In June 1816, at the white settlement of Assiniboia, on the banks of the Red River in Manitoba, a band of sixty French-speaking Metis fought back against an attack from the settlers, killing Robert Semple, the governor, and twenty-two settlers, an event remembered as the Battle of Seven Oaks. The Metis, sometimes called the Brules, were Indians from the Canadian hinterland, intermarried over the years with French trappers. This particular group were employed by the North-West Company to guard its warehouses for the fur trade on the Red River.
The Red River settlers were part of the great wave of settlement taking place in many parts of the Empire in these years. They had arrived in Canada four years earlier, brought from Scotland under the auspices of Thomas Douglas, Lord Selkirk, a philanthropic Scottish peer with a large shareholding in the Hudson’s Bay Company, a rival to the North-West Company in the backlands of Canada. With the confidence of great riches, he had dreamed up a variety of imaginative colonisation projects in the Empire for the benefit of the expropriated and disinherited peasants of the Scottish highlands.1
His first ambitious plan, ‘a Proposal’ to the British government formulated in 1802, was to send Catholic peasants from Ireland to Canada. He suggested that troublesome Irish Catholics, embittered after the rebellion of 1798 and ‘a standing danger to the Empire’, should be shunted off to a British colony that could be set aside solely for Catholics. Where better, Selkirk argued, than the vast territory of Canada, since this already sustained a substantial Catholic population established by its former French owners.2 Once the Catholics had been moved out of Ireland, Selkirk’s argument continued, loyal and energetic Scots settlers could be moved in, turning Catholic Ireland into an entirely Protestant country.
Since the Atlantic coast of Canada was already occupied by the farms of existing white settlers, Selkirk thought that space might be found for his project inland, near Lake Winnipeg, ‘a country which the Indian traders regard as fertile’. This was fur-trading country, long familiar to the employees of the North-West Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company, where Indians lived and hunted; but Selkirk made no mention of an Indian presence in his ‘Proposal’.
The British government did not warm to Selkirk’s scheme, and he was told that assistance would not be made available for anything so bizarre. Undeterred, he worked on a new emigration plan that he could organise himself. He would send Scottish farmers directly to Canada, and in 1803 he arranged for 800 settlers from Scotland - from Argyle, Ross-shire, Inverness and Skye - to be shipped across the Atlantic to Prince Edward Island, off the coast of Nova Scotia.
A few years later, in 1811, his agents in Scotland assembled a second group of peasant families and prepared them for emigration. Selkirk had acquired 116,000 square miles of land south of Lake Winnipeg thought to be suitable for colonisation, and a settlement was built at Assiniboia, at the junction of the Red River and the Assiniboine River.
For the settlers from Scotland, the journey was unbearably long. They came by ship to York Fort on Hudson’s Bay, and then travelled up the Nelson River to Lake Winnipeg. On arrival at Assiniboia, they met strong opposition. The local Indians along the Red River were opposed to the establishment of any new settlement, as were the Metis and the employees of the North-West Company. The harsh conditions they encountered, coupled with Indian hostility, caused many settlers to give up.
The final collapse of the settlement in June 1816, at the Battle of Seven Oaks, was recorded in a contemporary account by Daniel Harmon.3 A band of Metis had come down the Red River to Lake Winnipeg to guard the property of the North-West Company. When they passed close to the Assiniboia settlement, they were twice fired on by the settlers. They were unprepared for an attack, for they had few guns; but they fought back successfully, causing such damage that the surviving settlers abandoned the colony. Some went to live on the shores of Hudson’s Bay, but most retreated to Canada’s eastern provinces.
The indefatigable Selkirk returned to Assiniboia the following year with a fresh group of settlers capable of defending themselves, for they were all former soldiers, recruited from several different regiments. They had an easier time of it, and much of the hostility of the Metis and the Indians to their settlement evaporated when the rival trading companies merged in 1821.4 The North-West Company was incorporated into the Hudson Bay Company, and the Red River settlement established itself permanently, soon attracting fresh settlers.
Yet the arrival of the military settlers proved catastrophic for the Assiniboine Indians, for the soldiers brought smallpox with them. ‘The prairie all around is a vast field of death’, wrote a German traveller, Prince Maximilian of Wied, who journeyed through the area in the early 1830s. He described a land ‘covered with unburied corpses’, with ‘pestilence and famine’ spreading for miles around.5
The Assiniboines, 9,000 in number, roaming over a hunting territory to the north of the Missouri as far as the trading posts of the Hudson’s Bay Company, are, in the literal sense of the expression, nearly exterminated. They, as well as the Crows and the Blackfeet, endeavoured to flee in all directions, but the disease everywhere pursued them.
Did the soldiers inadvertently bring smallpox with them, or did they actively seek to kill off the indigenous population? The records are silent. Yet the pattern of development in the nineteenth century was now established, as the more distant Indian lands of Canada were thrown open to white rule.
World History
