2

‘Tribes that never saw Europeans before’

Ascoilemore fur trader Donald MacKay and the beginnings of clearance-era Sutherland’s links with Manitoba

Jessie Ross’s resistance to her and her children’s eviction – resistance encapsulated in Jessie’s refusal to help move her baby from her home – was entirely passive. Donald MacKay, one of Ascoilemore’s farming tenants and a man who, in the course of his 68 years, had had to cope often with adversity, gave Donald Bannerman and his evicting party greater trouble.

MacKay had ‘removed all the furniture out of [his] house’ in advance of his family’s eviction on 30 May 1821, Bannerman reported. But some hours later, when the sheriff-officer and his evicting party were busy elsewhere, word reached them that MacKay had resumed possession and ‘had put some of [his] furniture into the house again’. On hearing this, Bannerman continued, he had returned to MacKay’s home where, with the help of ‘some of the party’, he ‘put [the contents] out and threw down [or demolished] the house’.1

Donald MacKay, his wife Mary and their several children were taken in temporarily, like Jessie Ross and her daughters, by an Ascoilebeg householder. The MacKays’ rescuer was William Sutherland whose home must have been crammed to bursting point because of his having accommodated not just the MacKays but two further Ascoilemore families. The consequent congestion eased after a fortnight or so, when, with the exception of the MacKays, William Sutherland’s guests left for Cromarty, the Ossian and Nova Scotia. In the interim, however, the MacKay children, like the Ross girls, had gone down with whooping cough (clearly rife in Ascoilemore just prior to its clearance) and one of them, ‘a boy of four years old’ according to his father, died.²

Though not identified as such in documentation from 1821, the dead child must have been the MacKays’ son Hugh, born in 1817. He was buried, no doubt, in the same small graveyard – roughly halfway between ‘the two Ascoiles’ – as little Katherine Ross. Soon after, Hugh’s father (very possibly in emulation of Katherine’s father Gordon) wrote to Lord Stafford to inform him of the circumstances surrounding the boy’s death and to provide the marquis, as Donald MacKay put it, with some idea of the ‘cruelty’ being inflicted on Sutherland’s population in his, Lord Stafford’s, name.3

What had happened at Ascoilemore, Donald MacKay raged, was ‘so disgraceful to humanity’ that he could not ‘find language . . . adequate’ to describe it. Lord Stafford needed to understand, MacKay continued, that on the day Donald Bannerman and his ‘gang’ (the term MacKay used of the sheriff-officer’s evicting party) were ‘demolishing every house [in Ascoilemore] . . . to the very ground’, children who were ‘sick with the whooping cough’ had found themselves without shelter in weather that was ‘very cold’ because of there having been ‘a strong wind from the north-east’. Like Gordon Ross, then, Donald MacKay implied that the Marquis of Stafford was responsible – even if indirectly – for the deaths of Sutherland children. MacKay’s language, however, was more forceful than Ross’s. The destruction which Bannerman had inflicted on Ascoilemore, MacKay wrote, would be ‘visible to the end of time’, and he hoped very much that ‘those who [were] the authors of such barbarous actions’ – the ultimate such authors being the marquis and the marchioness – would one day ‘be exposed to the censure of the public’.⁴

Despite the ferocity of its contents, Donald MacKay’s letter worried James Loch less than the letter Lord Stafford had received a few days earlier from Gordon Ross. This was because Loch thought MacKay an easier man to discredit than the SSPCK schoolmaster. MacKay, Loch observed, was ‘half-crazy’, ‘a blackguard’ and ‘a very great villain’ who had for years been embroiled in anti-Stafford plotting of a sort that, according to Loch, had strayed into criminality. Elaborating on this point, Loch recounted how, on Joseph Gordon telling Gordon Ross that Ascoilemore’s clearance could not be prevented, Donald MacKay turned elsewhere for legal advice in the belief – vain as it proved – that he and his neighbours would eventually find some way of retaining their homes. In total, Loch commented, MacKay and other Ascoilemore tenants ‘spent about £100 [equivalent to several thousand pounds today] in the hope that they could legally prevent their . . . removing and, finding that impossible, they urged on their subtenants at Achness to open resistance’. As neither the marquis nor the marchioness needed reminding, ‘resistance’ to the clearance of Achness, three or four miles from Ascoilemore, had reached such a pitch in early 1821 that (as recounted later) evictions there had to be enforced by an army detachment, the Achness people (whose land was sublet, as Loch stated, from Donald MacKay and his neighbours) having previously beaten off the sheriff-officers, constables and Sutherland Estate staff sent to evict them.5

