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The Hudson’s Bay Company

Captain George Vancouver's chart of 
Vancouver Island and "New Hanover,"
or what came be called British Columbia

Captain Vancouver is credited with some of the earliest maps of the Pacific Northwest, but his enterprise was limited to the coast. Many of the major rivers are absent, and only the mouth of the Columbia river is shown in his charts. From 1789-1795 Captain Vancouver and some notable Spanish explorers began to map out the isles of the Canadian Pacific; their names have since become familiar toponyms on navigational charts, from Texada Island, Galiano and the Juan de Fuca Strait.

On the coast, a series of successive archipelagos ranging from Haida Gwaii to the San Juans posed a navigational challenge; in the interior, the foreboding Rocky Mountain range cut across the rolling plateau of the Canadian prairies. It was not until Alexander Mackenzie trudged through to Bella Coola in 1793 that Europeans began to lay claim to the rugged BC interior. Primarily, these first explorers were motivated by the same thing: the fur trade. It was two hundred years before Hudson’s Bay and the North West Company began to build trading forts in BC, headed by Mackenzie, Simon Fraser and David Thompson. These two companies merged in 1821; from thereon, the Hudson’s Bay Company actively made use of the trails, forts, and First Nations trading relationships to expand its commercial territory.
Returning, we ascended the Fraser in canoes as far as the mouth of the Que-que-al-al. where the village of Hope now stands; and thence, hap-hazard, struck across the Cascade Mountains to the Similkameen, which we followed down until we fell in with our horses at an appointed rendez-vous in the open country.1
 The R.C. Harris fonds includes many of the reports, early maps, and trip logs of these first explorers. The two charts featured here are copies from Captain George Vancouver's travels on the HMS Discovery, and can be found in the R.C. Harris fonds. Explorerers of particular interest include David Thompson, Alexander Ross, Samuel Black and, most notably, A.C. Anderson, the man behind the HBC brigade trails.

George Vancouver's charts of the Queen Charlotte
Islands (Haida Gwaii) 
British Columbia only joined Federation in 1871; the Canadian government decided that a railway could connect the two seemingly disparate poles across the 49th parallel. The Fraser River and Cariboo Gold Rush led to an influx of new immigrants seeking their fortunes; this put a cultural and economic strain on the new colony. When the United States bought Alaska in 1867, the Dominion of Canada decided to take action: debts were paid, a railway was promised, federal support was guaranteed. The Canadian Pacific Railway soon proved to be a nigh-impossible task, but the “Last Spike” was finally struck by CPR patron Donald Smith in 1885, and the tracks were extended to Vancouver in 1886.

To avoid the Black Canyon and Hells Gate section of the Fraser, and the rocky mountain spurs now pierced by the Alexandra and other tunnels, the trail angled northeast over the sidehill, aiming for the lowest part of the ridge and Kamloops. Even today, the section of the Fraser Canyon avoided by the HBC trail requires sixteen railway tunnels, four highway tunnels, three fish ladders and innumerable retaining walls and bridges to get the traffic by, on a reasonable grade.2            
For early settlers, most of the interest lay with either the promise of gold or the profits of trade. See 1848 HSBC Trail from Alexandra Lodge for

more information.

1 Anderson, A.C. The History of the Northwest Coast. Unpublished transcript, n.d. in R.C. Harris Fonds, Box 66, Folder 5. The Irving K. Barber Rare Books and Special Collections at University of British Columbia Libraries.↩
 2 Harris, Bob. "The 1848 HSBC Trail to Alexandra Lodge." Best of BC's Hiking Trails: Twenty Great Hikes. Vancouver: MacLean Hunter, 1986. 116. ↩
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