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Hay-cutting began on the 20th (afterwards 25th) July, and the scene of operations was the wild prairie. The outer two miles of each river frontage belonged, for hay purposes, to the frontage owner up to a certain date, but for the most part cutting was done on prairie that was free as air to everybody. The best hay meadows were located in good time before the above date, and on the night before people were camped all around them. Each one knew pretty well just the spot he was going to strike next morning, and if more than one had their eyes on the same spot, it became the property of the one who reached there first and made a “circle” by cutting around the field he wished to claim. There was sometimes (in dry years when hay was scarce) great rivalry, and we have seen camps all ready to start on the stroke of midnight, and actually starting to mark out circles in a thunderstorm. We have seen a circle entered by another than the one who made it, but it was in the case of someone who had tried to circle the whole prairie for himself, and in such case the unwritten law of the camp said that it served him right. There was rarely any trouble to speak of, and we look back to the camp on the prairie with its many tents like a white village as a most delightful and health-giving experience.

- Rev. R. G. MacBeth, Red River Settlers in Real Life

I thought this week would be a good time to look at one of the essential entries in the Red River farmer’s Day Timer. It’s an aspect of the livestock farmer’s life even to today: making hay.

As you will see, hay making was necessarily a community project, especially in the early days. And from the accounts of the activity in early settlement journals, we can learn some interesting things about life at the Red River Settlement.

Initially, the farms of Red River had ten chains frontage on the river, and extended back into the plains for the distance one could view beneath a horse’s belly – two miles. Hay priviledges were granted for a further two miles unless someone else had prior claim, in which case the use of an equivalent piece of land was offered elsewhere. Each farm also had a wood lot allotted to it on the opposite side of the river. Later the hay lots were granted in fee simple to the farmers.

These lots were often divided between children as the older generation passed away and, according to R. G. MacBeth, newcomers chuckled over the method of farming in lanes at Red River.

(reference: Rev. R.G. MacBeth. p. 33-4.)

I was alerted to a new-to-me website this morning – one that mentions the Red River Colony. So, naturally, I went in to have a look!

Many of us are tempted to accept as truth what we see in print. Unfortunately, and this is something that is particularly evident in material one finds on the Internet, a lot of what is written for our edification is either poorly researched, mistaken, or just downright misleading! Such is the case with Scottish Government site I was refered to today, Learning and Teaching Scotland: Scots and Canada.

The site looks very professional, and has a slide show of historic maps, paintings and sketches that add to the sense of authority of the site. But for the historian well-versed in Red River history, several errors are evident in the text. I’ll point out a few right now:

1. Lord Selkirk agreed that he would provide settlers and militia for the region over the next decade. According to Bumstead’s biography of Lord Selkirk (Lord Selkirk: A Life, 2008), Selkirk was constantly stymied by the British and Canadian Governments in his efforts to provide military protection for the RRS. He overcame the obstacle by settling retired Swiss soldiers in the Colony. They came (officially) as settlers, not soldiers. I wonder who the author of this site is inferring the agreement was between?
2. In 1811, a hundred Scots emigrants set sail for Hudson’s Bay under the leadership of Miles MacDonnell [sic]. The first Scottish (and Irish) settlers set sail in 1812. The group of 1811 was a work party made up of mostly Irish, Scottish and Orcadian men, and certainly fewer than 100! According to the list in the Miles Macdonell Papers as reprinted in Martin (p.10), 18 men were included in the work party. The 1812 group of Scottish settlers engaged was 56, according to A list of Settlers and Servants engaged in Ross, Brolas, Greenburn in the Island of Mull, for the service of the Honorable H. B. Coy and the Right Honorable Earl of Selkirk. [Selkirk Papers M-734 Vol. 2 pp. 558-559].
3. They arrived in Canada too late to make the 60-day trek inland to Red River before winter and were forced to camp near York Factory. The Scots barely survived the harsh winter. By spring, only 22 men were healthy enough to make the 1300-mile trek to Red River. The work party of 1811 did winter near York Factory, and encountered the usual hardships of winter life in the far north. There was a lot of strife and unrest in the two camps (one mainly Irish, the other mainly Scottish), and several Irish men were sent home on the next available ship as a result. The work party was never intended to be much larger than the group that headed for the intended site of the RRS in 1812, although there was some argument in the spring of 1812 about who would be part of it and whether HBC employees would augment the numbers. According to the list mentioned in the point above, 18 men left York Factory in 1812 as a work party for the RRS.
4. Nor’Westers refused to trade with the Scots settlers… On the contrary, NWCo. officials at Red River did everything they could to coerce the settlers to accept relocation to Canada from the RRS, and providing them with food was one of the main methods of dividing the settlers and the RRS officials and creating a rebellious spirit among the settlers. Metis and First Nations hunters supplied food for the RRS and were paid or traded for their services and provisions.
5. MacDonnell [sic] called himself the Governor of the Red River Colony. Of course he did. He was appointed such by Lord Selkirk himself! This site is pretty hard on Miles Macdonell, who, although he was admittedly not the best man for the job and made several serious mistakes in his leadership, was working in circumstances that even he would have had difficulty forseeing. Answers to his reports, which could only be sent out once annually with the ships from York Factory, were only received a year after he requested instructions, when the next ships arrived with the mail! How much can occur under volatile situations over the period of a year!
6. Cameron tried to convince the settlers to relocate but most refused. Actually, the majority (about three quarters of the settlers, according to lists made at the time of the events) accepted Cameron’s offer to relocate to Canada in 1815. Several families were forced by officials/servants of the NWCo. Only a handful removed to Jack River at the north end of Lake Winnipeg to await aid, instructions and the 1815 group’s arrival to augment their numbers and to start all over again.
7. Cuthbert Grant and 60 of his men massacred a group of 25 Hudson’s Bay Company employees at a place called Seven Oaks. Settlers were also slain in this massacre. Cuthbert Grant and ‘his’ men were acting under orders of NWCo. officials.

