Unsettled: Lord Selkirk’s Scottish Colonists and the Battle for Canada’s West, 1813–1816

By Robert Lower

The fascinating story of the Red River Settlement, now Winnipeg, in the years 1813 to 1816, told with archival journals, reports, and letters

Unsettled tells the story of two hundred Highlanders who flee the Scottish Clearances in 1813 to establish a settlement on the Red River in what eventually became Winnipeg. They are sponsored by the Earl of Selkirk, a man who has never been west of Montreal. Families who have never left their Highland crofts take an epic journey over ocean, up wild rivers, and through boundless wilderness, surviving disease and brutal winter only to face the determined opposition of fur barons who want no sodbusters threatening their trade and are prepared to stop at nothing to destroy their dream.

The “empty” land they’ve been promised is also anything but, already occupied by First Nations bands and the beginnings of that proud nation soon to be called Métis, whom they must befriend or fight.

Unsettled takes you inside the experience, relying on journals, reports, and letters to bring these days of soaring hope, crushing despair, and heroic determination to life — to bring their present into ours.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ECW Press
• Release date: Jun 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9781778521652

Book preview

Dedication

For my mother, Jean (Livingstone) Lower, who gave me her love for history, especially our own.

And for my daughter, Michaelin, who will carry it on.

Author’s Note

This is a work of nonfiction, and as such I stand behind any and all statements and quotations. But it is not a history in any formal or academic sense. In the interest of smooth reading, I have kept citations to a minimum. Any quote without a citation comes straight from the Selkirk Papers, on microfilm in the Archives of Manitoba.

Because pre-Victorian sentence structure and vocabulary can be challenging, I have made alterations to spelling and punctuation in quotes where I believe it improves readability without altering meaning. When I have paraphrased, I’ve stayed as faithful to the documents as I can.

The Selkirk Papers are the chief archival source used for this book. Though I was always aware of the many other players involved, the point of view is unavoidably that of the Red River Settlers, the Selkirk Settlers. This is how they saw it, how my great-great-grandfather, a young millwright from Islay, must have seen it. Other points of view exist and I have indicated them in places where contention persists. Caveat lector.

Though my story is told through the eyes of the Scots who lived it, I am fully sensible of the social, cultural, economic and physical crimes that the descendants of these settlers, right up to my own generation, have perpetrated on the original inhabitants of the Canadian prairies, and as one of those descendants I accept my share of responsibility for that.

As a son of the prairies, it would be hypocritical to say I wish that my forebears had never come. But I am heartily sorry, in the name of those forebears, for the suffering and injustices inflicted on First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples. And for my own part I am sorry — I apologize — for the great part of my life that I spent accepting those same legal and social crimes as the inevitable, if regrettable, result of historical processes. They were not inevitable; we, the settlers, could have done so much better, but we frankly didn’t care. In our (including my own) unquestioning belief in European entitlement, we were blind and deaf. I hope now that a corner has been turned and that we have truly begun to care. Redress of grievances, recompense, and rehabilitation and recovery of stature and self-determination among Indigenous cultures must be a national priority.

The subjects of our story are Highland Scots, 250-plus men, women and children fleeing brutal displacement by another crime of humans against humans, the Highland Clearances. Hindsight tells us that they were the vanguard of the coming invasion, but they did not know that, nor intend it. They knew only that they were being offered a way out of poverty and oppression. They had become refugees in their own country and like refugees everywhere, they looked to distant lands for safe haven. That is the story I set out to tell, with all due respect, I hope, for those who were already here.

A Note on Names.

I have tried to identify First Nations by the names they use for themselves today, sometimes coupling them with the settler terms, many of which are still in common usage. For the Métis, I have used the name by which they referred to themselves at the time: Bois-Brûlés , or just Brûlés. The term and spelling Métis came into common use in the years following the period covered by this book, and denotes a qualitative change in the way these unique people came to see themselves.

As for individuals’ names, it’s a free-for-all and anybody’s guess which spelling is correct. You’re on your own except where I’ve made it clear why I am using a specific spelling.

