14

‘To seek shelter in some more propitious quarter of the world’

Escaping clearance-era Sutherland; renewed opposition to removals; army-backed evictions

Prior to the commencement of large-scale sheep farming on the Sutherland Estate, anyone making a circuit of Strathbrora, Strathnaver and the Strath of Kildonan – a journey that, even on horseback, might take a week – would have passed through, or close to, somewhere between 150 and 200 distinct (and individually named) communities. Many were small, consisting of no more than three or four households. Others were larger. But irrespective of whether they were home to 20 people or five times that number, virtually all those settlements (exceptions will be touched on shortly) had gone by the summer of 1820, their hundreds of landholdings having been replaced by just eight.

Three men, James Hall, John Cleugh and Gabriel Reed, accounted for the greater part of Strathbrora, including most of its lower and more productive areas. Immediately west of Reed, Cleugh and Hall’s farms – Kilcalmkill, Pollie and Sciberscross respectively – was Anthony Marshall and Adam Atkinson’s vast tenancy. In one corner of Atkinson and Marshall’s farm, then, were the higher reaches of Strathbrora. In another was the part of upper Strathnaver lying to the east, south-east and south of Loch Naver. Here Marshall and Atkinson’s farm bordered with both of Patrick Sellar’s sheep-farming tenancies. The bigger of the two, known as Syre and encompassing practically the entire western flank of Strathnaver, dated from 1819. Also dating from 1819 was Skelpick, a farm tenanted by John Paterson who, in 1813, had competed unsuccessfully with Sellar for the tenancy of the latter’s other Strathnaver landholding, Rhiloisk.

Like Atkinson, Marshall, Reed and Cleugh, Paterson came from Northumberland. Like Cleugh, he was very much a working shepherd made good, having acquired at Skelpick a substantial tenancy situated on the right or east bank of the River Naver and extending from just short of the river’s mouth to a point some eight miles upstream. Here Skelpick met with Sellar’s Rhiloisk – also on the Naver’s right bank and spreading eastwards (as described earlier) into the upper or northernmost section of the Strath of Kildonan. There Rhiloisk shared a march or boundary with Knockfin. Its tenant, Thomas Houston, had previously occupied Suisgill, located (as again described earlier) further down the Strath of Kildonan. One of the Sutherland Estate’s first sheep farms, Suisgill was itself now tenanted by William Clunes, against whom so much anger had been directed by Kildonan people in 1813. Also in Clunes’s possession, as it had been since its creation precipitated the 1813 protests, was Torrish, the farm immediately east of Suisgill and, like Suisgill, on the Helmsdale’s left or northern bank. This meant that, between them, Houston and Clunes controlled many thousands of acres between the Helmsdale River and Sutherland’s border with Caithness. In the opposite direction, and thus on the Helmsdale’s right or south bank, were riverside localities on the northern rim of Gabriel Reed’s Kilcalmkill – much larger than Torrish, Suisgill or Knockfin and extending south, by way of Glen Loth, to this circuit’s starting point in Strathbrora.

Everyone dispossessed as a result of the emptying of the Sutherland Estate’s interior valleys should, in principle, have been accommodated in one or other of the crofting townships that, by 1820, were to be found on the estate’s north and east coasts. In the east, those townships were concentrated around Helmsdale, Brora and Dornoch; in the north, they occupied virtually the entire coastal strip between Invernaver, on the River Naver estuary, and Strathy, a dozen or so miles to the east. Those places’ crofts, however, were no more attractive in 1820 than before to people directed towards them. Hence the efforts evicted families made to remove themselves entirely from the Sutherland Estate.

The ‘greater part’ of the Strathbrora tenants due to be dispossessed in May 1820, Francis Suther reported during the preceding March, were ‘going about Caithness endeavouring to find small farms’. They were not alone. While there was also movement from the Sutherland Estate into Culrain and other Easter Ross localities, Caithness – where landholdings could readily be got by those able to pay for them – was favoured. It was to Caithness (as already seen) that William MacKay of Achoul’s family went following their 1819 ejection from Grumbeg, and plenty of others did likewise. Among them were many people evicted from the Strath of Kildonan in 1819 and 1820. From Kildonan those folk headed north into the adjacent Caithness parish of Latheron where they settled thickly in the valleys of the Berriedale and Dunbeath Rivers – localities not at all unlike the one they had left. This, according to Patrick Sellar, was because Kildonan families were ‘bred to idleness, illicit distillation and sheep stealing’ – activities more readily pursued among the Caithness hills, Sellar reckoned, than in one of the Sutherland Estate’s coastal settlements. The fact that so many people had quit the estate in this way, Sellar thought, was no bad thing. Their departure, he informed James Loch, ‘[has] unloaded you of a great deal of trash of which you are well rid’.1

Francis Suther offered a more nuanced analysis of the exodus from Sutherland of what Lady Stafford called ‘a very considerable number of middle tenants’, by which the marchioness meant the group one or two notches below tacksmen in the pre-clearance hierarchy. ‘None have settled in Caithness’, Suther explained to Loch, ‘who could not get a place to keep at least four milk cows.’ What such people wanted, Suther went on, was to remain in full-time farming. That could not be accomplished on a Sutherland Estate croft – the point of such crofts being to force their tenants into the fishing industry and other non-agricultural occupations. This prospect, Suther commented in June 1819, was ‘mortally hate[d]’ by families of the sort leaving for Caithness. ‘Indeed,’ he added, ‘I have lately found out that the people in the hills [by which he meant residents or former residents of the Strath of Kildonan, Strathbrora and Strathnaver] all consider themselves farmers and look on it as a degradation to be compared to labourers or fishermen.’²

Exactly that point had been made over several years by informed critics of the Sutherland ‘improvements’, such as Alexander Sutherland (notably in his Star articles of 1813) and the Earl of Selkirk. This makes it all the more remarkable that no similar thought occurred to Suther, the man with day-to-day responsibility for the mechanics of clearance, until 1819’s numerous removals were over. So completely had Suther bought into ‘improvement’ thinking, it seems, that he simply closed his eyes to the reality of the society he was instrumental in destroying. This society, as the factor had eventually come (even if dimly) to grasp, was not made up entirely – if at all – of the idlers and wasters who populate Patrick Sellar’s pro-clearance outpourings. Instead it consisted, in part at any rate, of people who – as well as owning the dairy cows mentioned by Suther – possessed beef cattle herds and other cashable resources on a scale sufficient to enable them to buy their way into Caithness.