Not content with his having ‘incited’ violence at Achness, James Loch went on, Donald MacKay had mailed ‘threatening letters’ to the Marchioness of Stafford when, in August and September 1820, she spent some weeks at Dunrobin. At the time, Loch had advised Lady Stafford to take no action in response to those letters because MacKay, or so Loch and Francis Suther understood, had begun ‘paying rent for a farm in Caithness’ and would thus soon be gone from Sutherland. Although angered by Donald MacKay having ‘openly rebelled in word and deed’, as she put it, the marchioness accepted this advice – with the proviso that, if MacKay persisted, ‘we will have him before the sheriff’. On its afterwards becoming apparent that MacKay had abandoned his planned move to Caithness and (despite his age) was contemplating a fresh start in Nova Scotia, Loch began to regret that he had dissuaded Lady Stafford from prosecuting MacKay for his role in what the marchioness described as an Ascoilemore-based ‘conspiracy’ to sabotage Achness’s clearance. His ‘not having noticed’ MacKay’s threatening letters, Loch confided to Francis Suther, had simply ‘emboldened’ their author. But even if it might have served the marchioness better had James Loch turned in 1820 to the ever-pliant Sheriff Ross and got him to jail the Ascoilemore ‘madman’, as Loch called MacKay, the Stafford position was far from irretrievable, Loch being of the opinion that anything MacKay might say in public about the manner of Ascoilemore’s clearance could immediately be countered by evidence of his having engaged in illegality.⁶

But if James Loch was correct to minimise the possibility of Donald MacKay inflicting serious damage on the Staffords, MacKay’s July 1821 letter to the marquis – a letter which, unlike Gordon Ross’s, was not retracted – shows there were people in clearance-era Sutherland who, though deprived of homes and land, refused to be cowed into subservience. This, in turn, prompts the question of how it came about that Donald MacKay, one such person, considered himself entitled to address the Marquis of Stafford in such unrelentingly caustic terms. James Loch, had he been asked that question, might well have replied that the answer lay (though Loch would have used less sensitive language) in MacKay being unstable psychologically, and in so responding, Loch (as will be seen) might not have been wholly in error. But he would not have been wholly right either. An alternative explanation for MacKay’s courageous (and it was courageous) behaviour is to be found in one of his correspondence’s most striking features: his signature. All dash and flourishes, it is the signature of a man who had exercised authority.

This was understood by William Young who, as the Sutherland Estate’s resident factor between 1811 and 1816, was Francis Suther’s predecessor. Reporting on an exploratory trip he made into Strathbrora in the autumn of the year prior to his appointment, Young told of his finding Donald MacKay living, with his wife and children, ‘in a wretched timber hut . . . without a foot of garden ground’. ‘Distressed with rheumatism,’ Young commented of MacKay for whom the factor felt some sympathy, ‘he cannot long hold out in such a habitation and I could wish to see him more comfortable’. Although Donald MacKay was said by the Marchioness of Stafford to have later ‘threatened to shoot Young’, it may be, then, that the Ascoilemore tenancy which subsequently came MacKay’s way was a consequence of his having had the factor’s help. The possibility of such help is hinted at in William Young’s account of his 1810 encounter with a man who – though Young could not have foreseen this – would afterwards cause the Sutherland Estate much difficulty. ‘He pressed me to come in,’ Young wrote of Donald MacKay, ‘gave me some details of his travels and said he liked to see strangers. On my remarking that his house must be cold in winter, he laughed at my ignorance and said that, although I saw the boards open at present, the rain would make them quite close and prevent the wind from blowing in . . . I had to go [elsewhere] . . . and was obliged to leave poor MacKay in the midst of his travels, after telling him at parting [who] I was, and [that I was] hoping to see him [made] more comfortable in his native land.’7

