Fort Edmonton

At this time, a long-serving member of the HBC, John Edward Harriott, became the chief trader under Rowand. The two gained family ties when Harriott married one of Rowand's daughters. On a couple of occasions when Rowand joined HBC Inland Governor George Simpson for travel abroad, Harriott acted as chief factor.

Rowand's administration from the 1830s onward coincided with a great change in the Saskatchewan District. For the first time, missionaries, artists, and curious travellers came to Edmonton to visit, sometimes for extended periods, which frustrated Rowand to some degree. Prior to this time, the only Europeans to come that far into the west were men on some sort of company business.

With Rowand having made Edmonton his home, the fort became an important centre in the west. It was a necessity for any traveller going any further west of Edmonton to go through there for provisions first. Rowand constructed a three-storey house in the heart of the fort for the exclusive use of him and his family, denoting his station to his subordinates, visitors and trade partners alike.

Two Catholic missionaries, Francois-Norbert Blanchet and Modeste Demers, were the first to visit Fort Edmonton (called Fort-des-Prairies) in 1838.[12] Starting in 1840, the Fort housed the Wesleyan missionary Robert Rundle as a company chaplain. Rundle's tenure lasted until 1848, and his ministry and missionary work was met with competition of a sort by Jean-Baptiste Thibault, a Catholic priest who, like Rundle, was attempting to evangelize natives in the area. A chapel was erected inside the fort in 1843, which the Reverend Rundle boasted could host "(one) hundred Indians"; the structure also had two small rooms for Rundle's private use.[13] Meanwhile, Rowand complained that the presence of ministers in his fort was a distraction for the natives, and was ostensibly impeding the fur trade business.[14] On a personal level, however, Rowand had taken a liking to Rundle, and entrusted the minister with teaching his children.[15]

Father Pierre-Jean De Smet spent the winter of 1845-46 at Fort Edmonton having traveled and explored from Oregon Country to meet the natives of the Rocky Mountains.

In 1852, the Oblate missionary Albert Lacombe first visited Fort Edmonton. With Rundle having trouble controlling the department in 1848, Lacombe easily took up residence in the former Methodist chapel. Lacombe took pity on the fur trade labourers, opining that, "during the summer months, [Hudson's Bay labourers' toil] was as hard as that of the African slave.".[16] He found little sympathy for the workers from John Rowand or the HBC clerks. The following year, Lacombe moved to Lac St. Anne, but had a new Catholic chapel constructed in the fort in 1857 (but did not dwell there); this chapel lasted nearly twenty years before being moved outside of the fort.

A Methodist follow-up to Robert Rundle, Reverend Thomas Woolsey, was dispatched to Edmonton in 1852. His arrival in the fort coincided with Lacombe's residency in the former Methodist chapel, a discovery which distressed Woolsey. Conflicts and private frustrations with Catholic missionaries, and failures to convert Catholics to Protestantism, marked Woolsey's twelve-year residence at the fort.

In 1854, the mission St. Joachim was officially founded in turn at Fort-des-Praires (Fort Edmonton).

This watercolor with a scale diagram of the Fort was drawn by Vavasour in 1846.

Though somewhat distant from the territory in question, Fort Edmonton, an important stop on the York Factory Express overland trade route, was peripherally involved in the Oregon Boundary Dispute. A pair of British Army lieutenants, Mervin Vavasour and Henry James Warre, were sent on a mission in the guise of eccentric gentlemen to reconnoitre the lower Columbia River valley and Puget Sound. Among other objectives, they were to determine which HBC posts could be used in a military conflict.[17][18] The trip had been encouraged by Sir George Simpson Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company. Warre and Vavasour reported that the mountain passes were unsuitable for troop transport. Their mission took them through Fort Edmonton in the fall of 1845, and again on their way back to Montreal in 1846. They wrote: "Without attempting to describe the numerous Defiles through which we passed, or the difficulty of forcing a passage through the burnt Forests, and over the high land, we may venture to assert, that Sir George Simpson's idea of transporting troops. . . with their stores, etc. through such an extent of uncultivated Country and over such impracticable Mountains would appear to Us quite unfeasible." As with other forts he visited on this mission, Vavasour drew a plan of Edmonton.

