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Hereward Longley Alberta's hydrocarbon deposits have been a mainstay of provincial economic development since the Second World War. When Imperial Oil struck oil near Leduc, Alberta in February 1947, it marked the beginning of a petroleum boom that rapidly transformed Alberta's impoverished agricultural economy and drew thousands of people to the province. 1 As demand for oil grew, the oil industry and the Alberta government began producing synthetic oil from the vast bitumen deposits in the Athabasca region. The Alberta bitumen deposits are fine-grained sands, which hold up to eighteen per cent bitumen, a heavy and viscous hydrocarbon mixture. The largest of these, the Athabasca deposit, covers 50,000 square kilometers of northeastern Alberta (Figure 1). The Athabasca deposit occurs in the McMurray formation, a stratigraphic unit of the Early Cretaceous Mannville Group of the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin. 2 The Athabasca bitumen deposits dwarf Alberta's conventional oil deposits, but difficulties with mining and upgrading bitumen into synthetic crude oil prevented the commercial production of bitumen before the 1960s. 3 In 1958 Sun Oil entered an agreement with Great Canadian Oil Sands Limited (GCOS) to finance a bitumen extraction plant. The Alberta government approved GCOS in 1962, construction started in 1964, and the 45,000 barrels per day (bpd) plant opened in 1967. 4 In 1966, as construction progressed on GCOS, Cities Service, Imperial Oil, Royalite, and Atlantic Richfield Canada formed the Syncrude consortium and began planning a second plant. Responding to pressure from industry, and from modernist aspirations, governments in the 20 th century ultimately prioritized resource extraction, technological development, and economic growth above associated costs and consequences. 5

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This paper examines the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) Edmonton House Journals and district reports from 1820-1829 to assess the relationship between the HBC and Freemen over the decade immediately following the merger between the HBC and Northwest Company (NWC). I argue that although numbers of Freemen associated with Edmonton House decreased substantially as Freemen moved to the Red River and Columbia River regions after the merger, Freemen associated with Edmonton House provided an essential supply of food and fur that bolstered both the viability and profitability of the post, and served as an invaluable buffer between the HBC and Indigenous peoples. Freemen often moved fluidly between bush and post, procuring food and furs for the fort, at times engaging in contract labour around the fort, or accompanying trapping and exploration missions alongside fort employees. By the end of the decade, it appears that many Freemen were able to eliminate their debts with the HBC and establish more autonomous communities. In the fort Edmonton region, the 1820s can perhaps be viewed as a point of emergence for Freemen communities as they gained greater autonomy from fur trade companies and increased the size of their families. Growth in the independence and size of Freemen bands in the 1820s may be considered as a root of Métis ethnogenesis in the West.