Honourable senators, in 1799, Joseph Lewis, an employee of the Hudson’s Bay Company, arrived in what is now Alberta. He was 27 years old, but he’d already had a life of adventure.

Born in 1772 in Manchester, New Hampshire, at the age of 20 he had made his way to Montreal where he joined the North West Company, the HBC’s great rival. He was a Nor’wester for four years until he jumped ship — or perhaps I should say jumped canoe — and went to work for the Hudson’s Bay Company. He signed a three-year contract as a steersman at a salary of £20 a year and paddled and portaged his way west until he arrived in Alberta to help Peter Fidler found Greenwich House, an HBC trading post near Lac La Biche.

One other interesting thing about Joseph Lewis: He was black. When you picture voyageurs, I know you probably don’t imagine them as Afro-Canadian, but black fur traders and explorers were very much a part of our history. The North West Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company attracted adventurers from all over, young men of energy and ambition seeking fame and fortune.

Records being scarce, we don’t know whether Lewis was an escaped slave or a freeman who was looking for a better life than the new United States could offer. But perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that he headed for the western frontier, where he might hope to be judged by his abilities and not his race.

In the summer of 1810, Lewis joined Joseph Howse on his expedition across the Rockies to the Columbia River. Joseph Lewis wasn’t the first black man to cross the continental divide. That honour belongs to York, the Virginia slave who accompanied Lewis and Clark on their 1803 Pacific expedition. But Joseph Lewis belonged to no man. He crossed the Rockies, strong and free, though slavery in the British Empire would not be abolished for another 30 years. When the Howse expedition returned to Edmonton House in July of 1811, they brought back a bounty of furs, valued at £1,500, and priceless intelligence about what they had seen in the West.

Now, Joseph Lewis wasn’t the only black voyageur of his era. Stephen Bonga was a fur trader and interpreter who took part in the Bow River expedition in 1822. He was the grandson of Michigan slaves. Glasgow Crawford, another HBC employee who was black, spoke English, French and Iroquois, and worked as a cook and middleman at Fort Chipewyan from 1818 to 1821.

Joseph Lewis may have left the most lasting Canadian legacy, however. He and his Indigenous wife, whose name, sadly, we don’t know, had two daughters and a son who later settled in the Red River colony as members of the Métis Nation.

As we mark Black History Month, let the story of Joseph Lewis remind us that black history is Canadian history, and Alberta history too.