Visiting Latheron in the early 1820s, Donald Sage met with ‘a goodly number’ of those people. Sage’s stepmother had died in 1818, and in post-clearance Sutherland, Sage wrote, his father (who would himself die in 1824) now ‘lived the life of a hermit’ in a district the clearances had stripped of habitation: ‘All his family had left [home], and the township [of Kildonan], and indeed the whole parish . . . were depopulated, so that, except [for] his own servants, male and female, the schoolmaster [and one or two others] . . . [my father] had not a human being to converse with for many miles around.’ Latheron, in contrast, contained many of the Kildonan minister’s former friends and neighbours. Prominent among them, Donald Sage found, was George MacKay. This was the catechist who, on the evening of 5 January 1813, had played a key role in sanctioning the next morning’s successful attempt to halt William Clunes’s inspection of what subsequently became Torrish farm. ‘It would be as well for them to be killed’, Kildonan people had told Clunes that same winter’s evening, ‘as set adrift upon the world.’ In the end, however, many Kildonan folk had chosen to leave not just Sutherland but Scotland rather than accede to ‘improvement’. Among families broken up in consequence was George MacKay’s. Ten years on from 1813, his home was in Latheron. But his son Angus and Angus’s wife Jean, the couple who had married in Kildonan on the day following Clunes’s enforced retreat from Torrish, were several thousand miles away, on the Ontario farm they had reached by way of Churchill and Red River.3

Although tales of the hazards encountered by emigrants like Jean and Angus MacKay filtered back to Scotland, these by no means eradicated the notion of quitting Sutherland for North America. ‘Fhuair sinn bailtean dhuin fhìn’, runs a Gaelic song composed by one of that continent’s numerous Highland settlers, ‘’S cha bhi uachdrain a chaoidh ’gar lèireadh’: ‘We have got farms of our own, and landlords will no more oppress us.’ This, from the perspective of Sutherland Estate tenants living constantly with the prospect of losing land and homes, was to conjure up a vision of paradise-like contentment. The Staffords, James Loch and other proponents of ‘improvement’ might insist that prosperity, as ‘improvement’ theory demanded, was bound to come the way of people prepared to combine the tenancy of a coastal croft with a non-farming trade. Throughout the clearance era, however, all such claims (as already stressed) were disbelieved. By those who could afford to rent one of its farms, Caithness was preferred to post-clearance Sutherland. By those with the opportunity and the means to get there, North America was reckoned better still.⁴

Some Sutherland people were to join the Kildonan folk who – on being taken from Red River by the North West Company – obtained landholdings in the vicinity of Lake Erie. More, however, made for Nova Scotia. Here families from Sutherland congregated in then thickly wooded country around Pictou, a harbour town on Nova Scotia’s north coast. To visit a farm in that locality is, even today, to get a sense of the immense effort it took to create such farms where previously there was virgin forest. It is to get a sense also of the pride taken by pioneer farmers in their achievements. The Pictou area’s settlers from Sutherland, remarks present-day Nova Scotian Glen Matheson, were people who ‘had never swung an axe’ but who found themselves, on their arrival, ‘in the midst of hardwood forest’ where tree after tree had to be disposed of before crops of any consequence could be grown. Many of Glen’s own Sutherland forebears were in this category. Surviving stories of their experiences – stories Glen has spent years collecting – deal in difficulties associated with forest clearance and in hardships suffered during Nova Scotian winters when food was scarce. But a powerful theme of those same stories, Glen Matheson says, consists of what he calls ‘the joy of landownership’ – the sense that, on reaching Nova Scotia, families whose Sutherland tenancies could so suddenly be taken from them had at last gained independence and security of a kind then unobtainable in Scotland.5

Something of what this meant emerges from a petition submitted to Nova Scotia’s governor, Sir John Sherbrooke, by an early group of emigrants to Pictou from Sutherland. This group – comprising 17 people in all – consisted of four families. Those families were headed by Robert Baillie, Alexander Sutherland, Hugh MacPherson and Janet Sutherland, a widow accompanied by her son and daughter. None of the four could write, and their petition – in effect an application for a land grant – was drawn up for them, in October 1814, by a Pictou JP, Hugh Denoon.* ‘Your memorialists’, Denoon commented at the start of a document addressed to Sherbrooke personally, ‘emigrated from the county of Sutherland . . . this month.’ They had done so, Denoon went on, in consequence of their having been ‘turned out of possessions’ that had subsequently been let to ‘sheep dealers’. Hence the four families’ decision ‘to look for an asylum’ in Nova Scotia. ‘They have [character] certificates from their parish minister’, Denoon added of Baillie, MacPherson and the two Sutherlands, none of whom could write but all of whom put their ‘marks’ to his summary of their case, ‘and have nothing to recommend them further but to assure your Excellency that they were faithful subjects at home to his Majesty [King George] and will now so continue.’6

Getting to the point of his submission, Denoon noted of Janet Sutherland, Hugh MacPherson, Alexander Sutherland and Robert Baillie ‘that as they have followed farming from their infancy they . . . most humbly pray that your Excellency will be pleased to order a location of lands for themselves and families . . . that they may be improving and clearing the woods and brush this winter . . . [in order to plant] a crop the ensuing spring.’ This ‘prayer’ was answered positively. Subject to the standard condition that specified acreages had to be brought into cultivation each year for several years, land grants – requiring little if anything by way of upfront payment – were rapidly forthcoming. Baillie, whose family was ‘seven in number’, received 350 acres; Alexander Sutherland, with four dependents, got 300 acres; MacPherson, with three, got 250; and Janet Sutherland, with two, was awarded 200.⁷

Baillie and MacPherson are known to have lived in Strathbrora. It is probable that the Sutherlands did so also. If so, the ‘sheep dealers’ to whom their petition referred were Gabriel Reed and John Cleugh, the former’s Kilcalmkill farm dating from 1813 and the latter’s Pollie farm from the following year. Establishing Pollie and Kilcalmkill had entailed clearances which, though not so extensive as the blanket removals of 1819 and 1820, were – even to people not directly affected by them – most unsettling. That is why lots of Strathbrora people expressed interest in the Earl of Selkirk’s Red River venture at the point, in 1813, when it seemed that Selkirk was about to provide hundreds of passages to North America. Might the Baillie, MacPherson and Sutherland families have hoped to quit Strathbrora for Red River? And might they, when it turned out (because of Selkirk taking limited numbers) they had no chance of being shipped there, have opted instead for Pictou? That question cannot be answered definitively. But it is clear that the choice thus made was a good one. Prior to their departure from the Sutherland Estate, Janet Sutherland, Hugh MacPherson, Alexander Sutherland and Robert Baillie were tenants – highly vulnerable tenants at that – of the Marquis and Marchioness of Stafford. By the close of 1814, less than three months after stepping ashore in Pictou, they had become, between them, the possessors of a 1,100-acre slice of Nova Scotia.⁸

With land came modest affluence. ‘The early settlers were strong, industrious and economical,’ an early historian of Pictou wrote in the mid-1870s. ‘They were poor at first, but with great perseverance they made themselves comfortable homes. There are men . . . who settled . . . in the woods without a guinea in their pockets who [today] have fine houses, large barns, excellent farms and considerable sums at interest.’ Success of that sort took time to achieve. But the prospect of eventual betterment had been evident from the first. Hence the manner in which, as across-the-board clearances loomed ever closer, Sutherland people were drawn to Nova Scotia by accounts of the opportunities to be got there.9

Since even illiterate settlers could have letters written for them, Robert Baillie and other members of his 1814 party may have been one source of such accounts. Others may have emanated from still-earlier Sutherland emigrants like William MacKenzie, Donald MacIntosh and Angus Sutherland. MacKenzie established himself before 1810 in a locality that evolved into Kenzieville on Barney’s River, west of Pictou. Sutherland and MacIntosh, for their part, were principal founders in 1813 of the soon thriving community of Earltown, to the east. By the late 1820s, Earltown and an adjacent locality, Tatamagouche, were home to well over 1,000 settlers. ‘Of the[se] . . . settlers’, noted that same nineteenth-century historian, ‘nearly all came from Sutherlandshire . . . All spoke the Gaelic language and it is still [in 1877] generally used by their descendants.’¹⁰

In and around both Earltown and Kenzieville, then, there developed what were, in effect, transplanted Sutherland communities. There people expelled from townships destroyed in the course of the clearances could set up home and recommence farming – this time on their own land – in close proximity to relatives, friends and former neighbours. Earltown might be 3,000 miles from Sutherland. Its forests and its climate – Nova Scotia winters being both cold and long-lasting – might make it very different from the Highlands. But by offering its new arrivals the chance to become full-time agriculturalists – in a social setting that was linguistically and culturally familiar – Earltown, together with other Nova Scotia settlements of the same sort, provided homesteaders with lifestyles superior to anything available on three-acre crofts in previously barren parts of Sutherland.