Artist Paul Kane's romanticized painting of the fifth fort (1849, from 1846 sketch), displaying Rowand's house rising high above the palisade.

The artist Paul Kane first visited the fort in 1845. He produced several works of art based upon his time there.

In May 1854, John Rowand died while accompanying the annual York Boat trip eastward. Accounts suggest that he tried to break up (or join) a skirmish between some of the tripmen while at Fort Pitt, and in his rage he fell suddenly dead. He was initially buried at Fort Pitt, but was later exhumed and buried in Montreal as per his last will and testament.[19]

Following a few short-lived administrations in Rowand's wake, William J. Christie was a long-lasting chief factor at Edmonton from 1858 to 1872. Christie's protégé Richard Charles Hardisty, later a Canadian Senator, served as chief factor in Edmonton for an interim period from 1862 through 1864.

The Hudson's Bay Company relinquished Rupert's Land to the Government of Canada in 1868, pursuant to the Rupert's Land Act 1868, thus ending the HBC's administration of the vast territory and beginning an era of settlement in the 1870s.

By the 1890s, the fort was in disrepair and largely abandoned. The Hudson's Bay Company transitioned to retail stores, and business in Edmonton ran from one of those instead.

In 1841 James Sinclair stopped at Fort Edmonton to receive instructions on where to cross the Rockies. With him were about 116[20] to 121[21] mostly Métis settlers from the Red River Colony, hired by the Pugets Sound Agricultural Company to settle on Fort Nisqually and Cowlitz Farm within modern Washington state.

Captain John Palliser stayed in Fort Edmonton for a time in 1858 while on his famous expedition. With the help of the factor's wife, Palliser held a ball there.[22]

In 1859, the 9th Earl of Southesk visited on his way to the Rocky Mountains, hoping that the fresh mountain air would improve his health.[23]

Fort Edmonton, near the new Legislature Building, 1914.

The spring of 1870 saw Fort Edmonton come under the threat of violence due to a war between the Blackfoot and Cree, resulting from the slaying of Cree Chief Maskipiton. A group of the Blackfoot approaching the fort from the south caught some traders with wagons of goods on the south bank. The traders escaped by ferry but had to leave their wagons behind. The ferry was not sent to the Blackfoot and were not able to give chase as they were unable to ford the North Saskatchewan due to high spring waters. They encamped in today's Walterdale neighbourhood of Edmonton, plundered the wagons and harassed the fort with their muskets. The men in the fort armed themselves and prepared to fight. But the fort was not attacked in force. The Chief Factor William J. Christie ordered the Bay men not to go out to attack the Blackfoot, apprehensive that to do so would invite further violence against the Hudson's Bay Company.[24]

Fifteen years later, on March 19, 1885, during the North West Rebellion, Edmonton's telegraph wire was cut. Fearing imminent attack, many local settlers and their families took shelter behind the fort's old wooden palisade. No attack happened. Within a few weeks marching and mounted troops arrived from southern Alberta and from eastern Canada by way of the CPR station at Calgary, to ensure that no local outbreak would occur.[25]

What remained of the fifth Fort Edmonton was dismantled in 1915. It was seen as a crumbling eyesore next to the Alberta Legislature Building, which had been completed three years earlier.[26] The Government of Alberta indicated at the time that it would use the old fort's timbers to create a heritage site elsewhere in the city, but it never did.

In 1969, a reconstruction of the fifth Fort Edmonton began five kilometres upstream from its final site, representing it as it stood in 1846, but this time on the south bank of the North Saskatchewan River. This marked the beginning of Fort Edmonton Park, which has become one of the city's premier tourist attractions. The park represents, through various historical buildings, four distinct time periods, exploring Edmonton's development from a fur trade post in the vast Northwest, to a booming metropolitan centre after the First World War.