Fort Chipewyan

The 1788 post Mackenzie left from, and still no road to it that works in summer

Fort Chipewyan is a hamlet at the western tip of Lake Athabasca in northern Alberta, beside Wood Buffalo National Park and about 223 km north of Fort McMurray, and one of the oldest European settlements in the province. It is named for the Chipewyan who lived around it. The lake drains by the Slave River to the Mackenzie and the Arctic Ocean, and the fur trade followed the water.

In 1788 Roderick Mackenzie built the North West Company's new post on a small peninsula on the south shore of the lake, now Old Fort Point, placed so that its canoes could still meet the summer rendezvous at Grand Portage, trade their furs for supplies and get back north in the same season. For the 12 years it stood there it was the company's headquarters and chief trading post in Athabasca, the collection and distribution point for furs, goods and men moving through the Peace, Slave, Athabasca and Mackenzie basins. Alexander Mackenzie set out from it on his journeys down the river that now bears his name and across to the west coast.

Roderick had a taste for the written word. He wrote to traders all over the north and west asking for scenery, adventure, folklore and history, and in 1790 he started a library at the fort that grew past 2,000 books, one of the most famous in all of Rupert's Land. Half in jest, he hoped it would be the little Athens of the Arctic regions.

Around 1800 the post moved to the northwest shore, where the ice went out sooner and traders could leave earlier, and the hamlet stands there today. The Hudson's Bay Company put Nottingham House on English Island in 1802 and gave it up in 1806, and from about 1815 John Clarke's Fort Wedderburn faced the Nor'Westers from Potato Island, 2.4 km away. George Simpson stayed there in 1820 and 1821 while he reorganised the trade, and John Franklin passed through in July 1820 on his overland Arctic expedition. When the two companies merged in 1821, Fort Chipewyan became the Hudson's Bay Company's district headquarters and main northern depot.

Old Fort Point was designated a National Historic Site of Canada in 1930. The 2021 census counted 798 people, predominantly Cree, Chipewyan Dene and Métis. No all-weather road reaches the hamlet: in summer people fly in or come up the Athabasca by boat from Fort McMurray, and in winter ice roads run in from Fort McMurray and Fort Smith. A solar farm owned by the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, the Mikisew Cree First Nation and Fort Chipewyan Métis Local 125 now replaces about 800,000 litres of diesel a year.