If Donald MacKay truly got to ‘the midst of his travels’ in the course of just an hour or two’s conversation with William Young, he made short work of an intricate life story. As is indicated by his having built in Strathbrora a ‘wooden home’ approximating to a log cabin, this was a man who had spent more time on various North American frontiers than in Scotland; a man who been in lots of places which, at the start of the nineteenth century, only a handful of other Europeans had so much as glimpsed; a man who, when he quit Sutherland for the last time in the summer of 1822, would be making his ninth crossing of the Atlantic Ocean.⁸

Donald MacKay was a remarkable individual. Indeed it is an arguable proposition that today’s world owes more to MacKay’s activities than to the much-trumpeted accomplishments of Loch and the Staffords. Two centuries after the ‘improvements’ brought about there by James Loch and his employers, Sutherland contains some 13,500 people, about 10,000 fewer, incidentally, than lived there 200 years ago. The population of Manitoba, the Canadian province MacKay’s ‘travels’ helped open up to trade and settlement, is nearly 100 times larger, while a Sutherland town like Brora, of which the Marquis and Marchioness of Stafford expected so much, cannot meaningfully be compared with Manitoban cities like Brandon, its origins traceable to one of Donald MacKay’s trading posts, or Winnipeg, which MacKay helped supply with its earliest settlers.

Donald MacKay was born in Strathbrora in 1753. Nothing further is known of him until, in 1779, he enters the historical record as the junior associate of a Montreal fur trader, also of Highland background, called John Ross. The American Revolutionary War was then raging and Montreal, taken from its French founders by the British less than 20 years before, was full of Highlanders. Some were loyalist refugees from independence-seeking colonies to the south; others had served in one of the Highland regiments integral to Britain’s ultimately doomed struggle to keep those colonies inside its empire. Since one of his fur trade colleagues was to write of Donald MacKay that ‘he had been in the army’, it may be that he belonged to the latter group. What is certain is that, within months of Ross hiring him, MacKay, by way of the canoe routes that were the fur trade’s equivalent of transcontinental highways, was deep in the North American interior, travelling as far west as the so-called Mandan Villages on the upper reaches of the Missouri River in present-day North Dakota.9

The Mandan Villages, permanent settlements in an area where most Native American peoples were nomadic, intrigued their white visitors, not least Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, who headed the Corps of Discovery sent west by US President Thomas Jefferson in 1804. Donald MacKay, who reached the upper Missouri a quarter of a century in advance of Lewis and Clark (key contributors to the USA’s territorial expansion) was equally taken by the villages and their inhabitants – something reflected in the several pages devoted to his Mandan experiences in the autobiographical sketch MacKay was to put together when in Nova Scotia.¹⁰

MacKay’s principal field of operations, however, lay further north – on the great rivers, principally the Saskatchewan, the Assiniboine and the Red, that flow into Lake Winnipeg. Here during the 1780s Donald MacKay, whose partnership with John Ross did not last long, traded on his own account, refusing to have anything to do with the consortium then being put together by a number of his compatriots in Montreal. This was the North West Company (NWC), which, for the next 20 or 30 years, would dominate the North American fur trade. Run for much of that period by Simon MacTavish and his nephew William MacGillivray, both of whom came from Stratherrick near Inverness, the company’s sphere of operations eventually extended all the way to the Pacific, which one of its leading traders, Alexander MacKenzie, reached in 1793. Aiming always to keep costs low and profits high, MacTavish, MacGillivray, MacKenzie and other ‘lords of the lakes and forests’ as the Nor’Westers were dubbed by an American observer, were determined monopolists who, if unable to persuade independent traders to join them, were perfectly happy to run such traders out of the interior. Among Nor’Wester targets was Donald MacKay, always his own man, always irascible and already experiencing the periods of ‘great trouble and vexation of mind’ that were to plague him for much of his life. What MacKay called ‘the stratagems and manoeuvres of the . . . North West Company’ were to include his being assaulted and robbed of his trade goods at Grand Portage, a fur trade way station west of Lake Superior. It was in reaction to this and similar episodes that MacKay decided in the end to put his services at the disposal of the one commercial concern with the capacity, potentially at least, to do to the Nor’Westers what they had done to him – that concern being the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC).11

