The Montreal Natural History Society's Survey of Rupert's Land, 1827
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An Extensive and Unknown Portion of the Empire: The Montreal Natural History Society’s Survey of Rupert’s Land, 1827-1830 Geoffrey Robert Little A Thesis in The Department of History Presented in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts (History) at Concordia University Montreal, Quebec, Canada September 2015 © Geoffrey Robert Little, 2015 CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY School of Graduate Studies This is to certify that the thesis prepared By: Geoffrey Robert Little Entitled: An Extensive and Unknown Portion of the Empire: The Montreal Natural History Society’s Survey of Rupert’s Land, 1827-1830 and submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts (History) complies with the regulations of the University and meets the accepted standards with respect to originality and quality. Signed by the final Examining Committee: ____________________ Chair Dr. Andrew Ivaska ____________________ Examiner Dr. Elsbeth Heaman ____________________ Examiner Dr. Ted McCormick ____________________ Supervisor Dr. Gavin Taylor Approved by ____________________________________________ Chair of Department or Graduate Program Director __________2015 _____________________________ Dean of Faculty ABSTRACT An Extensive and Unknown Portion of the Empire: The Montreal Natural History Society’s Survey of Rupert’s Land, 1827-1830 Geoffrey Robert Little Shortly after it was founded in May 1827, the Montreal Natural History Society constituted an Indian Committee to study the “the native inhabitants...and the Natural History of the Interior, and its fitness for the purposes of commerce and agriculture.” The Interior was Rupert’s Land, the territory to the west and the north of Montreal governed by the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC). In 1828 the Committee had a survey containing 253 questions on the climate, geography, inhabitants, and resources of Rupert’s Land distributed to HBC traders and individuals living in the Interior, along with instructions on how to prepare specimens to send to the Society’s museum. Intervention by the HBC’s Governor and London Committee meant that no replies were received in Montreal and the Society’s project was unrealized. This thesis explores the Society’s interest in the development of the Interior as well as in gathering data about its Aboriginal population within the contexts of westward expansion across North America and Aboriginal policy in Upper and Lower Canada and the United States after the end of the War of 1812. It also examines the history and practice of natural history in the early nineteenth-century Anglo-American world and efforts by the Society to establish itself as a node within international scientific networks. This study fills a gap in the history of science and western exploration in pre-Confederation Canada and will help historians understand how the Montreal Natural History Society imagined an Interior transformed through settlement, commerce, and agriculture into a productive, peopled, and civilized part of the British Empire. iii DEDICATION For my parents, Diane and Robert (1946-2004) iv TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures vi Note on Terminology vii Introduction 1 Chapter 1. Historiographical Overview 9 Chapter 2. “The Nomination of the Visible:” 26 Natural History, Exploration, and Fur Chapter 3. Scientific Networks, Colonization, and Empire: 38 The Creation of the Montreal Natural History Society Chapter 4. “All the Indians in the Universe”: 66 Aboriginals in the Interior and the Canadas After 1815 Chapter 5. “The Replies with which we May be Favored”: 86 Gathering Data from the Interior Conclusion 115 Bibliography 124 Appendix. “Queries Connected with the Natural History 139 of the Honorable Hudson’s Bay Company’s Territory and the Indian Territories of British North America, Addressed to the Gentleman in the Interior” v LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. British North America in 1825 8 Figure 2. “Louisiana Purchase and Controversies, 1803-1819” 65 vi NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY The term “Aboriginal” is used throughout this thesis to refer to the descendants of the original inhabitants of North America. “Indian” is used in a few instances to refer to cultural or visual tropes. The term “Métis” is used to refer to the distinct Aboriginal peoples of mixed European and Aboriginal heritage with historical roots in the Canadian West. The names of specific Aboriginal groups are used as appropriate. “The Interior” and “Rupert’s Land” are used interchangeably to describe the part of North America granted to the Hudson’s Bay Company by its 1670 charter. The Montreal Natural History Society occasionally also referred to it as the “Indian Country” or “Indian Territory.” vii INTRODUCTION On the last day of February 1828, five members of the Montreal Natural History Society gathered to hold the first meeting of the Society’s Indian Committee. Struck seven months after the Society had been founded in May 1827 by