Red River could conceivably have offered Sutherland’s dispossessed population an equally desirable alternative to the Sutherland Estate’s new crofting townships. But Red River’s many troubles – combined with an inaccessibility that was to endure into the 1880s – meant that after 1815 there was for many years little or no movement from Sutherland to Manitoba. Nor was there much interest, once Nova Scotia began to exert its pull, in emigrating to other parts of the world. An obvious place to have gone – not least because of the 93rd Regiment’s long stint of garrison duty in Cape Town – was South Africa. However, attempts to channel emigration from Sutherland in that direction were repeatedly to fail.

The first of those attempts was made by John Graham, who helped get the 93rd ashore at Bloubergstrand in January 1806. In South Africa, Graham had quit the 93rd to take command of the locally recruited Cape Regiment, composed of soldiers drawn from the Cape’s Khoikhoi people. In 1811 he led his Khoikhoi force and a number of British troops – some men of the 93rd among them – into action against the Xhosa, who held extensive territories around Fish River on the eastern edge of Britain’s Cape-centred sphere of influence. In a brutal campaign – calculated, in words used by one of Graham’s superiors, ‘to impress on the minds of these savages a proper degree of terror and respect’ – the Xhosa were defeated. The gains thus made, colonial officials thought, needed to be consolidated by promoting white settlement in a Fish River frontier zone. John Graham agreed. When on leave in Britain in 1813, therefore, he pressed the colonial secretary, Lord Bathurst, to ship to South Africa some of the people then beginning to be threatened with eviction from the Strath of Kildonan and other parts of the Sutherland Estate, a development Graham, who came from the Dundee area, would have heard about from former comrades among the 93rd’s officers and men. Neither Bathurst nor other government ministers, however, were any more taken with Graham’s scheme than with Lord Selkirk’s analogous plan – also circulating in Whitehall in 1813 – to have thousands of Sutherland people relocated to Red River. John Graham’s settlement project duly died a rapid death. The next such initiative was no more successful.11

This was the brainchild of Adam Gordon, whose father was a long-established tacksman at Griamachary, a modest landholding on the north-eastern borders of Patrick Sellar’s Rhiloisk farm. Gordon, who enlisted in the 93rd in 1800, had afterwards followed John Graham into the Cape Regiment. Pensioned off – or put on half-pay – by the army in 1817, he returned to Sutherland. There, in the spring of 1818, by which point removal notices were being distributed in all the Sutherland straths, Adam Gordon declared himself willing to lead a large party of emigrants to South Africa, ‘knowing it’, he intimated, ‘to be one of the finest places in the world’. Probably for the same reason as Red River had appealed five years before – this being that anywhere, whether the North American prairies or the South African veldt, was bound to be an improvement on a Sutherland croft – there appears to have been an initial flurry of interest. But this soon evaporated. In April, Francis Suther reported, Adam Gordon was putting it about that ‘more than one half of the inhabitants of [the Strath of] Kildonan [had] expressed their determination to accompany him’ to the Cape. By June, however, it was clear that South Africa had in fact been ruled out by prospective emigrants and that Nova Scotia continued to be, on all sides, the popular choice. ‘The Kildonan people are determined on going to America’,* Suther noted in November 1818, ‘and I am rather inclined to think the Strathbrora tenantry . . . intend to embark for [there] also.’¹²

This proved correct. There were many Strathbrora folk among the 20 or 30 families who left Sutherland for Nova Scotia in 1819. In the early summer of 1820 they were followed by another substantial contingent. Among this group were two families from Carrol, the township which, when she glimpsed its emptied and unroofed homes later that same year, would provoke in the Marchioness of Stafford a transient ‘melancholy’. Nothing is known of the emotions experienced by the emigrants forced from those same homes by Lady Stafford’s employees. All that can be discovered is that there were 19 of them. James Sutherland left Carrol with his wife (whose name was not recorded) and their five children. He was accompanied by William Sutherland, William’s wife (again anonymous in the records) and their ten children. By September 1820, when the marchioness looked across Loch Brora at what remained of the houses those people had quit three months earlier, all 19 were in Pictou.¹³

Also sailing on the ship that brought the two Carrol families to Nova Scotia were other families from newly cleared Strathbrora townships. From Scottarie came William Baillie, his wife and four children; from Kilfedder, Catherine Graham, a widow, and her six children; from Kilbraur, Donald Baillie, his (presumably widowed) mother and his two sisters. Like all such emigrants, those people paid heavily (by the standards of that time) for their passage. They sailed on a ship belonging to William Allan, a Leith-based businessman who, for much of this period, was one of the emigration trade’s key figures. Allan charged each of his adult passengers £6, with children under 15 paying £3. This means that William Sutherland from Carrol, some of whose ten children are bound to have been over 15, would have had to find the better part of £60 in order to get his family to Nova Scotia. His ability to do so (to reiterate a point already made) demonstrates that Sutherland’s straths, ‘improvement’ rhetoric notwithstanding, were not uniformly sunk in poverty. Strathbrora’s schoolmaster, Gordon Ross, whose school was three miles from Carrol and who is sure to have taught a number of the Strathbrora children who left for Pictou in 1820, would have taken four years to earn the amount it cost William Sutherland to secure his family’s departure.14

Patrick Sellar was pleased to see Sutherland families emigrating en masse. ‘There never occurred a better time to get quit of a number of them,’ he wrote. ‘Highlanders’, he added, ‘are of all people those who do best in America.’ This, Sellar explained, returning to his earlier contention that Sutherland’s ‘aborigines’ and North America’s indigenous peoples were equally ‘shut out’ from civilisation, was because Highlanders, being ‘little removed from the first state of society necessarily prevalent in the wilds of that new country’, were ideally suited to life in the Nova Scotia backwoods.¹⁵

James Loch – conscious that widespread eagerness to be off to the other side of the Atlantic was negating claims that betterment awaited everyone taking a Sutherland Estate croft – was not persuaded. That is evident from his exchanges with William Allan who believed he could have filled his ships many times over had all Sutherland’s aspiring emigrants been able to find the necessary cash. He had had ‘many applications’ from every part of the Sutherland Estate for information about his fares and sailing schedules, Allan told Francis Suther: ‘I . . . sent my clerk [north] for the purpose of encouraging [prospective emigrants], but he found they had not the money to pay their passage.’ Loch, to whom Suther forwarded Allan’s letter, was not amenable to the Leith ship-owner’s implicit suggestion that poorer people might have their emigration costs met in part by the Sutherland Estate. ‘It is not Lord Stafford’s wish to promote any emigration from the Estate of Sutherland’, Allan was informed, ‘as he provides lots [or crofts] for all he removes from the hills.’¹⁶

