Everything about Robert Cunningham totally explained
Robert Cunningham (1837-1905) was a British-Canadian lay missionary turned entrepreneur who founded the town of
Port Essington, British Columbia.
He was born January 1, 1837, in
Dungannon,
Ireland (one source, Large, says "Tullyvally, Ireland"), to a Protestant (
Anglican) family. In 1862, at the age of twenty-five, he sailed to Canada with the Anglican
Church Missionary Society to work as a lay assistant to the Anglican lay missionary
William Duncan at the
Tsimshian community of
Metlakatla, B.C.
Shortly after his arrival, Cunningham married a Tsimshian named Elizabeth Ryan and in 1864 he left the mission and began working at the
Hudson's Bay Company's Fort Simpson, a trading fort later known as Port Simpson and
Lax Kw'alaams. He worked alongside Charles F. Morison, who eventually married Elizabeth's niece
Odille Quintal (later Morison), the Tsimshian linguist. Cunningham eventually rose to the position of chief trader.
In 1870 he left the HBC and Port Simpson. Versions differ as to the circumstances of this: discontent over his salary or a trumped-up charge of rum-running imposed by Duncan (who was also the local justice of the peace), or both. Cunningham then began an entrepreneurial relationship with one Thomas Hankin (later father to the Tlingit interpreter and teacher
Constance Cox. In 1871, with the onset of the
Omineca Gold Rush, Cunningham and Hankin became traders at
Hazelton, in
Gitxsan territory, and eventually founded a depot at Woodcock's Landing downriver at the
Skeena River estuary, at what later became the site of Inverness cannery.
In search of a better location, the two staked a claim for a plot of land at a site Tsimshians called
Spaksuut (fall camping-place), on the territory of the
Gitzaxłaał Tsimshians at the confluence of the Skeena and
Ecstall rivers. In 1872 a store was built there, and the site gradually acquired a more or less permanent presence of
Kitselas and
Kitsumkalum Tsimshians from upriver.
By the 1890s Port Essington, as Spaksuut came to be known, was a small town, and soon it became the largest settlement in the region and its economic hub. Cunningham bought out Hankin and established salmon packing as the community's main industry. The Cunningham Cannery produced "Diamond A" brand canned salmon. Though other canneries operated in the town, Port Essington was largely considered to be "Cunningham's town."
Several members of Cunningham's family in Ireland eventually moved to Port Essington, as did Charles and Odille Morison. In 1888, Cunningham's wife Elizabeth was drowned with several others when their canoe capsized off Port Lambert near Port Essington. Of their five children, only two, George and John, survived early childhood, and John was killed at age seventeen when a trading schooner was wrecked near the
Queen Charlotte Islands.
In 1893 Cunningham married again, to Flora Bicknell, formerly of
Coventry, in
England. They had two children, Hazel and Harold. A third, Edith, was born shortly after Robert's death, in April 1905, in
Victoria, B.C., at the age of sixty-nine. He is buried in Metlakatla.
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