Canada's Festival City

Edmonton is the capital city of the Canadian province of Alberta. Edmonton is on the North Saskatchewan River and is the centre of the Edmonton Metropolitan Region, which is surrounded by Alberta's central region. The city anchors the north end of what Statistics Canada defines as the "Calgary–Edmonton Corridor".

. It lies along the North Saskatchewan River in the centre of the province, 185 miles (300 km) north of Calgary. Transportation has been the cornerstone of the settlement and development of Edmonton. The North Saskatchewan River was a major conduit for the historic fur trade, which established trading posts near what is now Edmonton. The advent in the early 1900s of railways and later of roads, oil and gas pipelines, and an international airport transformed the city into a transportation centre known as the “Gateway to the North.” It is the service and supply centre for the oil industry as well as the petrochemical centre for western Canada. Area 264 square miles (684 square km); metro. area, 3,640 square miles (9,427 square km). Pop. (2011) 812,201; metro. area, 1,159,869; (2016) 932,546; metro. area, 1,321,426.

Archaeological evidence indicates that, for some 3,000 years before the arrival of Europeans in the 19th century, the area around what is now Edmonton, in the North Saskatchewan River valley, was the site of seasonal settlement by aboriginal hunting peoples. Edmonton’s history after the arrival of Europeans centred primarily on the intense competition between two rival fur-trading companies: the Hudson’s Bay Company, which was given the charter to the area known as Rupert’s Land (a territory that encompassed most of the Canadian prairies), and the North West Company, which encroached upon this territory. Fort Edmonton, a Hudson’s Bay Company trading post also known as Edmonton House, was initially built in 1795 on a site approximately 20 miles (32 km) downstream from the present-day city. The post is said to have been named for an area of north London, England, that was the home of a Hudson’s Bay Company employee. Nearby was Fort Augustus, a North West Company trading post. Both posts had moved to the location of present-day Edmonton by 1801, although both were abandoned for several years (1810–13) and then reoccupied. With the 1821 merger of the two companies, Fort Edmonton became the main collection, distribution, and service centre for the Western fur trade. There were few settlers in this region until Rupert’s Land was sold to the Canadian government in a deal finalized in 1870, at a time when the West was slowly beginning to open up for farming.