If the Staffords would not subsidise their tenantry’s emigration, some thought, the British government should make good the deficiency. Donald Logan, a Pictou timber shipper, was among those holding that opinion. He had himself left Sutherland for Nova Scotia in 1803, Logan informed colonial secretary Lord Bathurst in November 1818: ‘[Understanding] that, by reason of various new arrangements, many of my [Sutherland] friends and acquaintances were put out of their lands and otherwise rendered uncomfortable, I returned to my native country and got about one hundred and twenty of them removed this season to North America. But many were unable to pay the half of their passage and some not able to pay . . . anything at all . . . Under these circumstances, several hundred . . . tenants . . . whose farms the proprietors have considered more lucrative to lay under sheep, are removed to either waste ground or . . . [to] allotments so exceedingly unsuitable as to render it . . . the desire of those unhappy people to seek shelter in some more propitious quarter of the world.’17

Bathurst and his cabinet colleagues, as it happened, were shortly to sanction the expenditure of £50,000 (equivalent to several million pounds today) with a view ‘to assist[ing] unemployed workmen’ to emigrate to South Africa. But efforts to get Sutherland people to sign up for the Cape proved as unavailing this time as before, and, Donald Logan’s pleas notwithstanding, there was to be no similar aid offered, at this stage anyway, to Highlanders looking to reach North America. From the standpoint of Sutherland’s many aspiring emigrants, then, it was fortunate that what Patrick Sellar labelled ‘the Carrol party’ now stepped in to facilitate their departure.¹⁸

At his Edinburgh home in the autumn of 1820, Joseph Gordon of Carrol, as the former Strathbrora laird still styled himself, took delivery of a banker’s draft for £1,200. This ‘munificent sum’, as it was described by Lachlan Mackintosh’s Inverness Journal, had been forwarded to Joseph by his brother George, a partner (as already noted) in Mackintosh & Co. of Calcutta, the business the Journal’s proprietor had earlier helped to set up. ‘My Dear Brother,’ began the letter accompanying George’s draft, ‘The public and private accounts that reached this country about six months ago of the great distress brought upon the poor tenants of . . . Sutherland . . . excited a strong feeling of compassion in many persons here.’ He had ‘[taken] occasion therefore’, George Gordon went on, ‘to set on foot a subscription’ to which his partners – principally Lachlan Mackintosh’s brothers – had ‘most liberally’ contributed. The resulting funds, George informed Joseph, were ‘for the behoof of the poor of the county of Sutherland who have suffered from the measures adopted by the Marchioness of Stafford in the conversion of her estate to sheep farms’.¹⁹

It was George Gordon’s intention that the cash resulting from his Calcutta ‘subscription’ should be distributed by the Edinburgh-based Highland Society, founded in 1784 with the aim of expanding the economy of the Scottish north. Since the society was dominated by landlords and their agents, William MacKenzie, the Staffords’ Edinburgh lawyer, was keen to have its members fall in with George Gordon’s wishes, George’s instructions to his brother made it clear that, should the Highland Society not take charge of the £1,200 from Calcutta, then Joseph (whom MacKenzie loathed) was to be personally responsible for its disbursement. Prior to the society meeting at which the matter was discussed, MacKenzie informed the marchioness, he, Francis Suther and George MacPherson Grant MP had got together and ‘agreed that it would be desirable to keep the subscription money in the hands of the Highland Society rather than permit the management [of it] to be with Joseph Gordon, knowing his sentiments’. This, however, was not accomplished. Although MacKenzie and his allies argued, in effect, that all was well on the Sutherland Estate and that charitable funds were not required there, this was disputed by Joseph Gordon. ‘[W]hile he candidly admitted that many excellent and benevolent things were done [in Sutherland]’, William MacKenzie reported of Gordon, ‘[he also] said that there was to his knowledge much individual hardship which required to be relieved.’ More neutral members of the Highland Society – perhaps eager to steer clear of any Sutherland imbroglio – seem mostly to have kept quiet. But they nevertheless voted to have nothing to do with the cash that had come from India. ‘The fund is thus placed at the disposal of Joseph Gordon,’ MacKenzie notified Lady Stafford. ‘I consider this, with the temper and views he [Gordon] has, very unfortunate . . . Suther says [the Highland Society decision] will do more harm than it is possible to express.’20

James Loch, the marquis and the marchioness were of the same opinion. ‘I wish we could catch Joseph Gordon writing libels,’ Lady Stafford remarked of a man she suspected of having helped foment all the many opposition movements generated by ‘improvement’, from the Kildonan rebellion of 1813 to Thomas Dudgeon’s Trans-Atlantic Association. Gordon, however, was too experienced a lawyer, and too shrewd an operator, to lay himself open to a libel suit. Instead he announced that all funds reaching him from India – funds that were eventually to total a then very substantial £1,700 – would be used to assist emigration. ‘This is all very vexatious and troublesome,’ Loch commented. Gordon’s plans were bound to be seen ‘as a sort of attack . . . upon the late arrangements’. Instead of settling down on the crofts assigned to them in 1819 and 1820, evicted families would again begin to think about escaping to North America. It was infuriating, Loch complained to Suther, to have Lord and Lady Stafford ‘plagued, and ourselves tormented, by persons . . . having no right to interfere in [Sutherland Estate] affairs’.²¹

Francis Suther and his staff, the Marquis of Stafford instructed, were to ‘have nothing to do’ with Joseph Gordon ‘except privately to have an eye upon him’. In the event, however, the lawyer’s intentions were made perfectly clear. The Trans-Atlantic Association may, for all practical purposes, have been suppressed. But Joseph Gordon, who had certainly been in touch (even if indirectly) with Thomas Dudgeon and other association backers, now intended to give effect to the objective encapsulated in the organisation’s title. What Lord Stafford called ‘the Indian benefaction’, it emerged, was to be deployed in such a way as to ease the expense of passages from Sutherland to North America.22

In a leaflet circulated in Sutherland in the spring of 1821, Joseph Gordon revealed an improvement on William Allan’s transatlantic fares. Adults leaving for Nova Scotia, would pay ‘four guineas and a half’, ‘passengers under fourteen years of age . . . one guinea and a half’. Interest was intense. When, as advertised in his circular and in the Inverness Journal, Gordon staged an explanatory event at Golspie Inn on Tuesday 1 May 1821, he ‘was met’, according to Francis Suther, ‘by about 300 people’. Many, significantly enough, were former Sutherland Estate tenants who had moved into Caithness but who now scented an opportunity to get to North America. This Caithness contingent, however, was matched by an equally big group from Strathbrora, where (for reasons touched on shortly) a further, if localised, set of evictions had still to take place.²³

