Dunvegan

A 1805 fur post under Alberta’s longest suspension bridge, in a 200 metre valley

Dunvegan sits on a flat of rich alluvial soil on the north bank of the Peace River in northern Alberta, at the mouth of Hines Creek and 26 km south of Fairview, where the river swings to its southernmost point in the province. The Peace is a young river. It began draining a vast glacial lake that covered the Peace River Country some 15,000 years ago, and old shorelines still mark the promontory above the flat. When Alexander Mackenzie came through in May 1793 on his way to the Pacific, he wrote of groves of poplars and vast herds of elk and buffalo, a scene he said no words of his could do justice.

The country belonged to the Beaver, the Dunne-za, an Athapaskan people who had come in from the north more than a century before. In 1805 Archibald Norman McLeod of the North West Company built a trading post on the flat and named it for Dunvegan Castle, his family's ancestral home in Scotland. For sixteen years the North West Company and the Hudson's Bay Company fought a ruinous struggle for the Peace River trade, until they merged in 1821. Trouble followed in 1823, when Beaver killed the trader Guy Hughes and four of his men at Fort St. John, and Dunvegan was shut down too, reopening in 1828.

After that it prospered. Beaver, Cree and even incoming Iroquois bands came in spring and autumn from as far as the Grande Prairie and Pouce Coupe, and the post's furs were pressed and baled for the long river route to Fort Chipewyan, Hudson Bay and London. The traders also farmed the flats, growing grain and vegetables for their own use and for other posts. Dunvegan grew to more than 40 men and became headquarters of the Athabasca District in 1878, a role it lost to Lesser Slave Lake in 1886. The Hudson's Bay Company finally closed the post in 1918.

What survives is Historic Dunvegan. The Factor's House of 1877-78, whitewashed squared logs under a hipped roof, is one of the oldest buildings still standing in Alberta, unusual for its dovetailed corners where the company usually built post-on-sill. Beside it stand St. Charles Church and its rectory and a Revillon Frères free traders' post of 1909, all restored, with costumed interpreters giving tours through the summer and a campground alongside. Highway 2 drops into the valley and crosses the river on Alberta's longest vehicle suspension bridge.