Finally, Scots names: McDonalds, McDonells, Macdonells, McLeans, McLeods, McBeaths, McBeths, McKays and McRaes, not to mention the Alexanders, Archibalds, Anguses, Jameses, Jonathons and Williams. The names can be dizzying in their similarity and repetition. It behooves the reader to pay close attention.

Blame the Scots. I certainly do.

This book was researched and written in the place where most of its events took place, in Winnipeg, near the forks of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers, on the original lands of Anishinaabeg, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples and on the Homeland of the Métis Nation. I hope it will play a small part in infusing real people and real life into this too-often-mechanical acknowledgement. This truly was and remains Their Native Land.

Robert Lower

August 2022

Introduction

City on the Red.

I was born and have spent most of my life in Winnipeg, as did my father before me.

My city sits right at the centre of southern Canada, astride the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers, called locally The Forks, a continental crossroads and meeting place for peoples in every age since it emerged from the glacial meltwater, some 8,000 years ago.

Winnipeg is famous for its cold winters, its vibrant arts and music scene, its elm trees, Winnie the Pooh,1 the invention of the remote car starter (give that man a knighthood) — and its history.

The Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 shook the world, convincing every bloated capitalist and cozy politician in the British Empire and America that the Bolshevik Revolution had arrived on their doorstep. They used the army to crush it.

The Métis Resistance (Red River Rebellion) of 1870 was the first concerted backlash from Indigenous peoples against the wholesale western expansion and land grab by Settler Canada. Upon its suppression (also by an army), Winnipeg became the distribution and rail hub for that expansion and grew at such a rate that boosters thought it might rival Chicago. Virtually every immigrant of the hundreds of thousands who answered the call to transform Indigenous buffalo range into a vast wheat-producing machine came through Winnipeg. Many went no further, including my family.

History continues: As Canadians move forward with the difficult but necessary business of reconciliation between the settler population and the Indigenous cultures they (we) displaced and damaged almost to destruction, Winnipeg’s large concentration of First Nations, families, along with its status as the Homeland of the Métis Nation, put it right at the heart of that process. If reconciliation is to succeed at all, it must succeed here.

The Promised Land.

Before any of these, before there was a Winnipeg or a land rush or an entity called the Métis Nation, there was the Red River Settlement — a puny patch of ground occupied by a hopeful band of Scots refugees, never more than 150 at one time, looking only for a place to sow crops and sink roots. One of them was my great-great-grandfather, and that’s what brought me to this story.

As a child I was familiar with the Selkirk Settlers, as these uprooted Highlanders are called, and that an unspecified relative was one of them, but no story went along with that. Winnipeg and area abounded with their names — on streets, neighbourhoods, parks, schools and even a whole city, Selkirk. In school we heard about the Scottish Lord Selkirk and his attempts to help farmers of the Highlands, displaced by callous landlords. We knew the name Miles Macdonell and something called the Pemmican War (disappointingly for little boys, not really a war at all), which grew out of the bitter rivalry between two fur-trade giants, the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company. But in the end, these were just facts, a series of incidents that had no power to fire the imagination — with one notable exception.

Over the three years covered by this book, one event has remained alive and current through the generations: a clash now known simply as the Battle of Seven Oaks, but for over a century called by some, including the school system, the Seven Oaks Massacre, and by others La Grenouillière or its English translation, Frog Plain, referring to a campsite some distance from the battleground. This gunfight, which resulted in twenty-two deaths, has understandably stood out, both for its singular violence and for the division over its meaning. For my Scots forebears, it was a massacre of innocents who had done nothing wrong by uncivilized half-breeds (as they were called for far too long) out of some unfathomable primordial hatred. For Métis people, descendants of the other side of the field, it was a glorious victory over invaders who wanted to enslave them and destroy their way of life. For many on both sides of that divide, those opinions still prevail.2 Small wonder, then, that for most people curious about the Red River Settlement, Seven Oaks is what they find and where they stop.

To be clear, Seven Oaks was no part of why I wrote this book. I wrote this book because I discovered the story that had been missing from those dry historical accounts. And that story makes Seven Oaks a far more interesting and complex event than its reduction to a fight between good guys and bad guys could ever convey.