During the months following his taking charge of the money collected by his brother, Joseph Gordon had begun collaborating closely with William Allan who, within a week or two of the 1 May gathering at Golspie, had signed up enough people to fill the first of the ships he and Joseph Gordon were jointly to dispatch in the next 12 or so months. That vessel, the Ossian, sailed for Pictou from the Ross-shire port of Cromarty on 25 June 1821. Two others, the Harmony and the Ruby, left from the same port a year later. The Ossian carried just over 100 passengers, the Ruby and the Harmony a further 250 between them. Courtesy of the funding at Joseph Gordon’s disposal, all three ships were well provisioned and their passengers supplied with saws, axes and other tools they would need in Nova Scotia. While those same passengers were certainly glad to be quitting post-clearance Sutherland, their leave-taking – especially for relatives and neighbours left behind – was a time of mixed emotions. On Tuesday 2 July 1822, the day the Harmony and the Ruby sailed, a ‘vast assemblage’, or so the Inverness Journal reported, ‘attended [at Cromarty] to take leave of their friends’. The ‘parting scene’, the paper continued, ‘was of the most affecting nature’, such as to leave in tears even those ‘spectators unconnected with the [departing] parties’.²⁴

Among the 360 or so emigrants thus helped on their way to Nova Scotia were people who had seen something of, or been involved in, the highly charged events surrounding the ejection of Jessie Ross, her two little girls and her baby from their Ascoilemore home. One was Mary Murray, the nursing mother who, on the afternoon of the Ross family’s eviction, breastfed and comforted Jessie’s baby daughter, Roberta. Another was Alexander MacDonald whose father, Adam MacDonald, was one of Ascoilemore’s four principal tenants. Reaching the Earltown district by way of Pictou in 1822, Alexander* obtained a land grant on the Tatamagouche River and – as if to underline the extent to which Earltown and surrounding localities were Sutherland communities transposed to Nova Scotia – promptly married someone he had known, and maybe courted, back in Strathbrora. This was Christiana Baillie, one of the two sisters who had accompanied their mother and brother when, in 1820, the Baillie family left for Nova Scotia from Kilbraur, no more than a mile from Ascoilemore but on the River Brora’s opposite bank.²⁵

A further arrival in Nova Scotia in 1822 was Donald MacKay, the former fur trader who had been evicted from his Ascoilemore home the day before Jessie Ross and who, like Jessie’s husband Gordon, had had the temerity to raise the manner of the township’s clearance with the Marquis of Stafford. MacKay (as far as can be established) was not accompanied on to the Harmony at Cromarty by his wife Mary, who had perhaps died (though this cannot be established either) some time previously. MacKay took with him, however, two of his and Mary’s boys; and in Nova Scotia he was joined by Donald, one of the two sons MacKay had brought back to Strathbrora from York Factory at the end of his Hudson’s Bay Company career.

Donald junior’s older brother William had returned to Hudson Bay and joined the HBC in 1817. Described in 1832 by the HBC’s then governor, George Simpson, as ‘a halfbreed of the Cree nation’ and ‘a steady, well conducted, useful man’, William MacKay was to serve the company more loyally than his father, sticking with the HBC for more than half a century, mostly as postmaster (or principal trader) at various HBC trading centres on or to the east of Lake Winnipeg. In 1826, at Norway House, the former Jack River, William married Julie Chalifoux†; and in 1853 – in a development illustrative of the complexity of links between Manitoba and the Highlands – the couple’s eldest son, also William, married Elizabeth Grant whose Métis father, Cuthbert Grant, had so effectively harried the Kildonan settlers at Red River.26

Some 2,000 miles east of William MacKay’s sphere of operations, William’s brother Donald had meanwhile settled alongside his father and half-brothers on the upper part of Barney’s River. Known to his Nova Scotia neighbours as ‘Indian Donald’ – because (presumably) of features inherited from his mother – this man, whose childhood experiences included both winter treks across the Hudson Bay barrens and stints of cattle-herding on the Strathbrora hills, was said at the end of his life in 1885 to have been ‘very industrious, reserved and inoffensive’. If that is an accurate description, Donald MacKay junior’s character owed nothing to his father, of whom tall tales were still being told in the Barney’s River area more than half a century after the father’s death in 1833.²⁷

The main originator of such tales was Donald senior himself, a man whose ‘trusty rifle’, or so it was reported by a Pictou newspaper in 1886, had ‘popped’ many of the fur trader’s numerous enemies. Those same enemies loom large in MacKay’s own memoir of his first forays into the then wholly unsettled territories now occupied by Manitoba, Minnesota and North Dakota. This memoir, donated by one of MacKay’s descendants to the HBC Archive in Winnipeg, was compiled at the Nova Scotia homestead that MacKay, in exile now forever from Strathbrora, named Gordonbush. At this new Gordonbush,* it can be assumed, MacKay wrote at the portable writing desk he had brought with him from Scotland, a desk which, as well as making almost as many Atlantic crossings as its owner, had survived repeated journeyings on the Hayes, Red and Assiniboine Rivers. Those and other travels, MacKay commented, were punctuated by armed confrontations with his fur trade opponents. In the course of one such episode, he recalled, a group of rival traders had queried why they should permit him to be on his way. He replied, Donald MacKay wrote, with those words: ‘I only want what is just.’ This, to be sure, has all the hallmarks of a gloss put on an ugly, and potentially violent, scene a long time after the event. But it encapsulates, for all that, a truth about this most remarkable man. It certainly captures something of what had motivated Donald MacKay, while still in Sutherland, to wage a final battle with the Staffords and their agents.²⁸

*     *     *

The last mention of Donald MacKay in Sutherland Estate records occurs in a ‘List of Small Rents Supposed Irrecoverable at 1st August 1825’. There MacKay is described (inaccurately) as having ‘died in America’. He is also stated to have emigrated while still owing the Marquis and Marchioness of Stafford a grand total of sixpence. Lord and Lady Stafford are unlikely to have been perturbed by this loss. They would gladly have surrendered a much larger sum, it seems probable, to be rid of a man the marchioness and James Loch were at one in categorising as a ‘villain’, a ‘rebel’ and the principal architect of the ‘conspiracy’ which, in 1821, resulted in the military being deployed in Sutherland for the first time since soldiers had been sent north in the early months of 1813.29

The origins of this new deployment are to be found in the disputed tenurial position of the dozen or so tenants living in Ascoilemore and the adjacent townships of Dalfolly and Ballenleadin, occupying, between them, the mile or so of hillside separating Ascoilemore from Balnacoil where the valley of the Blackwater opens out into Strathbrora. It had originally been intended to evict those tenants, Donald MacKay included, in the spring of 1819. But on hearing of this intention, MacKay and his neighbours had objected on the grounds that William Young, when Sutherland Estate factor, had pledged to keep them in possession until well beyond that date. This, predictably, was disputed by Young’s successors and, just as predictably, by Walter Ross, Strathbrora’s minister. Ross denied a Donald MacKay claim that the minister, who leased land at Grianan, not far from Ascoilemore, both knew about, and had been party to, an agreement extending Ballenleadin, Dalfolly and Ascoilemore tenancies well into the 1820s.³⁰