Established by royal charter in 1670, this London-based and archetypally imperial corporation was supposedly in sole charge of all the trade conducted in all the territories drained by all the watercourses flowing into Hudson Bay – technically part of the Atlantic Ocean but so vast and so enclosed as to be virtually a sea in its own right. Because Lake Winnipeg’s waters drain into the bay by way of the Nelson River, the HBC’s domains included, in accordance with its founding charter, the catchments of those other rivers – the Red, the Assiniboine and the Saskatchewan – where Donald MacKay traded in the 1780s. But as MacKay had cause to know, the HBC’s claim to those areas, and to richer fur grounds further to the west, had been rendered null and void by the Nor’Westers who, in effect, cut off at source the furs that native peoples had previously been happy to bring to HBC posts – principally York Factory and Fort Churchill – on the shores of Hudson Bay. If this situation was to be altered and the HBC’s theoretical control of the fur trade made real, then the previously lethargic corporation, whose Bay-based operatives had shown little inclination to venture inland, was going to have to do what the NWC’s ruthlessly enterprising Highlanders had done already – establish a grip on the places where furs originated by adopting native or Aboriginal* technology, in the shape of birch-bark canoes, and move ever deeper into the continental interior. This was the approach Donald MacKay began to urge on the HBC, MacKay sailing from Montreal to London in 1788 to make his pitch directly to the company’s board.

MacKay’s motives were personal. He wanted, he wrote, ‘to be revenged on the villains . . . who [had] robbed [him] of his property’ at Grand Portage. This was recognised by the Bay Company men with whom he negotiated in London. Equally recognised, however, were Donald MacKay’s unrivalled attributes. He knew canoes; he knew the North American interior; he understood its geography more comprehensively than most of the HBC’s more established personnel.¹²

Hence Donald MacKay’s recruitment by the HBC; and hence the series of expeditions MacKay now launched into the then uncharted wilderness to the west and south-west of Hudson Bay. Despite his coming close to death at times from drowning or starvation, and despite his tendency to seek unnecessary confrontations with his Nor’Wester rivals, Donald MacKay went a long way to providing the HBC with means of reaching from the Bay a series of places that had previously seemed accessible only from Montreal by way of the Great Lakes and Grand Portage. The maps Donald MacKay made in the course of his exploratory travels (the travels William Young was to hear about in Strathbrora nearly 20 years later) would not be superseded in some instances until the development of aerial photography. And when, in 1793, MacKay established a post or trading fort named Brandon House on the Assiniboine, he provided the HBC with the toehold from which the company was eventually to pose an effective challenge to Nor’Wester supremacy in both the Assiniboine and Red River areas.

Donald MacKay’s Bay Company bosses – who, when he was in London, presented him with a ceremonial sword – were appreciative of what MacKay did for them. They were less appreciative of the man himself. Displaying tremendous drive and energy at some points, isolating himself at others, and given increasingly to threatening violence to those around him, MacKay became more and more impossible to live with. The Nor’Westers, in the Québécois French that was the lingua franca of the Montreal-based fur trade, had nicknamed him Le Malin, the devil. His HBC associates, much as James Loch would do later, called him Mad MacKay. Those same associates, it followed, were not sorry to see Donald MacKay quit Hudson Bay for Scotland in 1799. Nor were they pleased when, with the encouragement of the HBC’s London directors, MacKay in 1806 made a brief return to the bay where he overwintered at Fort Churchill. According to the fort’s chief trader, William Auld, with whom MacKay quarrelled bitterly, the latter ‘when sober, [was] mad, when drunk outrageously so’. There was, then, a certain inevitability about Donald MacKay’s 1807 decision to leave Hudson Bay for good. Returning to his native Strathbrora, where he had also spent the years between 1800 and 1806, MacKay – for all that a substantial sum had accumulated in his Bay Company account – chose to live frugally in the ‘hut’ William Young was to visit in 1810.13