Some years ago I happened to see my great-great-grandfather’s name, Samuel Lamont, on a bronze plaque in a Winnipeg park listing those first settlers of 1813. Having a name to go with that vague old family story, I went online. I discovered that Sam, a recently minted millwright, was twenty-two years old in 1813 and that as a well-regarded mechanic who knows his business, he had been hired to build a grist mill for the nascent colony. I went to the archives, to dig a little deeper.

The Selkirk Papers comprise 20,000 pages, of which about 3,000 are the letters, reports and journals written on the spot between 1812 and 1817 by the participants themselves. That’s where I would find any reference to my ancestor. I dipped into the first journal at the point where Sam’s group were making their way up the complicated river system between Hudson Bay and Lake Winnipeg. It instantly took my breath away — the immediacy and spontaneity of this optimistic record, written as the journey unfolded without benefit of hindsight or reflection. It felt like standing at the edge of a precipice, staring into a fog-filled canyon. Good heavens, I thought, "these people have no idea what they are getting into." I knew, though, and was hooked; I stepped over the edge and into the future with them.

I came to realize that previous researchers, however good their reporting on the events of these years, had, through choice or technical difficulty, missed or ignored the drama — the pulsing life — in these pages. It is in the daily details, and above all the personalities, that the real story emerges.

With a handful of exceptions the settlers themselves, including my great-great-grandaddy, the millwright from Islay, do not speak in these documents, though they are often spoken about. The journals and letters are written by the men appointed by Lord Selkirk to conduct his settlers to his lands and there to oversee his colony. Called Officers or Gentlemen, none of these men had ever been to western North America or seen the vast prairie at its heart. The settlers believed they were going to an unsettled, even unoccupied, tract of land belonging to his lordship, and therefore open to cultivation and settlement. In fact, a surprisingly large number of people already regarded The Forks as their home or territory. Most had never heard of Lord Selkirk and the rest regarded him as an enemy, so the Highlanders’ reception ranged from open-hearted welcome by First Nations bands to dangerous hostility (as agents of the hated Hudson’s Bay Company) from the North West Company. It would be up to their officers to navigate this complicated landscape and find that sweet spot of mutual acceptance and accommodation that any meeting of nations requires. To this challenge they proved singularly unsuited. One decision at a time, a few Gaelic farmers from a remote Highland strath (valley) would be led to make history in the worst possible way.

This is the story of how that unfolded. It is also something more, because this is where it all began. This is where a century and a half of commerce between Indigenous plains people and Europeans began to turn from a trading relationship into an imperial acquisition, an extension of Britain, pushing aside and dispossessing the original peoples. In this story are the seeds of that one-sided catastrophe and hints at how it all might have been done differently.

1 Inspired by Winnipeg, a bear at the London Zoo presented by a Winnipeg regiment in the Great War.

2 In 1891, a group of Scottish Winnipeggers erected a cairn on the site of the gunfight to commemorate the event and rededicate themselves to the condemnation of those who had massacred their countrymen. In June of 2016, 125 years later, I witnessed a gathering of Métis Winnipeggers around that same cairn to celebrate their victory of two centuries before.

Timeline

The broad outline of these years is well established, and it may well assist readers in keeping events and actors straight to provide a thumbnail summary here, a timeline of the principal events of these three desperate years. If you are already familiar with it, or if you would rather discover it as you read, you may want to skip the next eleven paragraphs. For the rest, here is a capsule account of the events covered in this book, so you may know just where you are (see Maps 1 and 5).

1810: Lord Selkirk, who has already sponsored settlement schemes in Prince Edward Island and Upper Canada, decides his next colonization exercise will be in the extremely remote valley of the Red River, in what is now southern Manitoba, Canada, a place the earl himself has never seen. To that end he has bought a large stake in the vast fur-trading empire of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), whose charter gives them a monopoly on trade and colonization.

1811: Lord Selkirk acquires the colonization rights to a significant piece of territory, including the valley of the Red River. He sends an advance party under Captain Miles McDonell to prepare the site. In 1812, he sends a few adventurous farmers to test the waters.

