North-Western Territory

The North-Western Territory was a vast and loosely defined region of British North America that lay north and west of Rupert's Land and lasted until 1870. Because it did not drain into Hudson Bay, it fell outside the royal charter granted to the Hudson's Bay Company in 1670, yet the company administered it in practice for nearly two centuries. Britain asserted sovereignty only gradually: after the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713 removed the French from the Hudson Bay coast, an act of 1821 gave the company criminal and civil jurisdiction over the fur trade, and the region was treated as part of its trading domain. Its boundaries were never precisely surveyed. In 1862, during the Stikine Gold Rush, the coastal Stikine Territory was carved out of it to forestall American claims, and part of that district was returned the following year. In 1868 the Hudson's Bay Company agreed to surrender its territories, and on 15 July 1870 the North-Western Territory and Rupert's Land passed to Canada, where they became the Northwest Territories. The territory had no fixed capital; the Hudson's Bay Company governed from its posts, and Fort Simpson on the Mackenzie is used here as a representative point.