In Strathbrora, Donald MacKay’s domestic arrangements were complicated. They were also controversial. When with the HBC, MacKay’s ‘country wife’ (the term applied in the fur trade to a man’s locally acquired female partner) was Hannah Sutherland, a Métis daughter (her mother was Cree) of MacKay’s fellow trader and fellow Highlander, James Sutherland. Hannah was to die when she and the couple’s two young sons were attacked (for reasons that remain obscure) by a group of Aboriginals. But her boys, William and Donald, survived (despite Donald having been scarred for life) and both were to spend lengthy periods with their father in Ascoilemore. There, not long after his initial homecoming, Donald Senior embarked on a relationship with Mary MacKenzie, more than 30 years his junior and still a teenager when her first child, described by Strathbrora’s Church of Scotland minister as Mary and Donald’s ‘bastard daughter’, was born at Ascoilemore in July 1803. Sometime later, however, the couple married prior to having more children, two of whom accompanied their father when in June 1822, taking advantage of subsidised passages Joseph Gordon was then making available, Donald MacKay* sailed from Cromarty for Nova Scotia.¹⁴

Donald MacKay’s 1822 departure for North America was not the first of his involvements with transatlantic emigration from Sutherland. That occurred more than ten years before when, at the start of 1812, MacKay was contacted by Thomas Douglas, Earl of Selkirk, then a key figure in the Hudson’s Bay Company. Partly with a view to assisting the HBC’s continuing efforts to combat Nor’Wester competition and partly in order to provide new opportunities for evicted Highlanders, Selkirk (of whom more later) was setting about the establishment of a settlement colony in the vicinity of Red River’s junction with the Assiniboine. Donald MacKay, as Selkirk had discovered, was perhaps the only person then living in the United Kingdom who had not only seen the locality in question but had spent time there. What could MacKay tell him of Red River and its wider setting? the earl enquired. The answer, it became apparent, was a great deal.

‘To enter minutely into . . . the nature of this country’, Donald MacKay wrote of territories occupied today by Manitoba, Saskatchewan, North Dakota and Minnesota, ‘would need a whole volume.’ But he would do his best; and in this he was clearly aided (since he supplied Lord Selkirk with sets of latitudes and longitudes) by his having available in Ascoilemore some at least of the charts and journals deriving from his North American explorations. Drawing on these to explain to the earl where Red River lay in relation to the Mississippi–Missouri drainage basin, MacKay could not resist recalling his Missouri exploits of more than 30 years previously. ‘I have seen tribes of Indians that never saw any Europeans before,’ he boasted, dwelling in particular on periods spent with the ‘Big Bellies’ (or Mandan) and the ‘Snakes’ (or Shoshone). Both those peoples, MacKay added, ‘treated me with the utmost civility and hospitality’.15

But what the Earl of Selkirk really wanted to know, Donald MacKay appreciated, was how prospective colonists – who, in the event, included two contingents from Sutherland – were to get from the Bay Company’s York Factory base to Lake Winnipeg and Red River. ‘The distance from York Fort to [Lake] Winnipeg is 350 miles,’ MacKay commented. En route, by way of the Hayes and Nelson Rivers, Selkirk’s Red River settlers would encounter obstacles in the shape of ‘twenty-four carrying places’ or portages, where boats or canoes had to be hauled around falls or rapids. There was, then, no disguising the arduousness of a York Factory–Red River journey. But once accomplished, Donald MacKay insisted, that journey – however difficult – would be shown to have been worthwhile.