1813: The first full contingent of migrants, almost one hundred Highland men, women and children, is dispatched from Scotland to York Factory, the Hudson’s Bay Company post at the mouth of the Nelson River, thence to be ferried by open boats to their destination, 1,200 kilometres inland. A typhus outbreak on the ship leads to their being put ashore at the lesser post of Churchill, 250 kilometres north of York Factory. They will have to pass the winter here, in crude hovels hastily built against the arctic freeze, dependent on HBC supplies to survive.

1814, January: Miles McDonell, fearing shortage of winter food, issues the Pemmican Proclamation, an edict forbidding others to take meat in the form of pemmican out of the district. Since the North West Company (NWCo), mortal rival of the Hudson’s Bay Company and therefore of Selkirk’s colony, depends on pemmican to feed its Bois-Brûlé (mixed heritage) traders, the edict creates outrage. Though he doesn’t know it, McDonell has just set off what will be called the Pemmican War.

1814, April: From their Churchill refuge, fifty Scots stalwarts of both genders choose to walk across the still-frozen taiga to York Factory to be there for the spring thaw. After a hard twelve-day walk, they make it, and presently board the boats that will take them to their new homes at Red River.

1814, mid-June: They reach their destination. They are instantly rapturous at its possibilities and barely aware of the animosity emanating from the North West Company, who want no part of a farming settlement straddling their fur-trade route and disrupting trade, not to mention eating their pemmican. They view it as an HBC plot, one they are determined to destroy.

1815: When the winter of 1814–15 proves even harder than expected, the colonists grow impatient with the short rations and arbitrary rules imposed by McDonell and his officers. The NWCo take advantage of the rift to offer free passage to Upper Canada for any wishing to leave. Resentment ignites into open revolt, and by mid-June well over half the colonists have deserted to the NWCo and left The Forks.

1815, June: The Nor’Westers now turn their armed wrath on the few who remain, provoking exchanges of musket fire. Three men are wounded, one fatally. Miles McDonell surrenders himself to the enemy in an attempt to save the colony, but this changes nothing. Leaderless and facing continued threats, the remaining settlers and servants (employees) flee to the safety of HBC posts at the north end of Lake Winnipeg, and reconsider their future.

1815, August: An HBC adventurer named Colin Robertson comes to their rescue, rallying them and leading them back to The Forks, where in mid-summer there are too few Nor’Westers to oppose them. Robertson’s experience in the country and his charismatic leadership succeed in restoring the confidence of these loyalists, and when a new governor, Robert Semple, and another contingent of eighty-four migrants arrive that fall, the colony is back in business.

1816: The Nor’Westers are still determined to stop them in their tracks, and through the winter and early spring of 1816, they convince their Bois-Brûlé hunters and traders that their food supply and way of life are at stake unless they gather once more at The Forks in June for an all-out attack. Colin Robertson builds Fort Douglas to withstand whatever force might present itself. He and Governor Semple disagree, Semple believing that his title of governor and his superior breeding should be enough to discourage a few men he dismisses as illiterate buffalo hunters. Robertson, whose respect for the Brûlés’ fighting ability, independence and determination is both greater and in accord with reality, becomes more and more frustrated, finally giving up and leaving the colony in the hopes that on their own, the colonial officers can unite to oppose the coming attack.

1816, June 19: Just one week after he leaves, the attacking force arrives on the scene, every bit as formidable as Robertson predicted. Still confident that his authority will prevail, Semple decides to face them, and here our story begins.

Part I

The Earl

A painted portrait of Thomas Douglas, Fifth Earl of Selkirk, in his early thirties. His hair is slicked back and he is wearing a white ascot and dark coat.

Library and Archives Canada/MIKAN 2939060

Chapter 1

Seven Oaks

June 19, 1816

Fort Douglas, Red River Settlement.

It is June to perfection, a glorious day in Lord Selkirk’s Red River Settlement. Most of the people have gathered in and around Fort Douglas. It is a fort in name only — its defensive wall only covers three sides of the cluster of crude buildings that house the colony’s governor and officers, the stables, the collective stores and the three cannons that are key to its strength. The rest of the palisade is still just a scatter of logs.

