History
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 Verendrye, 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 Montreal-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 Metis 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 Metis 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 Metis 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 Metis 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 Metis 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 Metis 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 Metis, 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 Metis 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.
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