Besides having easy access to the sturgeon that, according to MacKay, were readily to be taken from Red River itself, people setting up home on the river’s banks would be able to draw on lots of other natural resources. ‘Red River hath buffaloes, deers of different kinds and, in the fall and spring, geese, swans . . . ducks, heath hens, partridges, rabbits, etc.’ As to ‘the climate of the country you wish me to describe’, Donald MacKay informed Lord Selkirk, it was superior to that of many of North America’s already settled districts.

Because he had ‘wintered there four years’, MacKay wrote of the Red River region, he was well placed to make comparisons between that locality and the St Lawrence Valley where he had spent five years in or around Montreal. Winter weather at Red River, the former fur trader insisted, was ‘far milder than in Canada’, a term then applied only to the present-day provinces of Quebec and Ontario. By way of demonstrating this to his own satisfaction, MacKay emphasised that the St Lawrence River in the neigh-bourhood of Montreal, where the river iced over every winter, ‘did not break open until April’. The Red River, in contrast, broke ‘in March’ while the open terrain around it and to the west contained ‘better . . . soil’ than any to be found in areas fronting the St Lawrence.

In thus portraying Red River as next best thing to the promised land the Israelites found in Canaan, Donald MacKay was engaging in what nineteenth-century Americans called ‘boosterism’, the business of enticing settlers to some newly opened-up locality by over-egging its attractions. What MacKay had to say of Red River was true – more or less. But there was much he left unsaid, not least the fact that it was going to be hard, verging on impossible, for the HBC and Lord Selkirk to establish at Red River a colony of the sort the latter planned. At the start of the nineteenth century’s second decade, after all, the frontier of settlement in British North America (as today’s Canada was then called) had not got much further west than the eastern end of the Great Lakes. Since Red River was many hundreds of miles beyond that point, and since the HBC could access Red River only by way of its subarctic and regularly deep-frozen possessions on Hudson Bay, Selkirk’s colony (as will be seen) would be for many years one of the most isolated such communities in the world.

Nothing of this is likely to have worried Donald MacKay who, when writing to the Earl of Selkirk from Ascoilemore in February 1812, was anxious to give his full backing to a venture which, if even halfway successful, would create real problems for his old enemies in the NWC, the Nor’Westers being desperate to retain their still powerful grip on the Red River region and Selkirk, in his HBC role, being keen to have that grip loosened. Nor was MacKay any more inclined to sound a note of caution when, in May 1813, the Earl of Selkirk came in person to have dinner with him in the Ascoilemore home that, eight years later, Donald Bannerman and his evicting party were to destroy.

Because Strathbrora at this point was still roadless, Selkirk, when making the journey from Brora to Ascoilemore, was obliged to swap his carriage for a horse. The earl, for all that, is likely to have found the trip worthwhile. As one of those present was afterwards to recall, there were ‘a number of persons’ waiting for Lord Selkirk ‘at Donald MacKay’s house’. What was said to them by MacKay and Selkirk was not recorded. But it is probable that, in the course of discussions lasting for two or three hours, the former was every bit as effusive as the latter about the merits of Red River, the Earl of Selkirk’s colonisation project now being a means, from Donald MacKay’s perspective, of inflicting damage not just on the Nor’Westers but on a new set of foes nearer home.16

The Marquis and Marchioness of Stafford’s Sutherland ‘improvements’ had not long been launched in May 1813. But large-scale clearances were already in an advanced state of preparation, as were well-organised attempts to stop them. From the outset of the resulting conflict between Sutherland people and the Staffords, MacKay was clear as to which side he was on. By encouraging eviction-threatened families to reject one of the Sutherland Estate management’s proffered crofts and instead take up Selkirk’s offer of a fresh start at Red River, Donald MacKay, in addition to striking a blow against the NWC, was helping to subvert ‘improvement’.

* The term Aboriginal, today standard in Canada, is applied to First Nation, Inuit and Métis peoples. The US equivalent of First Nation is Native American.

* The circumstances surrounding MacKay’s emigration are explored in Chapter 14.