Having said all that (and more could be said…), the same site provides a link to an interesting educational page on the Red River Settlement, one that would be of interest to teachers and young people. It is simply written and hazy on detail. But it would be a good starting point for introducing children to their Red River roots! Check it out: The Red River Colony: Lord Selkirk has a Plan.

All TLSARL members and Red River Settlers’ Descendants are invited to attend!

For more information, contact George through the Contact Us Form.

Anyone interested in joining a TLSARL trip to Scotland in the summer of 2012? We are still planning, but need to know who is seriously interested so we can plan destinations according to descendant interests – there’s no point in going to Kildonan if no one from the Kildonan descendants is on the tour, right?

Essentially, the tour will be a pilgrimmage to our ancestors’ homes and other significant places in their lives in Scotland. We will also visit places that reflect various aspects of their lives there and the history of their local parishes.

Please, send me an email through the Contact Us Form noting your ancestors’ names and the places you’d be interested in visiting. This will also place you on our email list for the event.

Thank you!

Ross concludes his list with the following entry:

4th. For various reasons, therefore, we and many others here are of opinion, that Lord Selkirk’s object was the good of the natives, and theirs alone. What else could it have been? It was not territorial acquisition: that the Company had already. It was not the exclusive right of trade: that they had already. It was not to relieve a redundant population, for that relief was but small; nor could it have been for the bubble reputation. No: he had purer motives. The only prominent objection we have to Red River Colony in a local point of view is its proximity to the boundary line on the south, and his lordship was too clear-sighted not to have foreseen, that eventually it might fall into the hands of the Americans, and should it not, the only outlet for its resources must be south, and not north. Beyond what the Company might require, its market, in the nature of things, must be south also. Hence it is quite evident that his lordship’s motives must have been what we have stated; namely, the civilizing and evangelizing of the natives: so that into whatever hands its government fell, he would have attained his end. For its value to Great Britain, if we except the interest of the Hudson’s Bay Company, was, and ever must be, small indeed; nor could the Americans expect to benefit much by it, either in a political or commercial point of view. The fears of the North-Westers were fully realized, the anticipations of the Hudson’s Bay Company fully borne out by the result, for the colony has become a nursery for its retired servants; but as to Lord Selkirk’s view of benefiting the Indians, forty years’ experience has proved it, as we shall hereafter be able to show, a complete failure.

~ Alexander Ross, The Red River Settlement, p. 18-19.

If only Ross had given the colony another 20 years! He would have seen how wrong in several respects his conclusion was.

J. M. Bumsted, in his recent biography of Thomas Douglas, the Fifth Earl of Selkirk, talks a lot more about the Earl’s ideas on American expansion and the importance of Red River in countering U.S. expansion into what was in his time HBC territory. And one only needs to look at what happened to Britain’s claim to what is now Washington State and Oregon to see how important his foresight was!

