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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
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Shortly after his arrival at
Metlakatla Robert Cunningham was assigned to assist the missionary R. Arthur Doolan, himself newly arrived from England, in founding a new mission among the Nisga'a. Together with a Tsimshian interpreter named Robert Dundas they opened a mission among the villages on the
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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
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lower Nass River in July 1864. When it soon came to light that
Cunningham had fathered a child with a young Tsimshian student of Duncan's named Elizabeth Ryan Doolan married the couple and Cunningham's formal relationship with the Church Missionary Society was terminated.
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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."
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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
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John, survived early childhood, and John was killed at age seventeen when a trading schooner was wrecked near the
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rivers. In 1872 a store was built there, and the site gradually acquired a more or less permanent presence of
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In search of a better location, the two staked a claim for a plot of land at a site
Tsimshians called
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19:(1837–1905) was a British-Canadian lay missionary turned entrepreneur who founded the town of
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38:) family. In 1862, at the age of twenty-five, he sailed to Canada with the Anglican
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territory, and eventually founded a depot at
Woodcock's Landing downriver at the
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34:(one source, Large, says "Tullyvally, Ireland"), to a Protestant (
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In 1893 Cunningham married again, to Flora
Bicknell, formerly of
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estuary, at what later became the site of
Inverness cannery.
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Hankin (later father to the Tlingit interpreter and teacher
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to work as a lay assistant to the Anglican lay missionary
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117:Tsimshians at the confluence of the Skeena and
113:(fall camping-place), on the territory of the
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94:, Cunningham and Hankin became traders at
200:Large, R. Geddes (1957; reprinted, 1981)
197:Victoria, B.C.: Orca Book Publishers.
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190:Chilliwack, B.C.: Sunrise Printing.
90:. In 1871, with the onset of the
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204:Sidney, B.C.: Gray's Publishing.
195:Spokeshute: Skeena River Memory.
70:Cunningham began working at the
26:He was born January 1, 1837, in
21:Port Essington, British Columbia
235:Anglican missionaries in Canada
175:Steamboats of the Skeena River
80:Odille Quintal (later Morison)
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230:British Anglican missionaries
202:The Skeena: River of Destiny.
215:Biography of Odille Morison
170:Monte Cristo (sternwheeler)
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129:Tsimshians from upriver.
40:Church Missionary Society
188:Klondike of the Skeena!
143:Queen Charlotte Islands
186:Bowman, Phylis (1982)
245:People from Dungannon
193:Harris, E. A. (1990)
72:Hudson's Bay Company
240:Canadian Anglicans
92:Omineca Gold Rush
17:Robert Cunningham
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52:Metlakatla, B.C.
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250:Tsimshian
48:Tsimshian
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123:Kitselas
111:Spaksuut
96:Hazelton
36:Anglican
255:Gitxsan
181:Sources
154:England
119:Ecstall
100:Gitxsan
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