From Fort William, Selkirk’s soldiers radiated to the Northwest posts of Rainy Lake and Minnesota. Peter Grant was brought prisoner from Fond du Lac for obstructing the Selkirk scout, Lajimoniere. At the Pic, at Michipicoten, at Rainy Lake, the De Meuron soldiers appear and the Northwest forts surrender without striking a blow. Then Captain D’Orsonnens sets out in December with twenty-six men for Red River. He is guided by J. Ba’tiste Lajimoniere and the white man who had lived among the Ojibbways—Tanner. They lead him along the iced river bed to Rainy Lake, then strike straight westward through the snow-padded forests of Minnesota for the swamp lands that drain to Red River near the Boundary. All travel by snowshoes, bivouacking under the stars. Then a dash down Red River by night march on the ice and the Selkirk forces are within striking distance of Fort Douglas by the first week of January, 1817. Wind and weather favor them. A howling blizzard enshrouds earth and air. They go westward to the Assiniboine in the wooded region now known as St. James and Silver Heights. Here in the woods, hidden by the snowstorm, they construct scaling ladders. On the night of January 10th, the storm is still raging. D’Orsonnens rushes his men across to Fort Douglas. Up with the scaling ladders and over the walls are the De Meurons before the Nor’Westers know they are attacked! As fell Fort William, so falls Fort Douglas without a blow or the loss of a life. J. Ba’tiste learns with joy that his wife, Marie Gaboury, has not been murdered at all but is living safe under old Chief Peguis’ protection across Red River, and the French woman’s amazement may be guessed when there appeared at the hut where Peguis had left her, the wraith of the husband whom she had believed dead for two years. Tanner, the other scout, stays in D’Orsonnens’ service till Selkirk comes.
The dispossessed Nor’Westers scatter to Lake Winnipeg. After them marches D’Orsonnens to Winnipeg River, where Alex McDonell is trying to bribe the Indians to sink Selkirk’s boats when he comes in the spring. The De Meurons capture the post at Winnipeg River, and send coureurs to recall the scattered colonists. Alex McDonell escapes to the interior.
All the while, from June 19th to January 19th, the colonists had been wandering like the children of Israel in a wilderness of woes. When they had been driven to Lake Winnipeg by the massacre, they had begged Mr. Bird of the Saskatchewan to forward them to Hudson Bay, whence they could take ship for England, but Bird pointed out there was no boat coming to the bay in 1816 large enough to carry two hundred people. To go to the bay for the winter would be to risk death from starvation. Better winter on the good hunting and fishing grounds of Lake Winnipeg. It was well the majority took his advice, for the Company ships this year were locked in the bay by the ice. Cameron, the Northwest prisoner, and Colin Robertson, his inveterate enemy, were both ice-bound at Moose. The few settlers who pushed forward to the bay like the widow McLean, wife of the murdered settler, passed a winter of semi-starvation at the forts.
Bird set the colonists fishing for the winter, and they erected huts at Jack River. Here, then, came De Meuron soldiers in the spring of 1817, to lead the wandering colonists back to Red River; and to Red River came Selkirk by way of Minnesota in the summer. For the first time the nobleman now saw the Promised Land to which he had blazed a trail of suffering and sacrifice and blood and devotion for Earth’s Dispossessed of all the world! D’Orsonnens had given out a few packs of seed, grain and potatoes to each settler. Rude little thatch-roofed cabins had been knocked together with furniture extemporized of trees and stumps. Round each cabin there swayed in the yellow July light to the rippling prairie wind, tiny checker-board patches of wheat and barley and oats, first fruits of infinite sacrifice, of infinite suffering, of infinite despair—type for all time, sacrificial and sacred, of the Pioneer! For the first time Selkirk now saw the rolling prairie land, the rolling prairie world, the seas of unpeopled, fenceless, limitless fields, free as air, broad as ocean! To these prairie lands had he blazed the Trail. Was it worth while—the suffering on that Trail, the ignominy he was yet to suffer for that Trail? Did Selkirk foresee where that Trail was to lead; how the multitudinous feet of Life’s Lost, Earth’s Dispossessed, would trample along that Trail to New Life, New Hope, New Freedom? Faith in God, confidence in high destiny, had been to the children of Israel through their wilderness, a cloud of shade by day, a pillar of fire by night. Had Selkirk the comfort of the same vision, confidence of the same high destiny for his people? I cannot answer that. From the despairing tone of his letters, I fear not. All we know is that like all other great leaders he made mistakes, and the consequences of those mistakes hounded him to his death.
