In 1867, the Dominion of Canada was a narrow strip of territory along the eastern edge of the continent. Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick. To the west lay an enormous territory home to hundreds of thousands of Indigenous people, Métis communities, and almost no Canadian governance of any kind. Within twenty years, that territory had become Canadian. The process by which this happened was part negotiation, part purchase, part railway politics, and part, particularly for the Indigenous peoples who already lived there, a series of promises that were made with the full intention of not keeping them.
The Purchase of Rupert’s Land
The Hudson’s Bay Company had controlled Rupert’s Land since 1670. The territory covered roughly the drainage basin of Hudson Bay, which is to say most of what is now Manitoba, Saskatchewan, northern Ontario and Quebec, and parts of Nunavut and Alberta. It was an enormous territory governed by a commercial monopoly and populated primarily by Indigenous nations and the Métis communities that had developed over generations of intermarriage between European fur traders and Indigenous women.
Canada purchased Rupert’s Land from the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1870 for 300,000 pounds sterling. The sale was negotiated between the Canadian government, the British government, and the Company. The people who actually lived there were not consulted. This was not an oversight. It was a decision.
The Red River Resistance of 1869 to 1870 was the direct response. The Métis community at Red River, in what is now Winnipeg, learned that the transfer was proceeding and that their land rights and their French language and their way of life were about to be reorganized by a distant government without their involvement. Louis Riel organized a provisional government, negotiated the terms of Manitoba’s entry into Confederation, and became the most consequential and most contested figure in Canadian history. The resistance achieved its immediate goals. What followed, including Riel’s execution in 1885 for his role in a second resistance in Saskatchewan, is a longer and considerably darker story.
Canada purchased Rupert’s Land for 300,000 pounds. The people who lived there were not consulted. This was not an oversight.
The Numbered Treaties
Between 1871 and 1921, the Canadian government negotiated eleven Numbered Treaties with Indigenous nations across western and northern Canada. From the government’s perspective, the treaties exchanged Indigenous land rights for reserves, annual payments, farming equipment, and the right to hunt and fish on unoccupied land. From the perspective of many Indigenous signatories, the treaties were agreements for sharing the land while maintaining sovereignty and ensuring their peoples’ survival in a changing world. The distinction between these two understandings is not a minor interpretive difference. It is the foundational disagreement underlying a century and a half of legal and political conflict.
The reserve system that followed, the residential school system designed to eliminate Indigenous languages and cultural transmission, the pass system that restricted Indigenous movement, the banning of cultural ceremonies: all of this was built on the government’s interpretation of what the treaties meant. Indigenous communities have consistently argued that this interpretation did not reflect what was agreed. Courts have increasingly found merit in that argument.
British Columbia and the Railway Promise
British Columbia joined Confederation in 1871 in exchange for a specific commitment: a transcontinental railway connecting the province to eastern Canada within ten years. The province, a British colony that had seriously considered joining the United States before opting for Canada, extracted this condition as the non-negotiable price of union. John A. Macdonald agreed and spent the next decade struggling to deliver.
The Pacific Scandal of 1873, in which Macdonald’s government was found to have accepted campaign contributions from the railway promoters in exchange for the charter, cost him the government and nearly collapsed the entire national project. The railway eventually got built under different auspices. The Canadian Pacific Railway was completed in 1885 and the last spike was driven at Craigellachie in British Columbia on November 7th, producing one of the most famous photographs in Canadian history.
The photograph does not show the fifteen thousand to seventeen thousand Chinese workers who built much of the western section of the railway under brutal conditions for wages substantially lower than those paid to white workers. Their contribution was essential to completing the project on anything resembling the promised timeline. The government’s response was to impose a head tax on Chinese immigrants in 1885 and, in 1923, to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act banning most Chinese immigration to Canada entirely. The apology came in 2006.
What Was Built and at What Cost
Canada’s westward expansion created the country as it exists today. It connected the coasts, filled the prairies with settlers, established the agricultural economy that sustained eastern Canada for generations, and produced the territorial boundaries that have remained essentially unchanged ever since. It was accomplished at a cost that fell almost entirely on the Indigenous peoples who were displaced, confined, and systematically stripped of their languages and cultures in the decades that followed.
These two things are inseparable. You cannot tell the story of how Canada got its land without telling the story of how other people lost theirs. Canadian history courses used to try. They are trying less and less, which represents genuine progress even if the progress arrived decades late. The westward expansion is still, in many ways, the foundational event of the country. Understanding it fully means holding both the achievement and the cost in view at the same time, which is harder than a simple pride narrative allows but is the only honest way to look at it.
The Numbered Treaties
Between 1871 and 1921, the Canadian government negotiated eleven Numbered Treaties with Indigenous nations across western and northern Canada. The treaties exchanged Indigenous land rights for reserves, annual payments, and promises of ongoing support — farming equipment, schools, the right to hunt and fish on unoccupied land. They were, from the Canadian government’s perspective, a legal mechanism for acquiring the land necessary for westward settlement. From the perspective of many Indigenous signatories, they were agreements for sharing the land and ensuring their peoples’ survival in a changing world — not a surrender of sovereignty.
The distinction matters enormously because the government’s subsequent actions were based on the first interpretation while the promises made to secure the treaties were based on the second. The reserve system, the residential school system, and the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous land that followed the treaties were all consequences of a foundational disagreement about what had actually been agreed to.
British Columbia and the Pacific
British Columbia’s entry into Confederation in 1871 was accomplished with a specific promise: a transcontinental railway connecting the province to eastern Canada within ten years. The province, which had been a British colony and had considered joining the United States before opting for Canada, extracted this commitment as the price of union. John A. Macdonald agreed to the terms and then spent the next decade struggling to fulfill them — a struggle that produced the Pacific Scandal of 1873, cost Macdonald his government, and nearly collapsed the entire national project.
The Canadian Pacific Railway was finally completed in 1885. The driving of the last spike at Craigellachie, British Columbia is one of the most iconic images in Canadian history. What the photograph doesn’t show is the 15,000 to 17,000 Chinese workers who built much of the western section of the railway under brutal conditions, for wages far below those paid to white workers, and who were subsequently subjected to a head tax and then outright exclusion from Canada. Their contribution to the national project was enormous. Their treatment afterward was a national disgrace that Canada only formally apologized for in 2006.
What Was Built and What Was Lost
Canada’s westward expansion created the country as we know it. It filled the prairies with settlers, built the agricultural economy that sustained eastern Canada for generations, and established the territorial boundaries that remain in place today. It was also accomplished at a cost that fell almost entirely on the Indigenous peoples who already occupied the land — through broken treaty promises, the destruction of the bison herds that sustained Plains cultures, forced removal to reserves, and the residential school system designed to eliminate Indigenous languages and cultural transmission.
These two things — the creation of a country and the dispossession of its original inhabitants — happened simultaneously and are inseparable. Understanding Canada’s westward expansion fully means holding both of them in mind at once, which is harder than a simple national pride narrative allows but considerably more honest.
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