1810-1813
THE COMING OF THE COLONISTS—LORD SELKIRK BUYS CONTROL OF THE H. B. C.—SIMON M’GILLIVRAY AND MACKENZIE PLOT TO DEFEAT HIM—ROBERTSON SAYS “FIGHT FIRE WITH FIRE” AND SELKIRK CHOOSES A M’DONELL AGAINST A M’DONELL—THE COLONISTS COME TO RED RIVER—RIOT AND PLOT AND MUTINY.
Not purely as a fur trader does my lord viscount, Thomas Douglas of Selkirk, begin buying shares in the Company of Honorable Adventurers to Hudson’s Bay. Not as a speculator does he lock hands with Sir Alexander MacKenzie, the Nor’West explorer, to buy Hudson’s Bay stock, which has fallen from £250 to £50 a share.
To every age its dreamer! Radisson had dreamed of becoming a voyageur to far countries; and his dream was realized in finding the Great Northwest. Iberville’s ambition was to be conqueror, and he drenched the New World with the blood that was the price of this ambition; and now comes on the scene the third great actor of Northwest drama, a figure round whom swings the new era, a dreamer of dreams, too, but who cares not a farthing for discovery or conquest, whose dream—marvel of marvels—is neither gain nor glory, but the phantom thing men call—Good!
Born in 1771, Selkirk came to his title in 1779, and in 1807 married the daughter of James Colville, one of the heaviest shareholders in the Hudson’s Bay Company. All that life could give the young nobleman possessed, wealth, position, love, power. But he possessed something rarer than these—a realizing sense that in proportion as he was possessed of much, so much was he debtor to humanity.
During his youth great poverty existed in Scotland. Changes in farming methods had driven thousands of humble tenants from the means of a livelihood. Alexander MacKenzie’s voyages had keenly interested Selkirk. Here, in Scotland, were multitudes of people destitute for lack of land. There, in the vast regions MacKenzie described, was an empire the size of Europe idle for lack of people.
Young Selkirk’s imagination took fire. Here was avenue for that passion to help others, which was the mainspring of his life. He would lead these destitute multitudes of Scotland—Earth’s Dispossessed—to this Promised Land of MacKenzie’s voyages. The one fact that Selkirk failed to take into consideration was—how the fur traders, how the lust of gain, would regard this aim of his. He addresses a memorial to the British Government on the subject, which the British Government ignores with a stolid ignorance characteristic of all its dealings in colonial affairs. “It appears,” says Selkirk, “that the greatest impediment to a colony would be the Hudson’s Bay Company monopoly.”
Meanwhile he sends eight hundred colonists to Eastern Canada—some to Prince Edward Island, some to Baldoon in Ontario; but neither of these regions satisfies him as does that unseen Eldorado which MacKenzie described. Then he comes to Montreal, himself, where he is the guest of all the ostentatious hospitality that the pompous Nor’Westers can lavish upon him. At every turn, at the Beaver Club banquets, in the magnificent private houses of the Nor’Westers, Selkirk learns for the first time that there is as great wealth in the fur trade as in Spanish mine. Then, he meets Colin Robertson, the young Nor’West clerk, who was dismissed by McDonald of Garth out on the Saskatchewan; and Colin Robertson tells even more marvelous tales than MacKenzie, of a land where there are no forests to be cleared away; where the turning of a plowshare will yield a crop; where cattle and horses can forage as they run; where, Robertson adds enthusiastically, “there will some day be a great empire.”
“What part of the great Northwest does Mr. Robertson think best fitted for a colony?” Selkirk asks.
“At the forks of the Red and the Assiniboine,” the modern Manitoba, Robertson promptly answers.