John Black, the Apostle of the Red River / Or, How the Blue Banner Was Unfurled on Manitoba Prairies

by George Bryce

A book entitled "Red River Settlement," published by Sheriff Ross, some years after this time, is really a lively and correct account in most respects of the Selkirk colony. We have gleaned from his writings, and from the information communicated to Dr. Burns by him, the main facts leading up to the coming of John Black to the Highland colony. No doubt, late into that first night, the religious story of the forty years preceding, was told by the old fur trader to the youthful missionary. We may well rehearse the tale of disappointment now to be turned to joy.

The Scottish settlers of Red River were chiefly emigrants from the north of Scotland, brought to the country during and before the year 1815, by the Earl of Selkirk. They had a clergyman of their own persuasion promised by his lordship at the time of leaving their native country, the Rev. Mr. Sage, but he remained behind them for a year in order to perfect himself in the Gaelic language. He was expected to follow them. Next year, however, came and passed away and with it no clergyman; and up to the time of Mr. Black's coming no Presbyterian minister had ever visited Rupert's Land. In the winter of 1815-16 the settlers had to abandon the colony for want of food, and they betook themselves to the plains for buffalo, and to the lakes for fish, and wintered among the natives in all directions. In 1816, after their return to the settlement, they were driven from the colony at the muzzle of the gun by the Northwest fur traders, who did not want a farming settlement in Rupert's Land, and they spent the following winter three hundred miles to the north of the colony, at the foot of Lake Winnipeg.

Led by the vicissitudes of his settlers, Lord Selkirk visited his colony in 1817, made a treaty with the Indians, and made promises to his settlers, among other things, to send them a minister of their own faith. Much encouraged by his lordship's visit, the people settled down to work, when they were invaded by a grasshopper scourge, and had been compelled again to leave their farms and seek subsistence by the chase of the buffalo on the plains.

At this juncture (1818) they were surprised at the arrival of two Roman Catholic priests sent from Montreal, on the request of Lord Selkirk, for the Roman Catholic colonists taken out by him, and the French halfbreeds of Red River. But no Presbyterian minister was sent. It is to be said for Lord Selkirk that the financial difficulties of his colony and the strife and opposition which had arisen preyed on his mind to such an extent that he died in the south of France in 1820. He had, however, given strict charges to his agent, then in London, to send out a minister as promised. The agent was an Englishman and seemed to have used his position with the directors of the Hudson Bay Company very unfairly. In 1820 there arrived in Red River Rev. John West, a good and suitable man, but the settlers complained that he was of the Church of England, and that there were not "twenty individuals in the whole colony belonging to the Church of England."

Much dissatisfied, the colonists, in 1822, applied to Lord Selkirk's executors for redress, but no answer was made to them. Governor Donald Mackenzie, who was in charge at Fort Garry, made them, in the year following, a promise that a minister of their own persuasion would be sent them. A petition sent to Scotland for assistance received no reply. Years rolled on, the people still adhering in their homes to the customs of their fathers, holding prayer meetings from house to house and teaching the Shorter Catechism in their families. In 1843 they saw six Roman Catholic priests in the settlement, and four Church of England ministers, but none of their own faith.

The state of depression produced by these unavailing efforts may be seen in the fact that in 1835 a party of one hundred and ten persons, all Scotch settlers, left the colony for the United States, "solely because at the Selkirk settlement they had neither minister nor church of their own." Two years after a number of additional families left the country for the same reason. The indiscreet and uncalled for public address of one of their ministers, who had been once a Presbyterian but was so no longer, did much to influence their feeling and stir up resentment.

In the year 1844, Duncan Finlayson, a Scotchman, who was Governor at Fort Garry, advised another application to be made to the company in London. The petition of the people is really a most pathetic one. In it they say that "they are in danger of forgetting that they have brought with them into this land, where they have sought a home, nothing so valuable as the faith of Christ, or the primitive simplicity of their form of worship; and that their children are in danger of losing sight of those Christian bonds of union and of worship, which everywhere characterize the sincere follower of Christ."

In reply to this petition, the company denied any promise of Lord Selkirk to the settlers in the matter, but agreed to pay the expenses of a minister of their own faith to the country, provided they were willing to undertake his support. Again stirred up to vindicate their position, the leaders made affidavits as to Lord Selkirk's promise in their old Highland home of Helmsdale, in Sutherlandshire, before the Colonists emigrated, as well as at the time in 1817 when His Lordship gave the grant of land for church and school. The response to these declarations from the Hudson's Bay Company was no more satisfactory than the former had been, and thus ended the expectation which the Kildonan people had fondly cherished for more than thirty years of having a minister sent them by the company.

Now that they had learned the wisdom of the admonition—"Put not your trust in princes," the disappointed colonists began to turn their thoughts to the sympathy of the Scottish people. In 1846 they addressed a letter to the Free Church of Scotland, which in the following year reached the Colonial Committee of that Church. This committee sought in vain to obtain a minister for Red River, in Scotland, and in turn, through Dr. Bonar, the convener of the committee, handed the matter over to the Free Church in Canada.