alternatehistory.com

Here's the next regular update. It's a big one.

Part Sixty-Nine: Our Nieghbors Up North

A Company Project:
The latter half of the 19th century also was an important time for the area north of the United States, then united under the British crown as British North America. The period saw a great amount of development of the regional economy and a large influx of immigrants, just as in the United States, led to the settlement of the interior plains of British North America. A large part of the development of the western reaches of British North America came with the extensions of the railway from Hudson Bay and the eastern dominions out to the Pacific Ocean.

The Hudson Pacific Railway is for the most part the successor to other routes that had been used by trappers and settlers to cross the northern plains since the English and French arrived in North America. After the British defeat in the Oregon War, the Hudson Bay Company and Great Britain saw that maintaining a solid transportation link between Canada and the western coast of North America as well as the development of a naval base on the Pacific coast was a necessary goal to maintain British control of the northern Pacific. For this purpose, the only settlement suitable was Fort Simpson on the border with Russia.

There was also debate between the Hudson Bay Company and Great Britain over where the railroad itself was to connect at the eastern end. The HBC initially proposed that the railroad should follow the route of the York Factory Express and connect to the Hudson Bay port of York Factory, the colonial headquarters of the Hudson Bay Company[1]. The British government wanted to keep the railroad along the southern edge of British North America and connect the railroad with already existing rail in Canada. As Parliament had been granting more powers within the administration of British North America to the Hudson Bay Company, the HBC's plan was decided upon in 1875 under the auspices of HBC governor Stafford Henry Northcote. The railroad was completed in 1882, with extensions to the east being constructed in 1885.


The Mormon Revolution:
With the growing powers of the Hudson Bay Company in western British North America, the policies in Prince Rupert's Land started to become rather harsh on the Mormons who had migrated there. The power of enforcement of the laws in Rupert's Land had been given to the Hudson Bay Company since 1821, but starting in the 1860s, the British government gradually granted legislative powers to the HBC as well[2]. As more immigrants came into the eastern plains and the western gold mining towns, HBC governor William Garnett decided it was necessary to enforce stricter, more conservative policies. These policies did not sit well with the Mormon community in Winnipeg and the surrounding area.

While the Mormon opposition to the HBC's conservative laws grew, the Hudson Bay Company continued to pass legislation in an attempt to curb some of the American immigration to British North America and increase the control that the HBC had over the territory, both economically and politically. In 1865, the Colonial Transit Act imposed a regulation that all goods being exported from Rupert's Land and New Caledonia had to pass through Hudson Bay Company office cities. The only HBC offices at the time were in York Factory on Hudson Bay and Fort Simpson on the Pacific Ocean. As most of the international exports from the Mormon populated areas was to the United States, the law was very inefficient for the economy of the Mormon towns, and an appeal to the colonial office in York Factory for the creation of an HBC office in Winnipeg was denied[3]. Regulations such as these continued to be passed, and the region exploded into open rebellion in 1880.

The Mormon Revolution was led by Lewis Farnsworth, a local leader from the Mormon community in Whitmer. As the region was sparsely populated and was surrounded by several large lakes, the rebellion was easily defensible against attacks by HBC or British soldiers. The successful defense of the small isthmus in the Battle of Cedar Lake by the Hudson Bay Company defined the northern extent of the Mormon raids during the rebellion. However, the rebellion also cut off much of the communication between the Hudson Bay Company and Winnipeg, and the rebellion is remembered as a period of lawlessness in the city. After 17 months of open rebellion against the Hudson Bay Company, the new governor of the HBC Lord Dufferin[4] called Farnsworth to a meeting in London. Farnsworth made his case to Lord Dufferin who took the issue in front of Parliament. In 1886, the British government agreed to establish the Dominion of Deseret in the lands in southeastern Rupert's Land with large Mormon populations, including Winnipeg. Whitmer, as the original Mormon settlement in the area, was made the capital of the new Dominion, and soon a railroad connected it with Winnipeg in the south.


The Yukon Purchase:
With the Hudson Bay Company gaining more control over the lands in northwestern North America, the economic productivity of the territory began to decline with the decline of the fur trade. As more people in the region concentrated in the towns and began settling the Great Northern Prairie, the main driver of the economy and the Hudson Bay Copmany's profits from the region switched from fur trapping to grain exports and mining the northern Rockies. At the time, however, the far northwestern region of the Hudson Bay Company's jurisdiction was not very accessible to settlers coming from the east and was mostly settled by Russian fur trappers from Alyeska and Sitka.

As such, when the British government granted the Hudson Bay Company the authority to enter into treaties with foreign powers regarding their jurisdiction in 1890, governor Andrew Carnegie[5] went into negotiations with Alyeska governor Alexander Sibiryakov to formalize the border between Russian and British territory in North America. Over the next months, the border was hammered out and ended with the Treaty of Saint Petersburg, signed by Queen Victoria, Tsar Nicholas II, Carnegie, and Sibiyakov in 1895. Sibiryakov's priority was to make sure as much of the Yukon River watershed fell into Russian territory, and he almost succeeded at gaining all the land that drained into the Yukon.

The Treaty of Saint Petersburg set out the border as following the Portland Channel and Coast Mountains up to the northernmost point where it crosses the 130th meridian west, then along the 130th meridian to the continental divide, and following the continental divide to the Arctic Ocean. The far northern portion of the border remained undefined as the divide does not reach the Arctic Ocean, but the Mackenzie River and its tributaries were identified as being within British North America. In return for the territorial concessions made by Great Britain and the Hudson Bay Company, Russia paid the British Crown five million pounds and conceding Russian claims to any land south of the Hari River valley in Afghanistan.

[1] York Factory is the main port for goods and people going to and from Hudson Bay.
[2] Found the 1821 info on Wiki in the Rupert's Land article, but not sure exactly what act it was or to what extent their initial powers were.
[3] The Winnipeg office was abandoned after the Oregon War.
[4] In OTL a governor-general of Canada and Viceroy of India.
[5] The first Canadian to be governor of the Hudson Bay Company.