Northwest Territories
Northwest Territories
The Northwest Territory was originally part of the province of Québec, and covered everything east of the Mississippi River, northwest of the Ohio River, west of the colony of Pennsylvania, and south of the Great Lakes and the Boundary Waters to the west. At least it did since King George III's Royal Proclamation of 1763, in which he declared that there would be no white settlement west of the Apalachian Mountains. This was immediately after the Seven Years' War, or the so-called French-Indian War, had been resolved and Britain found itself the owner of a whole lot of previously French land in the New World. And the natives were, as they say, restless. A loose confederacy of First Nations rose up in revolt over what they viewed as British attrocities - trading blankets infected with smallpox and so on - so to quell the violence George attempted to draw a line in the sand to separate the 13 colonies from the indigenous folks to the west. That this would also limit the thirteen colonies to forever being just the thirteen may have crossed his mind a bit. Because George also found the thirteen colonies to be a little revolting, and this proclamation added to those tensions which would ultimately lead to the American Revolution a few years later.
Oddly, at the same time this was going on, there was a totally different territory far to the north (and west) called the North-Western Territory. It was essentially "everything else" when you looked at a map of the explored lands of British North America: Québec, British Columbia (much smaller than you might think), the Arctic Territories and Rupert's Land. It was bordered to the extreme northwest by Russian America, but that was so far north and west that no one could ever possibly care about it. So it was a very, very big piece of land.
Historically, the land that would become the North-Western Territory to some degree escaped the last glaciation. A lot of it, and certainly most of what would become Canada, was covered by the Laurentide ice sheet. To the west, the Cordilleran ice sheet covered pretty much all of present-day British Columbia. But in between, there was an ice-free corridor along the Mackenzie river, stretching all the way to the extent of the glaciers to the south, but more importantly for today's story, deep into the heart of the North-Western Territory.
To the west of this ice-free corridor, the Bering Strait between North America and Asia was at the time dry land due to the lower sea level one sees during a glaciation. This had the effect of keeping Pacific moisture from the area, and that meant that there was no snow and therefore no ice. So there was an ice-free land bridge between Siberia, where the people were, and the North-Western Territory, where the mastodons were.
There were several waves of immigrants coming east in those days, and even the odd wave going back. The present-day Yupik people are thought to have originally come from Siberia to Alaska, and then half of them migrated back; currently there are Yupik on both sides of the border. By about 8,000 BC the land bridge was underwater, the ice had retreated north and people were on one side or the other of the Bering Strait.
One group who were on this side of the strait were the Pre-Dorset people. They seem to have come from Beringia and spread east The Northwest Territory was originally part of the province of Québec, and covered everything east of the Mississippi River, northwest of the Ohio River, west of the colony of Pennsylvania, and south of the Great Lakes and the Boundary Waters to the west. At least it did since King George III's Royal Proclamation of 1763, in which he declared that there would be no white settlement west of the Apalachian Mountains. This was immediately after the Seven Years' War, or the so-called French-Indian War, had been resolved and Britain found itself the owner of a whole lot of previously French land in the New World. And the natives were, as they say, restless. A loose confederacy of First Nations rose up in revolt over what they viewed as British attrocities - trading blankets infected with smallpox and so on - so to quell the violence George attempted to draw a line in the sand to separate the 13 colonies from the indigenous folks to the west. That this would also limit the thirteen colonies to forever being just the thirteen may have crossed his mind a bit. Because George also found the thirteen colonies to be a little revolting, and this proclamation added to those tensions which would ultimately lead to the American Revolution a few years later.
Oddly, at the same time this was going on, there was a totally different territory far to the north (and west) called the North-Western Territory. It was essentially "everything else" when you looked at a map of the explored lands of British North America: Québec, British Columbia (much smaller than you might think), the Arctic Territories and Rupert's Land. It was bordered to the extreme northwest by Russian America, but that was so far north and west that no one could ever possibly care about it. So it was a very, very big piece of land.
Historically, the land that would become the North-Western Territory to some degree escaped the last glaciation. A lot of it, and certainly most of what would become Canada, was covered by the Laurentide ice sheet. To the west, the Cordilleran ice sheet covered pretty much all of present-day British Columbia. But in between, there was an ice-free corridor along the Mackenzie river, stretching all the way to the extent of the glaciers to the south, but more importantly for today's story, deep into the heart of the North-Western Territory.
To the west of this ice-free corridor, the Bering Strait between North America and Asia was at the time dry land due to the lower sea level one sees during a glaciation. This had the effect of keeping Pacific moisture from the area, and that meant that there was no snow and therefore no ice. So there was an ice-free land bridge between Siberia, where the people were, and the North-Western Territory, where the mastodons were.
There were several waves of immigrants coming east in those days, and even the odd wave going back. The present-day Yupik people are thought to have originally come from Siberia to Alaska, and then half of them migrated back; currently there are Yupik on both sides of the border. By about 8,000 BC the land bridge was underwater, the ice had retreated north and people were on one side or the other of the Bering Strait.
One group who were on this side of the strait were the Pre-Dorset people. They seem to have come from Beringia and spread east
So the biggest threat to Ontario, long before it even was Ontario, simply went away. But the evolution of Upper Canada into Ontario wasn't over yet. Upper and Lower Canada became the Province of Canada through the Act of Union in 1841. Confederation in 1867 split the province of Canada back up into the Provinces of Ontario and Québec. Ontario at the time was a small fraction of its current size, mostly what is today considered Southern Ontario and a little land around the Great Lakes on this side of the border. After the purchase of Rupert's Land (similar in size to the Louisiana Purchase), both Québec and Ontario grew substantially, the latter now extending north almost to James Bay and west to a "provisional boundary" with the District of Keewatin, a little bit this side of the current border with Manitoba, itself something of a postage stamp at the time. In 1880 there was a bit of a border skirmish between Ontario and Manitoba, both sides claiming the land around Kenora. This dispute was settled by the feds in 1889 and the land was awarded to Ontario, setting Ontario's western boundary at its present location and setting its northern boundary at the Albany River, with Keewatin to the north. Then in 1912, Keewatin became just one of four districts of the Northwest Territories, and its southern lands were parcelled out to Ontario and Manitoba.