James Macleod: The Red Coats' First True Leader

By Elle Andra-Warner

A vivid account of the life and times of the larger-than-life Canadian hero who played a major role in the peaceful development of western Canada.

A descendant of warriors, chiefs, and military men of the Clan MacLeod, James A.F. Macleod led an adventurous life that took him from his birthplace on Scotland's Isle of Skye to the Canadian west. After immigrating to Ontario, Macleod became a lawyer and militia officer before joining the effort to quell the 1870 Red River Resistance. In 1874, he was appointed assistant commissioner of the newly formed North West Mounted Police and led his troops west to smash the whisky trade and bring law and order to the vast North-West Territories.

Macleod smoked the peace pipe with prominent chiefs like Crowfoot and Red Crow, earning their trust as a man who kept his promises. As a policeman and judge, Macleod showed a strong sense of justice, sympathizing with the plight of Indigenous Peoples and challenging the government when it failed to fulfil treaty obligations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Heritage House
• Release date: May 20, 2019
• ISBN: 9781772032758

Elle Andra-Warner

Elle Andra-Warner is a bestselling author, journalist and photographer. Her award-winning articles appear regularly in major publications, and her newspaper columns have been in print since 1994. She has given journalism workshops throughout Canada, is an online guest lecturer in journalism for the University of California, Los Angeles, and is the co-editor of the Thunder Bay Historical Museum Society's annual journal. Estonian by heritage, Elle was born in a post-Second World War United Nations displaced persons camp for Estonians in Eckernforde, West Germany.

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Prologue

It was about six in the evening on July 23, 1880, and the water was running high when Colonel James Macleod and his group arrived at Slide-out Crossing on the Belly River to make their second river crossing of the day. Returning from Fort Walsh in Cypress Hills, they had already completed one hazardous river crossing on the Belly about thirty kilometres earlier. After this second crossing, they would be only fourteen kilometres away from Fort Macleod.

Accompanying the colonel were five men: guide Jerry Potts, Inspector Cecil Denny (who was on leave and had volunteered to accompany Macleod), constables Claudius S. Hooley (the teamster) and Alfred Stewart (Macleod’s orderly), and Macleod’s nephew, Norman Norrie Macleod (the son of Macleod’s brother Norman, who had recently been appointed the region’s first Indian commissioner). They had two riding horses and a four-horse team to pull a spring wagon loaded with supplies and baggage.

Macleod and Potts rode their horses to the river’s north side. Following Macleod into the water came the wagon with the rest of the group. They got about halfway across before the colonel, concerned for the safety of his men in the high water, ordered the group to stop and return to the south bank. They would camp and cross in the morning. Meanwhile, he and Potts rode on to the fort.

At daybreak the next day, teamster Hooley tested the waters while retrieving two horses that had swum to the other side. Confident about taking the wagon across, he convinced his three companions—Denny, Stewart, and Norrie Macleod—to skip breakfast so they could get the team of horses and wagon across the river and continue on to Fort Macleod.

Hooley sat up front in the wagon with Denny, while Stewart and Donald were in the rear. About midstream, things started to go horribly wrong. The horses caught a strong current and began to panic. Denny took the reins and, together with Hooley, got the horses settled; seconds later, however, the two lead horses stopped then swerved downstream, pulling the other two horses and the wagon with the men still aboard. Recognizing they were in danger of tipping and being swept away, Denny, Stewart, and the young Macleod jumped into the water and struggled to shore. But not Hooley, a non-swimmer—he clung to the uncontrolled drifting wagon, screaming in terror, Mr. Denny... Come and help me!

Denny later wrote in his memoirs, I jumped into the river and swam towards him. I was nearing the wagon when suddenly it again turned over. Man, horses, and the vehicle disappeared. I swam over the spot and down the river for a quarter of a mile, but they did not reappear. My strength almost exhausted, I was forced to make for shore.1

The overturned wagon and four dead horses were found almost a kilometre downriver. But it wasn’t until more than a month later that Hooley’s body was found, some nineteen kilometres downstream.

Hooley was an original member of the North West Mounted Police (NWMP), who had joined in 1873 and trekked the March West. He helped build Fort Macleod and had brought law enforcement to the West with Colonel Macleod, and was about to sign up for another term with the NWMP. He was buried with full honours in Union Cemetery in Fort Macleod.

The tragic loss of Constable Hooley cast a sombre shadow on Macleod’s last few months with the NWMP.

Chapter

1

The Macleods of Skye

About a month after Lieutenant Colonel James Macleod left the North West Mounted Police, on January 1, 1876, he brought a bit of Scotland to policing in the Canadian West—he gave the name of a Scottish castle to the new police fort built at the confluence of the Bow and Elbow Rivers. The fort’s Gaelic name would endure and eventually become the name of one of Canada’s greatest cities: Calgary, Alberta.

As the story goes, Macleod—now a full-time stipendiary magistrate of the North-West Territories (NWT)—was on his way by dog team to Fort Saskatchewan with the NWMP’s recently appointed assistant commissioner, Acheson Gosford Irvine. They stopped at the new NWMP post, which was the third to be built, the first two being Fort Macleod (1873) and Fort Walsh (1874).

