“Have a care you do me no ill,” shouted Boucher slipping off the other side of his horse, prancing back.
“Take him prisoner—I say! Is this a time to be afraid?” shouts Semple.
“My God! We are all dead men,” groans Sutherland, the Scotch colonist, for the dread war whoop had rent the air. There was a blaze of musketry, and there reeled back with his arms thrown up—young Holte, the officer who had boasted that with the Lake Winnipeg schooner “he would give the Northwest scoundrels a drubbing.” Another crash, and Semple is down with a broken thigh. Cuthbert Grant dismounts and rushes to stop the massacre. “I am not mortally wounded! Take me to the fort,” gasps Semple. Grant turns to call aid. The Deschamps stab the Governor to death on the spot. The firing lasts less than fifteen minutes, but twenty of the Hudson’s Bay men have fallen, including all the officers, four colonists, fifteen servants. Captain Rodgers is advancing to surrender when he is hacked down. Of the twenty-seven who followed out, Pritchard, the former Nor’Wester, is saved by surrender; and five men escape by swimming across the river. As for the cannon, Bourke is trundling it back as fast as the horses can gallop. McLean, the settler, has been slain. One, only, of the Plain Rangers, Batoche, has been killed; only one wounded—Trottier of Pembina; and Cuthbert Grant at last succeeds in stopping the infuriated rabble’s advance and drawing off to camp west of Seven Oaks.
No need to describe the blackness of the work that night on the prairie. The Half-breeds wreaked their pent-up vengeance on the bodies of the slain. Let it be said to the credit of the Nor’Westers, they had no part in this ghoulish work. The worst miscreants were the Deschamps of the Missouri, whose blood-stained hands no decent Indian would ever touch after that night. In camp, Pierre Falçon, the rhymster, was chanting the glories of the victory, and Pritchard was pleading with Grant for the lives of the women and children. For years afterward—yes, even to this day—terrible stories were told of the threats against the families of the colonists; but let it be stated there was never at any time the shadow of a vestige of a wrong contemplated against the women and children. What Indians might do, old Chief Peguis had shown. What the Deschamps, who were half-white men, might do—the mutilated bodies of the dead at Seven Oaks revealed.
Pritchard was sent across to the fort with word that the colonists must save themselves by surrender. Otherwise, Grant could not answer for their safety among his wild Plain Rangers. The panic of the two hundred people inside was pitiable. For a second time they were to be driven houseless to the wilderness, and yet the bolder spirits were for manning the fort and resisting siege. If only they could have known that Selkirk was coming; but Lajimoniere lay captive in the butter-vat prison at Fort William, and Miles MacDonell had not yet come. Without help, how could two hundred people subsist inside the palisades? A white sheet was tied on the end of a pole, and the colonists marched out on June 22nd, at eight in the morning, Grant standing guard to protect them as they embarked in eight boats for Lake Winnipeg. Before abandoning Fort Douglas, Angus Matheson and old Chief Peguis gather a few of the dead and bury them in a dry coulée near the site of the old Cree graveyard at the south end of modern Winnipeg’s Main Street. Other bodies are buried as they lie at Seven Oaks; but the graves are so shallow they are ripped open by the wolves. Grant rides along the river bank to protect the colonists from marauders till they have passed the Rapids of St. Andrew’s and are well beyond modern Selkirk.
Beyond Selkirk, at the famous camping place of Nettley Creek, whom should the colonists meet but the Nor’ West partners galloping their canoes at racehorse pace to reach the field of action before Selkirk.
“What news?” calls Norman McLeod; but the news is plain enough in the eight boat loads of dejected colonists.
The Nor’Westers utter a war whoop, beat the gun’els of their canoes, shout their victory. “Thank Providence,” writes one partner, Robert Henry, “that the battle was over before we got there, as it was our intention to storm the fort. Our party consisted of one hundred men, seventy firearms, two field pieces. What our success might have been, I will not pretend to say; but many of us must have fallen in the contest.” The Nor’Westers have always maintained that they had not planned to attack Fort Douglas and that the onus of blame for the fearful guilt of Seven Oaks Massacre rested on Semple for coming out to oppose the Half-breeds, who were going to meet the Montreal express. Such excuse might do for Eastern law courts, whose aim was to suppress more than they revealed; but the facts do not sustain such an excuse. The events are now a century past. Let us face them without subterfuge. The time had come, the time was bound to come, when the rights of a Feudal Charter would conflict violently with the strong though lawless arm of Young Democracy. Therein lies the significance of what apologists and partisans have called the Skirmish of Seven Oaks.
Norman McLeod, the Justice of the Peace, hails the harried colonists ashore at Nettley Creek. They notice among the Northwest partners several soldiers dressed in regimentals—mark that, those who condemn Selkirk for hiring De Meuron soldiers! Two can play at the game of putting soldiers in red coats to bluff the Indians into believing the government is behind the trader. The settlers notice also, carefully hidden under oilcloth, two or three brass cannon in the Nor’Westers’ boats. Mark that, those who condemn Selkirk for bringing cannon along with his bodyguard!
As justice of the peace, Norman McLeod seizes the dead Semple’s baggage for incriminating papers. As justice of the peace—though it was queer kind of peace—he arrests those men who escaped from Seven Oaks, and claps them in irons that prevent Bourke, the storekeeper, from dressing his wounds. The colonists are then allowed to proceed to their wintering ground amid the desolate woods of Lake Winnipeg at Jack River.