The fact that Ross came (as usual) to the estate management’s aid should have settled matters. But William Young, when contacted by Francis Suther and James Loch, backed up, in part at least, the MacKay version of what had occurred. Some time after he had let Pollie on the Blackwater’s upper reaches to John Cleugh, it now emerged, Young had been minded to lease to another shepherd by the name of Potts a further tract of hill pasture also on the Blackwater but some distance downstream. The Ascoilemore people and their neighbours, Young explained to Loch, had made such a ‘hideous clamour’ about this proposal that he had instead let it to them at an annual rent identical to the one Potts offered, this being 50 guineas. That deal, while not reaching as far into the future as its beneficiaries asserted, did extend, Young confirmed, as far as November 1820. Although limited to landholdings on the Blackwater, and thus not applying to the area where Ascoilemore and adjacent communities were themselves located, this same deal, as Loch and Suther were obliged to accept, constituted a real obstacle to evicting its Dalfolly, Ballenleadin and Ascoilemore beneficiaries. When, in May 1819 and May 1820, most of the rest of Strathbrora was emptied of its inhabitants, the occupants of those three townships were accordingly left in place. They would stay, it was announced, until May 1821.31

Heartened by this partial success, the Ascoilemore tenants in particular continued to insist on their entitlement, as they saw it, to remain where they were for several more years. In this connection, they spent heavily (as mentioned earlier) on legal advice – first from Joseph Gordon and then from the so-called ‘penny lawyer’ (his name was Fraser) they engaged in Tain. On this exercise failing to produce – in the absence of any documentary evidence of William Young’s supposed promises – the outcome the Ascoilemore people hoped for, they began (while still seeking legal ways forward) to contemplate other forms of resistance to their removal. In so doing, they are bound to have been encouraged by news from Culrain. Equally encouraging was the way the example set by that Ross-shire community was quickly followed by a second community, this time in Sutherland.

What took place in that community in the summer of 1820 was still recalled a lifetime later in Nova Scotia. Reporting in the 1880s on his conversations with elderly people who – when young – had come to Pictou from Sutherland, a contributor to Nova Scotia’s Eastern Chronicle told how his interviewees had left Scotland when the Staffords (a family those same interviewees clearly detested) ‘took it into their heads to convert into . . . stock ranches their estates in Sutherlandshire . . . This’, the Chronicle account went on, ‘made it necessary to drive out the tenantry and, in many cases, burn their cabins to make the work of spoliation doubly sure.’ In the run-up to one such episode, Chronicle readers learned, ‘the landlord’s sergeant was . . . delivering the legal notices of ejectment . . . and, the men of the place being absent at the time, a band of Amazons . . . burned the writs and, seizing the officer, suspended him over the bonfire until he was nicely roasted.’³²

That story came from a man whose mother had been one of the ‘Amazons’ involved. It contains some errors. The place where the ‘sergeant’ came to grief was not actually on the Sutherland Estate. Nor were its menfolk – certainly not all of them – elsewhere. What was described, however, was more or less exactly the fate that overtook Sheriff-Officer Donald Bannerman – a ‘shocking outrage’ James Loch called it – when he attempted to serve removal notices on tenants at Gruids.³³

Bannerman had confronted the Kildonan rebels in 1813; he had informed on Robert McKid’s poaching activities in 1814; and, in 1819 and 1820, he had carried out hundreds of evictions throughout the Sutherland straths. To say he was hated, then, would be grossly to understate the case. Word of what was done to Donald Bannerman or Domhnall Sgios at Gruids, it follows, must have been greeted everywhere in Sutherland with glee of the sort that remained evident, well over 60 years later, in the Nova Scotia telling of the tale.

Rather like Culrain, Gruids was an outlying possession of a Ross-shire landlord, in this instance Sir George Munro of Poyntzfield. Also like Culrain, just six or seven miles away, Gruids (where the young Hugh Miller stayed in the ‘longhouse’ described earlier) was located on the right, or south, bank of the River Shin. Between Culrain and Gruids, however, is the Oykel, the further river that constituted, in the nineteenth century, the boundary between Sutherland to the Oykel’s north and Ross-shire to its south. This meant that, on its being decided that Gruids was to be cleared, the requisite summonses of removal had to be obtained from Sutherland’s sheriff court and served by Sutherland sheriff-officers. Thus it came about that, having taken receipt of the relevant ‘decreets of removing’, Donald Bannerman, accompanied by two colleagues, Alexander Ross and Alexander MacKenzie, arrived at Gruids on the morning of Thursday 15 June 1820.34

To get there, the three men had taken the ferry that made regular crossings of the Shin a little way downstream from the present-day village of Lairg. As they approached the Gruids bank, the ferryman, John Murray, well aware of who his passengers were and why they had made the long journey from Golspie, said sarcastically that they would soon be receiving a warm welcome. Hearing this all three – already more than slightly fearful perhaps of encountering Culrain-style opposition – asked to be returned to the opposite shore. Murray, however, declined to oblige. Left with no alternative but to disembark, Bannerman and his colleagues did so only to see, as Bannerman put it, ‘a number of persons, mostly women armed with sticks and cudgels, making towards them’. Soon, said Bannerman, this crowd – about 100 strong – ‘violently seized’ him. The ‘precepts of removing’, as the sheriff-officer called the documents he had hidden about his person, were quickly found. Then, while one or two of his assailants went to fetch (presumably from a nearby home) an already burning piece of fuel that could be used to kindle a fire, the rest of the ‘mob’, young women to the fore, ‘stripped him naked . . . threw him down, and bound his hands behind his back’.³⁵

A blaze was set alight and the eviction orders thrown on to it. Next Donald Bannerman, who had meanwhile been permitted by older women to get back into his ‘britches and stockings’, was again grabbed, lifted into the air and suspended over flames fierce enough to scorch him – ‘first on the back and then on the belly’. Together with Ross and MacKenzie, who had also been ‘laid hold’ of, Bannerman – amid shouted enquiries as to whether he ‘had said his prayers that morning’ – was next marched back to Murray’s ferryboat. Minutes later, the three captives, escorted by a number of their captors, had been returned to the River Shin’s Lairg shore. There Ross managed to escape. Running (as he may have thought) for his life, he found shelter in the home belonging to Lairg’s schoolmaster, bolting the house’s door behind him as he entered. Soon, however, Ross had been retaken by people John Murray had been busy ferrying across the Shin from Gruids, two girls having ‘broke[n] in through [a] window’ and opened the schoolmaster’s locked door from the inside.36

Once Ross was back at the point where MacKenzie and Bannerman were being held, both he and MacKenzie appear to have had their freedom restored. Donald Bannerman’s ordeal, however, was not yet over. The exhausted sheriff-officer – who, it should be underlined, is described in documentation dealing with his Gruids experiences as ‘a widower aged sixty-five years or thereby’ – was once more ‘felled . . . to the ground’. Only after he had been left to lie there ‘for some time’ was he at last set on his feet and, with hands still bound and most of his clothes bundled roughly round his neck, left to stumble off in the direction of Golspie.³⁷

Two aspects of the Gruids debacle gave the Staffords and James Loch some satisfaction. First, it had not occurred on the Sutherland Estate. Second, the Gruids evictions were being undertaken in the name of Sciberscross’s former tacksman, John Sutherland, who, on quitting Strathbrora, had been granted a lease of Gruids by Munro of Poyntzfield. At Gruids, Sutherland may have expected to order matters in the traditional tacksman style by leaving the place in the occupation of subtenants. This was ruled out, however, by the lease Munro had insisted upon. Its terms obliged John Sutherland, as the Poyntzfield laird’s lessee, to have Gruids cleared and its population replaced by sheep. Sutherland, who acquired his Gruids tenancy in 1818, had not rushed to fulfil those conditions. But by 1820 he had been compelled to act. Hence the removal orders that resulted in the assault on Donald Bannerman.³⁸