In August, he gathered the people round him on the spot where St. John’s Cathedral now stands. He shook hands with each and learned from each his tale of suffering. To each he gave one hundred acres of land free of all charges, as compensation for their hardships. Then he gave them two more lots. “This lot on which we stand, shall be for your church,” he said. “That lot south of the creek shall be for your school; and in memory of your native parish, this place shall be called Kildonan.” To render the title of the colonists’ land doubly secure, Selkirk had assembled the Swampy Crees and Saulteaux on July 18th and made treaty with them for Red River on condition of a quit-rent of one hundred pounds of tobacco. To Lajimoniere, the scout, Selkirk assigned land in the modern St. Boniface, that brought to Marie Gaboury’s children, and her children’s children, untold wealth in the town lots of a later day. Tanner, the stolen white boy, Selkirk tried to recompense by advertising for his relatives in American papers. A brother in Ohio answered the advertisement and came to Red River to meet the long lost boy. The restoration was fraught with just such disaster as usually attends the sudden transplanting of any wild thing. Tanner, the white boy, had become Tanner the grown Indian. He left his Indian wife and married a Christian girl of Detroit. The union was agony to them both. Tanner was a man at war in his own nature—neither white man nor Indian. In a quarrel at the Sault some years later, he was accused of shooting a man and fled from arrest to the swamps. When spring came, his skeleton was found. He had either suicided in despair, or wounded himself by accident and perished of starvation in the swamp. Many years afterwards the confession of a renegade soldier in Texas cleared Tanner’s reputation of all guilt. The soldier himself had committed the murder, and poor Tanner had fled from the terrors of laws he did not understand like a hunted Ishmaelite to the wilderness. To-day, some of his descendants are among the foremost settlers of Minnesota.
In May, 1817, Royal Proclamation had commanded both companies to desist from disorders and restore each other’s property. William Bachelor Coltman and Major Fletcher came as Royal Commissioners to restore order and take evidence. Fort William passed back to the Nor’Westers and a new Gibraltar arose on the banks of the Assiniboine. Urgent interests called Selkirk East. Trials were pending in Upper and Lower Canada against both companies for the disorders. With Tanner as guide to the Mississippi, Selkirk evaded the plots of the Nor’Westers by going south to St. Louis, east to New York, and north to Canada.
Volumes have been written and heads cracked and reputations broken on the justice or injustice of the famous trials between the Nor’Westers and Hudson’s Bay. Robertson, the Hudson’s Bay man, was to be tried for seizing Gibraltar. The Nor’Westers were charged with being accomplices to the massacre of Seven Oaks. Selkirk was sued for the imprisonment of Daniel MacKenzie and the resistance offered to the Canadian sheriff at Fort William. In every case except the two civil actions against Selkirk, the verdict was “not guilty.” Whether the judges were bribed by the Nor’Westers as the Hudson’s Bay charged, or the juries were “unduly influenced” by Selkirk’s passionate address and pamphlets, as the Nor’Westers declared—I do not purpose discussing here. Selkirk was sentenced to pay £1,500 for imprisoning Daniel MacKenzie and £500 for resisting the sheriff. As for the verdicts, I do not see how a Canadian court could have given a verdict favorable to the Hudson’s Bay, without repudiating rights of Canadian possession; or a verdict favorable to the Nor’Westers, without repudiating the laws of the British Empire. The truth is—the old royal charter had created a condition of dual authority that was responsible for all the train of disasters. It was unofficially conveyed to the leaders of both companies by the British Government that if they could see their way to union, it would remove the necessity of the British Government determining which company possessed the alleged rights.
As for Selkirk’s fines, they were paid jointly by the Hudson’s Bay Company and himself. William Williams, a swashbuckler military man, is appointed at £1,000 a year to succeed Semple and force the trade so that the Nor’Westers will be compelled to sue for union and accept what terms are offered. More men are to be sent up from Montreal to capture Athabasca. The Rev. John West is appointed clergyman of Red River in 1819, at £100 a year. Annuities of £50 each are granted for life to Semple’s two sisters. Pensions are granted the widows of settlers killed at Seven Oaks—to the widows McLean, Donovan, Coan and two others. Oman Norquay, forbear of Premier Norquay of modern Manitoba, is permitted to quit the Company service and join the colony. So are the Gunn brothers and the Bannermans, and the Mathesons, and the Isbisters, and the Inksters, and the Hardisties, and the Spencers, and the Fletts, and the Birds. Selkirk has gone to France for his health, harried and weary of the thankless strife. On November 8, 1820, he dies. The same year, passes away his great opponent in trade and aim—Sir Alexander MacKenzie, in Scotland. The year that these two famous leaders and rivals died, there was born in Scotland the next great leader of the next great era in the West, the nation building era that was to succeed the pioneering—Donald Smith, to become famous as Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal.