Rupert's Land

Rupert's Land, or Prince Rupert's Land, was a territory in British North America based on the Hudson Bay drainage basin. In 1670 King Charles II granted the Hudson's Bay Company the right of sole trade and commerce over the region, effectively giving the company a commercial monopoly over an area that now includes Manitoba, most of Saskatchewan, southern Alberta, southern Nunavut and northern parts of Ontario and Quebec, as well as parts of Minnesota, North Dakota and Montana. The territory was named after Prince Rupert of the Rhine, a nephew of Charles I and the company's first governor, and it was administered from York Factory on Hudson Bay. For two hundred years the company governed the land as a commercial domain, trading furs with Cree, Assiniboine and other peoples and maintaining a handful of forts and posts. In 1821 its monopoly was extended from Rupert's Land to the Pacific coast. The southern boundary west of Lake of the Woods was the watershed between the Mississippi and the Red and Saskatchewan rivers until the Anglo-American Convention of 1818 substituted the 49th parallel. In 1869 the company agreed to surrender its rights, and in 1870 Rupert's Land was transferred to Canada and organized as the North-West Territories.