Steinhauer Bothers: Education & Self-Reliance‪.‬

In the summer of 1879 Egerton and Robert Steinhauer arrived in Cobourg, a town of nearly 5,000 people, immediately to the east of Toronto.(1) The two brothers, Egerton, twenty-one years old, and Robert, nineteen, came from White Fish Lake, a Cree farming community 200 kilometres northeast of Fort Edmonton. These two sons of Rev. Henry B. Steinhauer, the first Native Christian minister in what would later become Alberta, travelled over 3,000 kilometres to attend Cobourg Collegiate Institute, in preparation for Victoria University. Their father, one of the Methodists' early Ojibwa converts, had attended Upper Canada Academy in the late 1830s and had come to the North-West in 1840. He served as a teacher, interpreter, and missionary at Rainy River, in what is now northwestern Ontario, and then at Norway House and Oxford House, in present-day northern Manitoba.