The Marchioness of Stafford nurtured a virulent dislike of John Sutherland – a man who had had a hand in so much anti-clearance activity – and was consequently delighted by his Gruids entanglement. She saw the ‘finger of justice’, the marchioness wrote, in Sutherland ‘being the person concerned’ in this new clearance. James Loch agreed. Equally to be welcomed, he thought, was the fact that ‘Joseph Gordon [was] . . . John Sutherland’s agent’. By rendering both men ‘guilty of the crime of sheep farming and removing’, Loch hoped, developments at Gruids would diminish the authority of two of his most inveterate critics.39

For much the same reason, the marchioness derived a malevolent pleasure from reports of Sciberscross’s ex-tacksman being ‘in a very miserable state, his wife and family constantly quarrelling with him, and he with them’. Soon, however, this pleasure faded. It did so, in part, because of a dawning realisation on the part of Sutherland’s sheriff, Charles Ross, that John Sutherland, as Francis Suther informed Loch, may have staged something of a hoax at Gruids. By acting in ‘connivance with the measures resorted to by the [Gruids] people’, it was suspected, Sutherland aimed to give the appearance of attempting to fulfil his lease conditions while simultaneously ensuring that the attempt was bound to fail.⁴⁰

This, at first sight, may seem nothing more than an extreme instance of the Stafford camp’s addiction to conspiracy theory. But Ross (as will be seen) was to become more and more convinced that John Sutherland and his Gruids subtenants were indeed acting in concert – a state of affairs which, though further complicating an already complex situation, did nothing to ease Stafford worries that at Gruids, just as at Culrain, both landlords and the law were being defied with nothing in the way of repercussion. Aggravating those concerns were signs that sympathy with the stand taken at Gruids was widespread on the Sutherland Estate. Nor was such sympathy confined to folk with first-hand experience of eviction. It extended, for example, into the Sutherland county town of Dornoch, as became evident when, in August 1820, efforts were made to draft the 60-strong force of special constables that would be needed, it was felt, if there was to be any chance of getting a second set of removal notices delivered to people who, in June, had consigned the first set to a bonfire.

The decision to recruit this force was made by Francis Suther, Gabriel Reed and others when, in their collective capacity as Sutherland’s Justices of the Peace Court, they met on Tuesday 8 August. Over the next week or so, candidates for special constable posts were identified from among tradesmen and businessmen in the Dornoch and Golspie areas. Those candidates – blacksmiths, shopkeepers, an innkeeper, a baker, shoemakers and others – were then ordered to appear at a further court session to be sworn in and briefed as to their duties. This session took place on 19 August in Dornoch’s town council chamber, which was housed in the same building as the prison which, five years before, had briefly accommodated one of the JP Court’s leading members, Patrick Sellar.41

‘The first ten [men] named and called forward . . . refused to take the oath’, Suther reported of the chaos that now ensued, ‘and one of them, of the name of Henderson, grossly insulted the court. A warrant was immediately made out for committing him, but the officers [meaning the regular constables on hand] were deforced and the prisoner was rescued on the stair leading from the council room to the jail.’ Nobody, it appeared, was willing – not even in return for a special constable’s then attractive allowance of four shillings a day – to be seen to be enforcing further clearances.⁴²

Neither that Dornoch fracas nor its wider implications would have escaped the notice of Donald MacKay and his associates at Ascoilemore. This Strathbrora township’s ‘turbulent set’ of ‘complete Dudgeonites’, as Francis Suther called them, were easily the most recalcitrant opponents the factor and Loch had encountered since, in 1816, they had become responsible for the Sutherland Estate’s administration. ‘[U]nder the undue influence of that fellow MacKay’, as Loch put it, the Ascoilemore people had ‘from the beginning . . . behaved worse than their neighbours’. They had been regular attenders at the Trans-Atlantic Association’s Meikle Ferry assemblies. Preferring ‘Dudgeon’s sermons’ to those of their minister, Suther complained, they had also been prominent among the crowd that – in defiance of clergy-backed warnings of the consequences – had gathered at Golspie for the banned Trans-Atlantic Association meeting of 4 January 1820. People of this stamp, Loch felt, required dealing with harshly.⁴³

Individuals like Donald MacKay might think themselves men of substance, James Loch observed. But ‘they [were] not so respectable as many who [had] been moved’. They were certainly not to have ‘any extraordinary favours’ granted to them as a result of their having succeeded in avoiding eviction in 1819 and 1820. On the contrary, they had to be made ‘to feel the consequences’ of their enthusiastic adherence to Thomas Dudgeon and their attendance at the Trans-Atlantic Association gathering in Golspie. ‘I must insist on you intimating to such of them [as were at Golspie]’ Loch instructed Suther, ‘that they are to be turned off without lots.’⁴⁴

But this, as James Loch recognised in his calmer moments, was no real sanction. Since Donald MacKay and his principal allies – John Baillie and Adam MacDonald in Ascoilemore and Alexander MacKay in Ballenleadin – had ‘taken no notice’ of earlier offers of coastal crofts, they were not going to be swayed by the absence of further such offers. By 1820, if not before, MacKay – according to intelligence reaching Suther – was anyway ‘paying rent for a farm in Caithness’. Others from Ascoilemore and adjacent townships were known to be doing likewise. By the start of 1821, moreover, several of the same ‘badly dispositioned’ tenants – their Caithness farms notwithstanding – were reported to be showing interest in Joseph Gordon’s subsidised passages to Nova Scotia.45

Having thus provided themselves with two possible lines of retreat from Strathbrora, Donald MacKay and those around him may well have thought they had nothing to lose from renewed defiance. This became evident as a result of Francis Suther’s decision to commence the clearance of the Ascoilemore, Ballenleadin and Dalfolly area by moving, in early 1821, against the three townships’ subtenants at Achness. This was a community located, three or four miles up the Blackwater, among the hill pastures that William Young had agreed to lease to the Ascoilemore men and their neighbours. Ten years previously, scarcely anyone had lived at Achness. By 1821, however, the place contained at least eight families, and possibly more. The main explanation for its expansion, according to James Loch, was that it had become ‘a nest of smugglers’. From Achness, Loch had learned, it was possible to follow the Blackwater and one of its tributaries, the Skinsdale, to points where – by way of passes at altitudes of no more than seven or eight hundred feet – access could be got, via Borrobol, to the Strath of Kildonan.* From there, other paths led through the hills to the parts of Caithness where Loch (with probable justification) thought many of Kildonan’s evicted tenants had re-established their illicit stills. Achness, Loch believed, was ‘the connecting point’ between Caithness’s ‘smuggling districts’ and those districts’ Easter Ross, Inverness and Lowland markets, which were accessed by means of further hill routes leading, or so Loch contended, from Achness, through Gruids, to points south. This connection between the two rebel communities, Loch insisted, was why the one was as determinedly defiant as the other. ‘That the preservation of [their] illicit trade is the chief objective of the deluded people [of both Gruids and Achness]’, Loch wrote, ‘there can be no doubt.’⁴⁶

