Fort Douglas, (in background),
Where Winnipeg Now Stands
The Nor’-westers hid their anger, and watched for a chance to pay off the score. A party of them, on their way to an Indian camp, met a Hudson’s Bay party bound in the same direction. They started a camp fire, and began talking and drinking in the friendliest way. The Bay men took all that was offered them; but the wily Nor’-westers only sipped their liquor and secretly poured the rest on the snow. At last the Bay men fell asleep. The Nor’-westers then tied them on their sledges and whipped up the dog teams, which carried the sleepers safely home to their fort, while their sober rivals went on to the Indian camp and got the whole of the furs.
Many deeds of violence remained hidden in the breasts of the perpetrators. Of those that came to light, the most notorious was the “Battle of Seven Oaks,” or “Red River Massacre,” in 1816.
It was the foundation of the first white settlement in the West that led to that shocking event.
Until 1811, the Hudson’s Bay Company had been steadily opposed to any colonizing of its land. A permanent white population, it thought, would injure the fur trade. The Company’s officials even declared, and some of them doubtless believed, that the country was unfit for settlement or cultivation. But Thomas Douglas, the Earl of Selkirk, who was Governor of the [a]The Pemmican War] Company in 1811, knew better. He had already, in 1803, taken oversea a party of poor Scottish Highlanders, who established a colony in Prince Edward Island, and a little later he tried to start a settlement in Ontario. Seeing prospects of greater success in the West, he and his relations bought a majority of the Hudson’s Bay shares, and so controlled the whole of the Company’s operations. His next step was to buy from the Company 116,000 square miles of land, stretching north and south across Manitoba into Dakota and Minnesota, and including the present site of Winnipeg, where the Assiniboine flows into Red River.
The pioneers of western settlement sailed from Glasgow for Hudson Bay on July 26, 1811, but met “boisterous, stormy and cold weather,” and it was two months before they cast anchor at York Factory. There, though unskilled with the axe, they built log huts and spent the winter. Starting in boats for the next stage of their pilgrimage on July 6, up Hayes River and through Lake Winnipeg, it took them nearly as long to reach their Red River home as it had taken to cross the sea. They arrived on the 30th of August, and the first land was broken for crop that fall. Other parties meanwhile were coming out to join them, mostly from the north of Scotland and the Hebridean Isles, but some from Ireland too.
The North West Company did not like its rival’s new colony, and its hostility flamed up at last in the “Pemmican War,” which came about in this way.
The settlers, until they could raise food for themselves, had to live chiefly on the buffalo. The North West Company’s men, however, had been used to drawing their supplies of pemmican largely from the [a]Settlers Attacked by Nor’-Westers] same district, and as the Company’s Métis were skilled hunters the food supply of the colony was in danger. An order was made that no pemmican should be taken away from Lord Selkirk’s land. The Métis disobeyed the order, chased the buffalo out of reach of the settlers, and went on shipping pemmican out to the North West Company’s trading posts. The quarrel grew more and more fierce, and the Nor’-westers resolved to drive the Selkirk settlers out of the country. They burned the farmhouses and other buildings, destroyed the crops, and chased off any settlers who refused to go. “The Colony is gone to the Devil,” as one of the conquerors wrote.