Sir George Simpson (c. 1792 – 7 September 1860) was a Scottish explorer and colonial governor of the Hudson's Bay Company during the period of its greatest power.

From 1820 to 1860, he was in practice, if not in law, the British viceroy for the whole of Rupert's Land, an enormous territory of 3.9 millions square kilometres corresponding to nearly forty per cent of modern-day Canada.

Simpson was also the first person known to have "circumnavigated" the world by land, and became the most powerful man of the North American fur trade during his lifetime.

This put an end to a ruinous and sometimes violent competition and converted the HBC monopoly into an informal government for western Canada.

He escorted that year's furs to Rock Depot and returned upriver to Norway House for the first meeting of the merged companies.

He moved the headquarters of the Columbia District to Fort Vancouver, guessing that the south side of the river might fall to the Americans.

In May 1828, he started his second trip to the Pacific along with his dog, mistress and personal piper, going first to York Factory and then using the Peace River route.

He then went to Montreal, Red River, Moose Factory, the Saint Lawrence posts, and down the Hudson to New York, where he took ship to England.

On this part of the trip he was accompanied by James Alexander, 3rd Earl of Caledon, who left to hunt on the prairie and later published a journal.

Travelling on horseback to Fort Edmonton, Simpson caught up with James Sinclair's wagon train of over 100 settlers heading for the Oregon country, a sign of what would soon destroy his fur trade empire.

Instead of taking the usual route, he went to what is now Banff, Alberta, made the first recorded passage of the pass named after him in August, and went down the Kootenay River to Fort Vancouver.

He sailed to the HBC post in Hawaii (then known as the Sandwich Islands) in February 1842, and back to Sitka, where he took a Russian ship to Okhotsk in June.

He went on horseback to Yakutsk, up the Lena River by horse-drawn boat, visited Lake Baikal, went by horse and later carriage to Saint Petersburg and reached London by ship at the end of October.

Simpson, shortly thereafter, left for England, via Alaska and Siberia, while Haʻalilio and Richards departed for the United States, via Mexico, on 8 July.

[3] On 17 March 1843, King Louis Philippe I of France recognized Hawaiian independence at the urging of King Leopold I of Belgium, and on 1 April, Lord Aberdeen on behalf of Queen Victoria, assured the Hawaiian delegation that: "Her Majesty's Government was willing and had determined to recognize the independence of the Sandwich Islands under their present sovereign."

[2][7][15] Lord Donald Smith of Knebworth House, Co-Premier of Canada Sir Francis Hincks, and other leading members of Montreal's society would attend Simpson's banquets.

[21][3][22] With Governor Drummond, Sir Antoine-Aimé Dorion, and John Young, they founded the Transmundane Telegraph Company, but the venture later failed.

In May 1860, he went by rail to Saint Paul, Minnesota; decided that his health would not bear the trip to Red River; and returned to Lachine.

[25] It was later demolished to make room for Samuel Bronfman's pavilion, which was seen by Alcan CEO David Culver as an unforgivable act of vandalism.

[3] It was then occupied by Rosemount House, which was built on the land of Governor Simpson and was the home of Sir John Rose, 1st Baronet, and later William Watson Ogilvie.

Both Simpson Street and Prince of Wales Terrace were in the Golden Square Mile, a neighbourhood of Downtown Montreal where nearly 3/4 of all the wealth in Canada was held by its inhabitants.

[6] Shortly after the Princes of Wales's visit, Governor Simpson suffered a massive stroke and died six days later in Lachine.

At his death in 1860, he left an estate worth over £100,000, which in relation to GDP, amounted to half a billion dollars in 2023 Canadian money.

It was one of the passions of his life, collecting writing relating to his hero, covering his walls with Napoleonic prints at Lachine Depot, Norway House and Fort Garry, and infecting the factors and fur traders of the Hudson's Bay Company with them.

Simpson shocked his peers by neglecting to notify Margaret of his marriage or make any arrangements for the future of his two sons.