Cumberland House is a village in Census Division No. 18 in north-eastern Saskatchewan, Canada on the Saskatchewan River.[1] It is the oldest community in Saskatchewan and has a population of about 2000 people. Cumberland House Provincial Park, which provides tours of an 1890s powder house built by the Hudson's Bay Company, is located nearby.
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The population of Cumberland House consists of mostly First Nations people, including Cree and Metis.
It is situated on Pine Island in the Saskatchewan River delta, on the southern edge of the Canadian Shield. It was established in 1774 by Samuel Hearne, in the interest of the Hudson's Bay Company. Cumberland House was and is a Cree "n" dialect community, known in Cree as "Waskahikanihk".
The key factor in the establishment of Cumberland House was its location. It is located on the Saskatchewan River, which was a key route in the fur trade. From Cumberland House, you can travel east to Hudson Bay, via Lake Winnipeg and the Nelson River. You can also travel west as far as the Rocky Mountains. Its location as an island was also important to its establishment. The island was a meeting place even before the trading post was established here, which provided the settlement with some initial status, along with the fact that as an island, it would have been easier for travellers to locate.
It is frequently claimed that Cumberland House was the first inland trading post of the Hudson's Bay Company; however, this distinction is held by Henley House, established 31 years earlier, 200 km up the Albany River from James Bay at the confluence with the Kenogami River.[2][3] Nevertheless, it was the first inland post on the fur-trade highway from Hudson Bay to the west. Its founding was prompted by competition from the North West Company. In 1773 the supply of furs destined for the HBC was intercepted inland by the Frobisher brothers of the NWC, thereby saving the natives the long paddle to coast where the HBC posts were. Hearne then set up the original Cumberland House 16 km west of the Pine Lake Trading Post, established by the Frobishers the year before. Thus began the leap-frog game of establishing posts ever further west than the competition - a game that was to last until 1821 when the NWC was absorbed by the HBC.
On June 24, 2005, Cumberland House residents were evacuated to Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, and housed in a shelter set up by the Red Cross on the SIAST campus there, due to impending flooding from the Saskatchewan River. The influx of water was from record breaking rainfall in Alberta where the North and South Saskatchewan Rivers collected the runoff from that rainfall.
Cumberland House is the northern terminus of Saskatchewan Highway 123. The first bridge connecting Pine Island, where the community is located, across the Saskatchewan River to the mainland was built in 1996, replacing a ferry during the summer months and ice crossings in the winter.