twenty-six members of Montreal’s anglophone elite, including six medical doctors, three Presbyterian ministers, two lawyers, a dentist, and assorted merchants and tradesmen, the Indian Committee had two objectives: to study the “intellectual and moral conditions” of the Aboriginal inhabitants of Upper and Lower Canada, including their “habits, customs, manners, language, and institutions,” and, “connected with that subject, the Physical Geography and Natural History of the Interior and its fitness for the purposes of commerce and agriculture.”1 The Interior, which the Committee would later describe as an “extensive and almost unknown portion of the empire,” was Rupert’s Land (Figure 1), the territory of almost four million square kilometres to the west and north of Montreal that had been granted by Charles II to the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), the privately controlled London-based fur trading concern, in 1670.2 To meet these objectives, in spring 1828 the Indian Committee prepared a request for specimens and two identical surveys with 253 questions on the geography, environment, resources, climate, and Aboriginal inhabitants of Rupert’s Land, one addressed to individuals living in the Interior or who had spent time there, and the other to men employed by the HBC at its forts and trading posts (Appendix). Distribution of the survey meant for HBC employees was facilitated by George Simpson (1786/87-1860), a member of the Indian Committee 1 “Minutes of the Indian Committee of the Natural History Society of Montreal, 29 February 1828,” QH1 N274, Blacker-Wood Manuscripts, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University Library (hereafter “Minutes of the Indian Committee”). 2 “First Report of the Indian Committee of the Natural History Society of Montreal Read at the Meeting of that Society on the 26th May 1828,” Appendix C [Circular], MS Folio QH1 N2698 1828, Blacker- Wood Manuscripts, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University Library (hereafter “First Report of the Indian Committee;” specific appendices will be indicated in the notation). 1 and since 1826 governor-in-residence of the HBC’s North American territories. After 1821 these included the Columbia Department (Figure 1), the area west of the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean claimed by both Britain and the United States but open to both nations as a result of the Treaty of 1818. The Indian Committee’s project was compromised, however, when the HBC’s Governor and London Committee learned about the survey and ordered their employees to send documentation and specimens to the imperial capital instead of Montreal. Other efforts to acquire survey responses appear to have been unsuccessful. As a result of a lack of data, the Montreal Natural History Society abandoned its study of the Interior and after 1830 there are no references to the Indian Committee or its project in the Society’s publications or archive, now part of the Blacker-Wood Library of Zoology and Ornithology’s collection of manuscripts in the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at the McGill University Library. Historians of Canadian science and western exploration point to the Montreal Natural History Society and to the Indian Committee as proof of an interest in science in British North America before 1842, the year that the Canadian Geological Survey was established, or as evidence that the Hudson’s Bay Company had become more willing to support Canadian scientific and exploratory initiatives after its merger with its Montreal rival the North West Company (NWC) in 1821. Both of those arguments are true, but this thesis contends that the Indian Committee’s project was more sophisticated and complex than has been described in the literature to date. Most studies, including very recent ones, describe the Indian Committee’s survey as an interesting but unrealized attempt by well-meaning amateurs to undertake a significant scientific and ethnographic project in the absence of government or military support or funding. This conclusion has minimized and underemphasized the project’s value to historians of the Canadian West and to historians of science in pre-Confederation Canada. 2 This thesis argues that the Indian Committee’s survey of the Interior was a challenge to what A.A. den Otter has claimed was the dominant British view of Rupert’s Land, that “it was a vast, isolated, and untamed wilderness” and that the “original human inhabitants of the northern expanse were but components of an uncivilized nature…a homogenous people with a simple, undiversified culture.”3 Instead the Indian Committee’s project had as its goal the increase of the geographic, physical, and demographic knowledge of the Interior available to men in Montreal with the goal of opening it up to development and settlement. It was an overtly imperial project, but one not organized in Whitehall or by the Admiralty or Royal Engineers, but by members of Montreal’s commercial anglophone elite who saw potential in the Interior and who wanted to extend British influence across the middle of the continent to the Pacific coast.