An Extensive and Unknown Portion of the Empire: The Montreal Natural History Society’s Survey of Rupert’s Land, 1827-1830

Type of resource
Author/collaborator
Title
An Extensive and Unknown Portion of the Empire: The Montreal Natural History Society’s Survey of Rupert’s Land, 1827-1830
Abstract
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). The Natural History Society of Montreal was founded by a group largely composed of physicians and educators, such as John Bethune, Alexander Skakel, William Robertson and Andrew Fernando Holmes. The author points out that in 1828 the Indian 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. However, the author explains that intervention by the HBC’s Governor and London Committee meant that no replies were received in Montreal and the Society’s project was unrealized. The author 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. The author 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. The author's object is to fill a gap in the history of science and western exploration in pre-Confederation Canada and 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.
Type
Master's thesis
University
Concordia University
Place
Montreal
Date
2015
# of Pages
vii-148p.
Language
en
URL
Citation
Little, Geoffrey Robert. “An Extensive and Unknown Portion of the Empire: The Montreal Natural History Society’s Survey of Rupert’s Land, 1827-1830.” Master’s thesis, Concordia University, 2015. https://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/980487/1/Little_MA_F2015.pdf.
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