George Harvey: Michipicoten to Dunvegan
- Ontario Métis Facts
- Oct 10
- 2 min read
George Harvey was born on December 16, 1856 at Michipicoten on Lake Superior to a Métis mother, Jane Flett, and Scottish Hudson Bay Company employee, Alexander Harvey.
The next year, the Harvey family moved north to Moose Factory on James Bay, where the young George spent many of his formative years deeply engrained within the region’s bustling fur trade economy and growing Métis community.
In 1870, when George was just 13 years old, he was sent to Stromness in Scotland’s Orkney Islands to receive an education, an uncommon but not unheard-of situation for many other Métis children with Scottish or English fathers. Upon returning to Moose Factory in 1873, George entered the HBC’s service as an apprentice clerk, working for the next five years in the Moose Factory and Albany districts.
George Harvey eventually rose through the HBC ranks, becoming a clerk by the 1880s. He soon after entered a new phase of his career in the Peace River region, in present day northern Alberta. There, in 1889, George met and married Margaret Thomas at Dunvegan. The couple eventually had three Métis children: George (1890), Marguerite (1891), and Roland (1893).
By 1899, Margaret had passed away, leaving George to raise their three Métis children at Dunvegan on the Peace River.
On July 10, 1899, George successfully applied for North-West Half-Breed scrip at Lesser Slave Lake, in northwestern Alberta. On his application, George identifies his birthplace as Michipicoten, Ontario and grounds his claim in his mother, Jane Flett, being a “Halfbreed”.
Mobile Métis families like the Harveys, Nolins, Sayers, Turners, and Roussains were essential to building and strengthening the many deep family, kinship, and community bonds that continue to tie the Métis Nation together across its vast Homeland—from the Upper Great Lakes to the Rocky Mountains—to this day.
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