Robert Cunningham (1837–1905) was a British-Canadian lay missionary turned entrepreneur who founded the town of Port Essington, British Columbia.
Together with a Tsimshian interpreter named Robert Dundas they opened a mission among the villages on the lower Nass River in July 1864.
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.