In charge of the new post was the unpopular twenty-six-year-old Inspector Ephrem Brisebois. Without discussion or official approval, he had named the place in honour of himself: Fort Brisebois. The choice rankled with both officers and troops. For some time, Brisebois’s skills as an officer had been widely criticized; the NWMP’s first commissioner, George French, called him insubordinate, and Macleod said he appeared little qualified for his position, and unreliable.1

There are several versions of what happened next. In his autobiography, Denny’s Trek, Inspector Cecil Denny recalled that in February 1876, following Macleod’s suggestion, Macleod, Irvine, and Denny decided on the name of Calgary. In another version of the story, Macleod picked an obscure Scottish name for the fort because he was so furious at Brisebois’s shenanigans and the fort’s appellation.2 And in Macleod of the Mounties, Michael Craufurd-Lewis writes that the fort’s troops asked Assistant Commissioner Irvine to rename the fort. Irvine, in turn, asked Macleod to do the honours of selecting a new name.

Despite discrepancies in the details, all versions agree that Macleod was responsible for the fort’s new name, and by the evening of February 6, 1876, the orders were out advising that the fort would be now known as Fort Calgary, subject to the approval of the Canadian minister of justice. No one knows what Brisebois thought about the rejection of his name for the fort, but in August 1876, he resigned from the NWMP and Inspector Denny took over the command of Fort Calgary.

Macleod was reported to have said Calgary meant clear running water in Gaelic. The explanation seemed fitting, as the fort was beside the waters of the Bow and Elbow Rivers. But the Gaelic-speaking Macleod would have known that was the incorrect meaning.

According to the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland, the name Calgary comes from the Gaelic Cala ghearraidh, meaning beach of the meadow (pasture). Other interpretations from Gaelic include shieling on the bay (shieling meaning a small farm with marked boundaries) and pasture by harbour.

So why did Macleod choose the name Calgary, which had no link to the NWMP, its men, the prairies, or policing, and did not even mean clear running water? The answer may lie in his 1872–73 visit to his homeland of Scotland and his fond memories of staying at Calgary Castle (or House), on the remote northwest tip of the Isle of Mull. It was in this beautiful setting that the thirty-seven-year-old bachelor Macleod spent his last weeks in Scotland before taking the four-to-six-week journey back to Canada.

At the time of his Scottish visit, Calgary Castle was owned by a relative of Macleod’s sister Alexandrina Barbara (Lexy). She had married Hugh Munro Mackenzie, the younger brother of owner John Munro Mackenzie. Hugh had been a civil engineer, laying out railway lines in Canada for the Grand Trunk Railway of Canada, but the couple now lived with their children in Distington, Cumberland, England.

Stories suggest that during his stay at Calgary Castle, Macleod was romantically involved with a young lady staying at the castle and had even proposed marriage, but she had rejected his proposal. Calgary Castle was a small Gothic-style mansion overlooking Calgary Bay and a shimmering white shell beach. Back in 1780, there had been a traditional laird’s house on the site; however, in 1817 it was rebuilt as a castellated mansion by the new owner, retired Captain Alan MacAskill. Near the castle were the stone ruins of the deserted village of Inivea, abandoned in the early 1830s during the Highland Clearances when tenants of the land were removed by the estate owners or tacksmen to make way for sheep farming.

Years later, the owner’s daughter, Norah Mackenzie, Lady Fairfax-Lucy, wrote about the house in her autobiography:

My family home, Calgary House, was known locally grandly [sic] as The Castle. It looks out to sea on the north-west corner of the island of Mull with nothing but the Island of Tiree between it and America. The view varies from an opalistic mill pond, through greys, blues and greens to a raging storm—the bay white with spin drifts and breakers surging against the machair. It was at Calgary House that a certain Colonel Macleod spent his last night in Scotland before emigrating to Canada. He settled where now stands the great city of Calgary named after our house.3

Although Macleod never returned to Scotland after his visit in 1872–73, he remained strongly connected to his Scottish roots. Whether it was because of the beauty of Calgary Bay, the good memories of his time at the castle, or some other reason, Macleod brought Calgary to Canada.

Scottish Roots

James Alexander Farquharson Macleod was born September 25, 1836, in the family’s stone manor at Drynoch on Scotland’s Isle of Skye. His father, Captain Martin Macleod, was a retired British Army officer, and his mother, Jane Fry, was the youngest daughter of the wealthy and generous Henry Fry and Elizabeth Baker of Frybrook House, Boyle, Roscommon, Ireland. (Henry Fry was reported to have rung a bell every night inviting townsfolk to join them for dinner at their three-storey, Georgian-style home, which also housed a weaving industry on the site.)

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Captain Martin Macleod. Glenbow Archives NA-2932-1

Captain Macleod belonged to the Macleods of Drynoch, the oldest branch of the Clan MacLeod of Dunvegan (the clan members from Drynoch spelled their name Macleod, with a lower-case l). According to clan history, Clan Macleod’s roots go back more than eight hundred years to the clan’s founder and namegiver, Leod (ca. 1200–1280). Leod acquired the baronial stronghold of Dunvegan Castle through marriage to the heiress of the Norwegian chief MacRaild. Two of Leod’s sons, Tormod and Torquil, are considered the ancestors of the main branches of the MacLeods. Tormod’s line is the Macleods of Dunvegan and Harris (the chiefs of Clan Macleod), and Torquil’s is the MacLeods of Lewis. In their book The Scots: A Genetic Journey, Alistair Moffat and James F. Wilson note that, according to DNA evidence, the Clan Macleod most likely has its genetic origin in Scandinavia.

Captain Macleod was the tacksman—the leaseholder—for the lands of Drynoch, which had been owned by the chief of Clan Macleod of the Macleods of Dunvegan since about 1425. The clan chief resided at the ancestral home of Clan Macleod chiefs, Dunvegan Castle, located about eight kilometres from Drynoch. As the tacksman of Drynoch, Captain Macleod paid the clan chief to lease the land, and then