Allen Carpé [1894–1932]

b. 1894 — Chicago
d. 1932 — Mount McKinley, Alaska

Allen Carpé was an American engineer and mountaineer who was a member of the Alpine Club of Canada from 1920.

In 1924 Carpé, Rollin Thomas Chamberlin [1881–1948], and A. L. (Pete) Withers went up Tête Creek “and made some fine climbs, among them Mount Sir Wilfrid Laurier.” (1)

In 1925, he was a member of the expedition that made the first ascent of Mount Logan. He lost his life on Mount McKinley in May 1932, as the leader of a party making scientific observations relating to cosmic rays.

Carpé’s name appears with and without an accent in various documents.

Dalby Brooks Morkill [1880–1955]

b. 1880 — Sherbrooke, Québec, Canada
d. 1955 — Vancouver, B.C., Canada

Morkill came to British Columbia in 1898. He received his commission as a British Columbia Land Surveyor in 1910. Morkill was employed in 1912 by the British Columbia government making surveys on the Fraser River between Horsey Creek and Holmes River. In 1913, with Alan S. Thompson, Morkill surveyed between the Goat River and Catfish Creek. Morkill worked on the Alberta-British Columbia Boundary Commission surveys north of Yellowhead Pass in the early 1920s. Subsequently Morkill surveyed in several other areas of the Province. During his last years he spent summers at his residence at Barkerville and winters in Vancouver. He was president of the Association of BC Land Surveyors in 1928.

Samuel Prescott Fay [1884–1971]

b. 1884
d. 1971

“Pete” Fay as he was known to his friends had been a member of the [American Alpine] Club for 59 years at the time of his death last August [1971]. His qualifications for election in 1912 were four seasons in the Canadian Rockies beginning in 1906. In 1914 he joined a Smithsonian expedition which left Jasper, Alberta in June for the purposes of exploration, mapping and the collection of birds and mammals in the northern Rockies. Reports were filed with the Biological Survey in Washington. In mid-October the party met a trapper who showed them an old newspaper with reports of the first weeks of World War I of which they had no inkling. For the next three or four days they traveled non-stop to reach Hudson Hope on the Peace River.
Pete graduated from Harvard in 1907. During World War I he joined the American Field Service to drive an ambulance in France and later served with the Air Force in France and Belgium. Afterwards he was associated with an investment counseling firm in Boston for many years. Aside from two years on the Council (1930-1932), he did not take an active part in Club affairs, though he attended frequent meetings. Frail health confined him to his home for the last ten or more years.

Charles Doolittle Walcott was an American paleontologist and director of the Smithsonian Institution from 1907 to 1927. He made several field trips in the Canadian Rockies, discovering the Burgess Shale fossil bed in 1909, sponsoring the 1911 Alpine Club of Canada–Smithsonian Robson Expedition (he was unable to attend in person due to the death of his wife Helena in a train crash on June 11), conducting his own investigation of the Mount Robson area in 1912, and attending the 1913 Alpine Club of Canada Camp at Mount Robson where he continued his geological investigations.

Walcott was married three times — to Lura Ann Rust [1843-1876], to Helena Breese Stevens [1858-1911], and to Mary Morris Vaux [1860-1940]. By his second wife he had four children: Charles Doolittle Jr. [1889-1913], Sidney Stevens [1892-1977], Helena Breeze [1894-1965], and Benjamin Stuart [1896–1917]. Charles died while a student at Yale, and Benjamin was killed in action in France in 1917 flying for the Lafayette Flying Corps.

When Walcott traveled to the Canadian Rockies during the summer in search of fossils, often his wife and children would accompany him on his expeditions.

Gabriel Franchère [1786–1863]

b. 1786 — Montréal, Quebec
d. 1863 — St. Paul, Minnesota

French Canadian author and explorer of the Pacific Northwest. Franchère was born in Montreal and joined the Pacific Fur Company as a merchant apprentice, arriving at Fort Astoria on the Tonquin. After Astoria was sold to the North West Company, Franchère returned to Montréal overland in 1814. He was employed for a time by John Jacob Astor in Montréal. He wrote Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America, published in 1819.

Paul Kane [1810–1871]

b. 1810 — Mallow, County Cork, Ireland
d. 1871 — Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Kane was an Irish-born Canadian painter, famous for his paintings of First Nations peoples in the Canadian West and other Native Americans in the Columbia Departmentof the fur trade.

A largely self-educated artist, Paul Kane grew up in York, Upper Canada (now Toronto), and trained himself by copying European masters on a “Grand Tour” study trip through Europe. He undertook two voyages through the Canadian northwest in 1845 and from 1846 to 1848. The first trip took him from Toronto to Sault Ste. Marie and back. Having secured the support of the Hudson’s Bay Company, he set out on a second, much longer voyage from Toronto across the Rocky Mountains. On October 6, 1846, Kane left Edmonton for Fort Assiniboine, where he again embarked with a canoe brigade up the Athabasca River to Jasper House, arriving on November 3. Here he joined a large horse troop bound west, but the party soon had to send the horses back to Jasper’s House and continue on snowshoes, taking only the essentials with them, because Athabasca Pass was already too deeply snowed in that late in the year. They crossed the pass on November 12 and three days later joined a canoe brigade that had been waiting to take them down the Columbia River to Fort Vancouver (present-day Vancouver, Washington) and Fort Victoria (present day Victoria, British Columbia).

On both trips Kane sketched and painted First Nations and Métis peoples. Upon his return to Toronto, he produced more than one hundred oil paintings from these sketches. The oil paintings he completed in his studio are considered a part of the Canadian heritage, although he often embellished them considerably, departing from the accuracy of his field sketches in favour of more dramatic scenes.

Cautley was the original Alberta and later also the Dominion representative on the Alberta-British Columbia Boundary Commission, which conducted surveys in the Mount Robson region from 1917 to 1924.

The Alberta boundary commissioner was responsible for surveying the boundary in the passes. Cautley was an experienced surveyor, having obtained his first commission in 1896. Although Cautley was responsible for the surveys in the passes, the location of the monument positions was decided collectively by the Commission, which included as British Columbia commissioner Arthur Oliver Wheeler [1860–1945].

Cautley andWheeler wrote the reports for the Commission and supervised production of the maps After 1924 Cautley went to Ottawa with the Department of the Interior and was responsible for the survey of many of the national park sites in the maritime provinces.

He came to Canada at the age of 17 and became attached to a firm of surveyors in British Columbia. Later, he went north into the Klondike at the time of the gold rush and was engaged in the recording and inspection of mineral claim surveys. Upon termination of the gold rush, his footsteps led to Edmonton where he formed the land surveying firm of Cautley and Cote. Later, he went into partnership with his brother Reginald Hutton Cautley. Cautley was a charter member of the Alberta Land Surveyors’ Association, and was the Association’s president in 1914.

David Douglas [1799–1834]

b. 1799 — Scone, Scotland
d. 1834 — Mauna Kea, Hawaii

Hudson’s Bay Company [founded 1670]

Founded 1670

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 James McMillan 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]

North West Company [1779–1821]

b. 1779 — Montreal, Quebec
d. 1821 — London, England

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)