The amalgamation of the HBC and NWCo. probably would have happened anyway, if either were to survive the depletion of fur stocks in the west. In fact, it was likely a hostile take-over planned by Sir Alexander Mackenzie of the North West Company with the aid of Lord Selkirk that brought the Earl into the Hudson’s Bay Company in the first place (Bumsted, Lord Selkirk: A Life. pp. 171-2)!

As for the retirement community theory, well, who were the ‘Canadians’ but the Métis families of French Canadian fur traders and bois brulés? They were settling at least part-time in the area already! So the colony was only giving structure to a population already in place to some degree, and augmenting its population. Yes, it was meant to re-enforce the HBC charter claims to an area already overrun by the NWCo. The HBC was fighting for survival, just as was the NWCo. This was undoubtedly a means of strengthening the HBC claim and lowering their operating costs.

At the same time, this goal could be achieved by aiding a population in dire need of assistance – the evicted highland tenant farmers. This is where Selkirk really failed, I think. He had plans to bring over a great many more Scots than he actually managed to transport to Red River. The shortfall was in part due to the machinations of NWCo. partners and their propaganda; and the dithering of English politicians, who also were under the influence of NWCo. propaganda, on the subject of Selkirk’s emigration proposals. The colony also lost large numbers of its colonists to migration after NWCo. interference; mismanagement of the colony and its interests by Selkirk’s officials; and floods, droughts and grasshopper plagues; and Selkirk’s premature death among other things. I’m not even sure that the failure was Selkirk’s. The idea was a good one. The timing could have been better, perhaps. But how could anyone have known that!

Ross, to the best of my knowledge, never met Selkirk. He was not an eyewitness to any of the colony’s earliest history – he was one of those retired HBC servants with a First Nations family, who had been working in the Columbia District first for the NWCo., then the HBC, prior to joining the colony in 1825 (Frits Pannekoek, Ross, Alexander. Canadian Encyclopedia). He was one of the colonists who fought hard for a Presbyterian minister, and was very active in the Presbyterian Church at Kildonan as an elder, once it was established. A good portion of his book deals with civilizing the Natives of Rupert’s Land, a process Ross tends to equate with conversion to Christianity. It was a cause that he seemed very concerned with, himself….

The third of Selkirk’s supposed motives in Ross’ list leaves me scratching my head a bit.

3rd. The next statement, in our opinion, contains his lordship’s real object, the pious and philanthropic desire of introducing civilization into this wilderness. Being a pious man himself, he felt for others. His lordship knew from long experience, that poverty and degradation were making long and rapid strides in Rupert’s Land; that the wild animals of the chase had almost ceased to exist there, in sufficient numbers, at least, to feed and clothe the aboriginal inhabitants of the soil – not that such numbers had been extirpated by the natives themselves, but by the destroying hand of civilized man. It was now, in this point of view, drawing towards the eleventh hour, when it was high time for them, not only to cultivate the ground, whereby they might live, but prepare to cultivate the mind also, as the test of their improving condition, spiritually as well as temporarily. To this end, the preparatory step with his lordship was a colony, as a nucleus or rallying point in the wilderness. The object, then, was a laudable and charitable one, strictly in accordance with the character of such a man as Lord Selkirk – a man of a great mind and a good heart – and also in accordance with the spirit of the Company’s charter.

~ Alexander Ross, The Red River Settlement, p. 18.

There is undoubtedly something of Selkirk in this motive, but I can’t help feeling, as I read it, that this is more Ross’ ideal than his lordship’s. Selkirk was very much a philanthropist and a humanist, a fact that the previous two listed motives and people who uphold them tend to overlook.

Perhaps I am mistaken – there is so much material on Selkirk and the Settlement that I have yet to read! – but I think Selkirk’s main focus was on helping his fellow Scots/Europeans establish themselves sufficiently. His piety, or lack of piety doesn’t strike me as remarkable or overt. Was he pious? I think he had First Nation interests in mind to a greater degree than others planting colonies, certainly, but I’m not sure that ‘civilizing’ them was a major concern. Was it? As for the bison, certainly Selkirk’s officers saw them as a ready and plentiful food source for the colony. Did Selkirk himself worry about a radically declining bison population? Perhaps those of you who have read more widely can offer some comments!