In 1670, which company was granted exclusive trading rights over the Hudson Bay watershed?

Discover Canada dates the granting of these trading rights with two specific facts in a single sentence: In 1670, King Charles II of England granted the Hudson's Bay Company exclusive trading rights over the watershed draining into Hudson Bay. The year is 1670, the monarch is King Charles II of England, and the recipient is the Hudson's Bay Company — the only company named in this passage of the guide.

The grant was extraordinarily wide. Discover Canada describes the territory simply as the entire "watershed draining into Hudson Bay," which in practice covered an enormous portion of what is now Canada. The Company then dominated that economy for a long stretch of Canadian history. The guide notes that "for the next 100 years the Company competed with Montreal-based traders," and that the highly skilled French and Aboriginal canoemen who challenged it were the voyageurs and coureurs des bois, who "formed strong alliances with First Nations."

The Hudson's Bay Company is described elsewhere in Discover Canada as a defining commercial institution of the country: The Hudson's Bay Company, with French, British and Aboriginal employees, came to dominate the trade in the northwest from Fort Garry (Winnipeg) and Fort Edmonton to Fort Langley (near Vancouver) and Fort Victoria — trading posts that later became cities. The Company's reach is also why the beaver appears in Canadian symbols: the guide reminds readers that "the beaver was adopted centuries ago as a symbol of the Hudson's Bay Company."

The 1670 grant matters because, in Discover Canada's telling, it is the start of the Hudson's Bay Company's centuries-long shaping of Canadian geography. Cities like Winnipeg, Edmonton, Vancouver and Victoria all trace back to Hudson's Bay Company trading posts named in the guide — Fort Garry, Fort Edmonton, Fort Langley, Fort Victoria.

The grant also matters constitutionally. Discover Canada records that Canada later "took over the vast northwest region from the Hudson's Bay Company in 1869", the event that triggered the Red River resistance led by Louis Riel. So the 1670 charter is the legal beginning of an arrangement that 200 years later directly produced the province of Manitoba.