HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY, a corporation erected in 1670 by Charles IL, primarily consisted of prince Rupert, the king's cousin, and certain specified associates. It was invested with the absolute proprietorship, subordinate sovereignty, and exclusive traffic of an undefined territory, which, under the name of Rupert's Land, comprised all the regions discovered, or to be discovered, within the entrance of Hudson's strait. Rupert's Land was decidedly the most extensive of the dependencies of England, being held to embrace all the lands that poured water into Hudson's bay or Hudson's strait. For more than a century, however, the grantees confined themselves to the coast. About the period of the formation of the American republic their advance into the interior was accelerated, if not occasioned, by the more mature development of an ancient rivalry. From about the middle of the 17th c.—an epoch antecedent to the charter—New France, besides stretching, in name, to the arctic circle, had. in reality, advanced to the shores of Hudson's bay; and this position of faiths was virtually recognized by that provision of the letters-patent which exempted from their operation any actual possessions of any Christian prince or state. Though the claims of France, after being confirmed in 107 by the treaty of Ryswick, were at last abandoned in 1713 by the treaty of Utrecht, yet, in point of fact, adventurers from the great lakes, while Canada was still French, had penetrated, in quest of peltry, far up the Saskatchawan towards the Rocky mountains. Such overland enterprises—interrupted, for a few years, by the conquest and cession of 1759-63—soon came to be prosecuted, with more systematic energy, under English auspices, till, in 1783, they led to the formation of the North-west company of Montreal. After an age of stubborn competition, the Hudson's bay company coalesced, in 1821, with its formidable opponent.
'But the two members of the new partnership had already almost doubled the origi nal field of contention. The older association had, about 1770, traversed the basin of the Coppermiue; and, fully 20 years later, the younger one had descended the Mac kenzie to the Arctic sea, and had, through the barrier of the Rocky'mountains, reached the Pacific ocean. Even in general equity, a body which now represented all the dis
coverers bad a peculiar right to the discoveries themselves; but beyond general equity, a secondary provision of the letters-patent of Charles II. had regarded such discoveries, at least for the purposes of trade, as accretions to the primary grant. Accordingly, when, in 1S21, parliament, in view of the intolerable evils of competition, empowered the crown to issue licenses for the "Indian territories"—expressly declared to be all the wildernesses of British North America to the w. of Rupert's Land—the government exercised this statutory authority in favor of the Hudson's bay company as recast and extended by the coalition. So far as commerce was concerned, there was now no prac tical difference between Rupert's Land and the Indian territories, excepting that the charter of the former was perpetual, and the license of the latter was to be for 20 years at a time; and thus the newly modified association virtually ruled the western world, through 75° of long., from Davis's strait to Mt. St. Elias, and, through 28° of lat., from the mouth of the Mackenzie to the borders of California. • About 20 years after the coalition, Oregon from the borders of California to the par allel of 49° n., which had always been open to Americans by international arrangement, was given up to the United States by the same treaty which sacrificed sections of Canada and New Brunswick; in 1859 the rest of the tramontane tract wits brought within the pale of civilization as the national colonies of Vancouver's island and British Columbia; and lastly, as the second term of the license was, in 1859, also permitted to expire with out renewal, the remainder of the " Indian territories" was then potentially thrown back into the condition from which the statute of 1821 had seen fit to rescue all these cases, excepting. of course, the case of Oregon, the Hudson's bay company would appear to have lost rather formal privilege than actual influence, retaining, if not a legal monopoly old, at least a commercial supremacy on a wider basis.