Fifty settlers and employed men work to finish the fort. With their families, they total more than a hundred. Only a few have risked going out to their farm plots to tend their young crops. Reports abound of an approaching force of armed and mounted plainsmen, agents of the North West Company, whose aim is the final destruction of this colony. While the settlers have muskets and cannons, they are not warriors. They need this fort.

Sometime between four and five o’clock the alarm is raised by the lookout: a force of sixty or more armed men on horseback is passing to the northwest, heading toward a point on the Red River well north of Fort Douglas.

Governor Robert Semple peers through a telescope. No mistaking it — these folks are kitted out for a fight.

Conscious of the fort’s vulnerability and worried for absent colonists, the governor calls for twenty men to arm themselves and follow him to confront this group. Others clamour to go, but he declines; he is certain that his authority as governor can cow a gang of half-caste ruffians. Twenty-six men leave the fort and strike north on foot. The remainder, under Semple’s deputy Alex Macdonell, stare anxiously after the rapidly disappearing governor with his posse of farmers, labourers and clerks.

Minutes pass. An excruciating hour. Suddenly, a crackle of distant muskets crescendos, then tails into ragged fire for a long minute, then dwindles to single shots, then nothing. The only sound among the watching settlers is their own breathing.

More waiting. At last, out of the woods come several men, one wounded, moving as fast as they can into the fort’s protection. We confronted the group, they tell the others, but things went sideways. The settlers hadn’t stood a chance. The few who had run had been shot in the back. Only these men remained.

Convinced that an attack on the fort will come any minute, Alex Macdonell has the men take up defensive positions. The day, almost the longest of the year, wears on and finally turns to night. No one sleeps.

Five more survivors straggle in. The fifth, a man who had been taken prisoner, brings news that Governor Semple and twenty other men are dead. He also brings an ultimatum from the enemy camp: They have five settler hostages. At dawn, they will kill them, then they’ll attack the fort and slaughter every man, woman and child. The settlers’ only alternative is to give up the fort and leave Red River forever. If they do that, their lives will be spared.

The messenger’s stories terrify those with families. How long can they defend an open fort? Defeat is inevitable. Reluctantly, Alex Macdonell agrees to surrender in return for safe passage north for all, to the protection of the Hudson’s Bay Company.

Thus ends the violent day that has come down to us as the Battle of Seven Oaks. As decades pass, it will become synonymous with and inseparable from the story of the Selkirk Settlers. Its consequences are still echoing, two centuries later.

But June 19, 1816, is only one day out of the more than one thousand that are the stuff of this tale, and the gunfight is just the most deadly event in a series of trials, triumphs and failures that make the story of these three years so compelling.

Our story truly begins three years before as our band of hopeful pilgrims are about to set foot on North America’s shore. Trial and tragedy are already with them.

Chapter 2

Arrival

August 18 to September 16, 1813

Hudson Bay, near Churchill River.

On an August afternoon, two ships appear off the western shore of Hudson Bay. Both are under full sail and running hard for the Churchill River. They show no signs of slowing as they enter the inshore shallows. Is this a chase? Britain is at war with the U.S., and the second ship is a fighting vessel — perhaps a Yankee privateer? But no, both are flying British colours. Is some terrifying fleet about to heave into sight? But the horizon remains empty, not even an ice floe to break the monotony on this mild, late-summer day.

Sweeping into the river’s wide mouth, the ships glide past a disused stone fort, and quickly reduce sail. Along the western bank of the river, Hudson’s Bay men as well as some Dene and Inuit hunters look up, startled, as this dramatic apparition bears down on them. It’s not quiet; men shout orders, sails are reefed, rigging and spars clatter and creak. The bystanders can only stare. Imagine a pair of giant airships appearing out of nowhere to drift down your street and past your house. These vessels are vastly larger than anything normally seen in this river. For many Indigenous witnesses, these may well be their first sight of ocean-going vessels. The natural reaction is alarm. In the sub-arctic wilderness, the unexpected is rarely good news.

