Fur trader, explorer, linguist.
Born at Cirencester, England in 1775, he joined the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1795 with a reputation for linguistic ability. At Hudson Bay he soon learned Cree, and he spent a number of years engaged in the fur trade before heading into the Rocky Mountains for the HBC in 1809, ending up at Rocky Mountain House. In 1810 he recorded crossing the Continental Divide and explored widely in a country never previously visited by Europeans. He went to England in 1812, and on his return led a party on snowshoes from York Factory to Vermilion River, returning by dogsled and horseback. He was arrested by the North West Company in 1814, on a charge of burglary after Howse took 400 bags of pemmican from the NWC post near Brandon House, resulting in what has been called the Pemmican War. In 1815 he retired from the fur trade to Cirencester, where he worked as a gentleman-scholar on his Cree grammar until its eventual publication in 1844 as Grammar of the Cree Language, with Which Is Combined an Analysis of the Chippeway Dialect. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in 1837.
See also:
Joseph Howse, Dictionary of Canadian Biography VIII, 411-14.
Dictionary of Manitoba Biography by John M. “Jack” Bumsted, Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1999.
This page was prepared by Gordon Goldsborough.
Page revised: 9 February 2023
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