ABSTRACT
At the time of the US Civil War, the nucleus of the nation we today call Canada was known as British North America and was ruled directly by the British Crown. It consisted of a congeries of colonies in the eastern part of the country, principally Quebec, Ontario, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.1 Meanwhile, the vast western portion of the future nation, some one-third of its total land area, was, as it had been for almost 200 years, the exclusive fief of the great trading monopoly, the Hudson’s Bay Company. Called Rupert’s Land, in homage to its first governor, Prince Rupert of the Rhine (the warrior cousin of Charles II, who had granted the company its charter in 1670), the Company’s domain stretched from just beyond the western end of Lake Superior to the Rocky Mountains and from the US border to the Arctic Circle. In 1867, however, all of this would change. As a result of the happy confluence of a Canadian yearning for greater self-government and a British desire for imperial retrenchment, extension by the Crown of dominion status to its North American colonies brought into being a Canadian confederation exercising virtual self-government from its capital in Ottawa.2