The ships heave to and drop anchor in Sloops Cove, a snug harbour three kilometres from the river’s mouth. Sailors scramble over the rigging and decks to secure the anchorage. Some spectators recognize the Hudson’s Bay Company ship Prince of Wales, which has been supplying the trade for years. The other, HMS Brazen, is Royal Navy, an escort against those Yankee marauders. What are the ships doing here? And why is the activity on the warship so much more vigorous than that on the Prince? Watchers can’t decide whether to be thrilled, or chilled.

A ship’s arrival is a big event in the life of any remote post, probably the biggest of the year. The short northern summer allows for only one or two ships most years, and those invariably head for York Factory — or York Fort, as it is usually called — the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) northern headquarters, 250 kilometres south. But here it is, the news from home! Letters and newspapers, English food, tea and trade goods. It should be a stellar moment, but Mr. Topping, Churchill’s Chief Factor (trader), merely notes in the Churchill Post log:

Late in the afternoon the Prince of Wales and His Majesty’s Ship the Brazen cast anchor in the river. Sent two men to Sloops Cove to fire a [salute], but from the bad weather and the darkness of the night, they would not put off.

In fact the Prince of Wales’s longboat had been lowered into the water, and late in the evening Captain Turner was rowed ashore, not to greet Mr. Topping but to scout sites for hospital tents. The ship is riddled with deadly typhus. Turner’s crew, normally twenty-five, has been reduced to eight fit for work. Several sailors have died along with five passengers, a mixed group of Scots colonists bound for Lord Selkirk’s settlement, far inland.

Informed of the situation by Captain Stirling of the Brazen, which has no sickness, Topping orders that the cargo for the post be taken off so the ship can depart as soon as possible for York Fort. Passengers should remain on the ship.

Too late. Passengers and ailing sailors are being disembarked as fast as Captain Turner can manage it. The Prince will go nowhere until his ship is free of contagion and his seamen well enough to return aboard.

Topping sends his own boats to collect Churchill’s cargo, but the men are ordered on no account to go on Board the Ship. Our Indians also were called together and desired to keep away from Sloops Cove. This does not go down well with Indigenous hunters, who are understandably curious to see their first European women. Grumpily, they declare their intention to leave for their winter camps, but Topping begs them to stay and hunt fresh meat to supply the sick, which after much entreaty they consented to do. He also sends all his available fresh meat and vegetables for the relief of the sick people.

The ninety or so passengers put ashore are mainly Highland farmers. Their ultimate destination — Red River — is deep in the heart of the continent, where they will join an advance party to establish the first permanent agricultural colony west of the Great Lakes. They range in age from one to sixty-five, and half are women and girls. One of them is my great-great-grandfather, Sam Lamont, a 22-year-old millwright contracted to build a mill to grind the colony’s grain. They had expected to land at York Factory, where the colony’s governor would meet them with boats to convey them 1,200 kilometres inland.

Now, they have rocky ground for a bed and sails for a roof. Over half are fevered with typhus. A crossing that had started with so much hope ends as badly as anyone might imagine, short of sinking. Their leader and doctor, William LaSerre, is among the dead. Quarantined in the open, kept distant from the Churchill Post, neither comfort nor hygiene is possible. But these are Highland farmers, no strangers to adversity, and after eight weeks at sea, just to be on dry, unmoving ground must be some relief.

There is nothing 1813 medicine can do for typhus, so the patients must put up with fever, chills, aches, coughing, vomiting and diarrhea until the war between microbes and immune systems is resolved.

Two weeks later, the passengers and the Prince of Wales are taken out of quarantine, but Captain Turner makes the drastic decision not to go to York Factory but to head straight back to Britain to avoid being trapped by ice already forming in Hudson Strait. He orders all cargo unloaded and sets about preparing his ship.

He has not reckoned with William Auld.

On September 9, Auld sweeps in like the wrath of God, which, as HBC Superintendent of Northern Factories, is pretty much what he is. Topping had sent a fast boat to York Fort to warn him of Turner’s intentions.

I immediately embarked in an open boat in the middle of the night, Auld later writes. I got to Churchill in 45 hours, drenched with salt water, the sea breaking over us for 3 or 4 hours without mercy. He shoots