Robert Cunningham (entrepreneur)

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 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 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.

Cunningham 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.

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