the federal union of
1867, opening the way for the
transfer of the Red River Colony
from British to Canadian control.
The Métis majority - roughly 6000
compared to some 1000 whites -
were fearful of the consequences
and their resistance took shape
round Louis Riel , under
whose dexterous leadership they
captured the Hudson's Bay
Company's Upper Fort Garry and
created a provisional government
without challenging the
sovereignty of the crown. A
delegation went to Ottawa to
negotiate the terms of their
admission into the Dominion, but
their efforts were handicapped by
the execution by Métis of an
English settler from Ontario, Thomas
Scott . The subsequent furore
pushed prime minister John A.
Macdonald into dispatching a
military force to restore
"law and order";
nevertheless, the Manitoba Act
of 1870, which brought the Red
River into the Dominion, did
accede to many of the demands of
the Métis, at the price of Riel's
exile, and guaranteed the
preservation of the French culture
and language in the new province -
although in practice this was not
effectively carried out.
The eclipse of the Métis and
the security of Winnipeg - as it
became in 1870 - were both assured
when the Canadian Pacific
Railway routed its
transcontinental line through The
Forks in 1885. With the town's
commodity markets handling the
expanding grain trade and its
industries supplying the vast
rural hinterland, its population
was swelled by thousands of
immigrants, particularly from the
Ukraine, Germany and Poland; in
1901 it had risen to 42,000. By
World War I Winnipeg had become
the third largest city in Canada
and the largest grain-producing
centre in North America, and by
1921 the population had reached
192,000. More recently, the
development of other prairie
cities, such as Regina and
Saskatoon, has undermined
something of Winnipeg's
pre-eminence, but the city is
still the economic focus and
transport hub of central Canada.