Achness’s inhabitants, James Loch informed William MacKenzie in Edinburgh, were being ‘incited by a blackguard by the name of MacKay, a Hudson’s Bay man’. Whether or not at MacKay’s prompting, it was definitely the case that no one at Achness could be compelled or cajoled into accepting summonses of removal. When, not long after New Year, James Brander, who had organised the clearance of much of Strathbrora, went to Achness in the company of several sheriff-officers and constables, the summonses he took with him were at once grabbed and destroyed. When, subsequent to this, a locally recruited Sutherland Estate employee was sent to reason – in Gaelic – with Achness residents, he was instantly sent packing. The settlement’s occupants ‘would not have heeded’ the Archangel Gabriel, Francis Suther remarked of this episode, adding that Strathbrora’s minister, Walter Ross, who could be relied on to instruct his congregation to do the Sutherland Estate’s bidding, had ‘very little influence if any’ in Achness, Dalfolly, Ballenleadin or Ascoilemore.47

In mid-March a further sheriff-officer agreed to make the long tramp into Achness. ‘No sooner [had he] put his foot on the ground’, Suther informed Loch, ‘than they seized him, stripped him, took every paper he was in possession of and destroyed them before his face.’ The Achness stalemate, it was thus made clear, was not going to be broken by any locally available means. The time had come, Loch duly concluded, to persuade William Rae, the lord advocate, to have soldiers sent to Sutherland.⁴⁸

This was Loch’s second such endeavour. His first had involved attempts to get ‘two companies of infantry’ despatched to Gruids in the aftermath of what had been done there to Donald Bannerman. This suggestion, however, had been rebuffed by Rae every bit as firmly as the lord advocate had earlier rejected Sheriff Donald MacLeod’s pleas for military intervention in Culrain. Hence the pains Loch took to ensure that this time he got a more positive response.⁴⁹

The starting point of the case made to William Rae was Achness’s alleged role in the illicit whisky trade, which Loch knew the government was increasingly eager to put down. All such ‘smuggling’, Loch argued, was being aided and abetted by ministers’ failure to deal decisively with what had been going on in Culrain, Gruids and Achness. Because of that failure, ‘a system of resistance to the law [was] rapidly extending over all the smuggling districts’. This was the government’s fault: ‘The people [in places like Achness and Gruids] have an idea that . . . government [ministers], if they do not favour their resistance [to eviction], yet wink at it.’ It was therefore ‘of the greatest consequence’ that Rae and his colleagues respond to outbreaks of the Achness, Gruids and Culrain type by showing themselves ‘serious in their desire to put an end to them’. Nor should Rae be overly afraid of injury being done to women. Their leading role in what had been going on was entirely ‘owing to a silly notion . . . the people have that women are not subject to be punished for riot or assault’. In this connection, cognisance had to be taken of the fact that ‘men always collect[ed] the stones’ that women and girls threw. There was nothing spontaneous, in other words, about what had taken place at Culrain or Gruids and what was now taking place at Achness. In every instance, attacks on sheriff-officers, constables and others had been the outcome of careful planning. That was why matters were so grave. ‘If this [meaning repeated lawbreaking at Achness] is passed over, as well as [what occurred at] Gruids, there is an end to all . . . legal authority.’ There was even a possibility, in such circumstances, that ‘those who [had] been removed’ would ‘resume their farms’.50

This was all very fine. But the lord advocate, James Loch expected, would respond as always by saying it was the responsibility of the civil authorities – whether in Sutherland or Ross-shire – to enforce court orders. This could be countered, Loch felt, by the contention that such enforcement had become impossible. Not only had Sutherland’s JPs been unable to sign up special constables, those constables already in service were not to be relied on. Most of them, Francis Suther told Loch, shared ‘the general feeling of [Sutherland] natives’ that Achness families had right on their side. This could be seen, Suther went on, ‘from the lukewarmness of the majority of those [constables]’ who were with James Brander at Achness – but who, despite the rough handling the procurator fiscal received there, had declined to come to his aid.⁵¹

In late March 1821, James Loch, accompanied by the ever-biddable George MacPherson Grant, met with William Rae in London. At this meeting, all the Stafford commissioner’s points appear to have been taken on board. However, the lord advocate, because of the long shadow cast by Peterloo, remained reluctant – even in the face of everything Loch and MacPherson Grant had to say – to run the political risk of injecting soldiers into situations that might result in their killing civilians. Loch had anticipated this. Ever since Peterloo, the Whig opposition in the House of Commons had been harrying the Liverpool administration about its habit, as Whigs saw it, of dealing with protest by resorting over and over again to repression. That was why, before going to see Rae, Loch had ensured that the lord advocate, if he consented to deploy troops in Sutherland, would be spared Whig attack. This had been accomplished with the help of Henry Brougham, a more and more influential presence on the Commons’ opposition benches. Brougham, it seems, was amenable to his old friend’s suggestion that Sutherland’s troubles should not be permitted to become a party matter. As previously agreed with Lady Stafford, Loch now played this card: ‘I . . . mentioned to the [lord] advocate Brougham’s opinion’, Loch told the marchioness, ‘and hinted that, through him, we were pretty sure the [parliamentary] opposition would say nothing . . . We saw this had its effect,’ Loch went on before adding a little coyly: ‘But that is our secret.’52

Reassured that he would not be exposed to Whig condemnation in consequence of doing as Loch wanted, William Rae moved fast. On Thursday 5 April, 70 men of the army’s 41st Regiment – a Welsh formation – were marched out of Fort George and on to the road north. Pushed along by their commander, a Major Fallon, they made good progress. In just three days they reached Dornoch. Next day they were in Brora. From there, before daybreak on Tuesday 10 April, they set off up Strathbrora in the direction of Ascoilemore and Achness.⁵³

James Loch was grateful for ‘the vigour’ shown by Rae. But there were limits to his gratitude. On learning from William MacKenzie – liaising on the Sutherland Estate’s behalf with the military authorities in Edinburgh – that MacKenzie had instructed Francis Suther to ‘see that provisions, particularly bread, be [made] ready for the soldiers’, Loch immediately fired off a supplementary order. ‘You will keep a distinct account of the amount of provisions furnished for [the 41st Regiment’s] use’, Suther was instructed, ‘[so] that you may be repaid by [the] government’. Fallon and his men might be in Sutherland to do, in effect, James Loch’s bidding. But, Loch being Loch, there was to be no chance of them getting anything for nothing from the Sutherland Estate.⁵⁴

In Sutherland itself, meanwhile, the Achness-bound military were joined on the morning of their departure from Brora by Sheriff Charles Ross and Francis Suther – Ross heading a substantial contingent of sheriff-officers and constables, Suther in charge of an equally large group of estate employees. In total, then, the force that, just after 8 a.m., passed Donald MacKay’s timber-built home – its distinctiveness leading to its featuring in direction-giving correspondence of the time – numbered more than 100. MacKay, who must surely have watched Fallon’s dozens of scarlet-coated soldiers swing by, may have found the spectacle (as he was meant to) intimidating. In light of what is known of the former fur trader, however, it is more likely that he derived no little satisfaction from having caused Loch, the Staffords and the British government so much trouble and expense.⁵⁵

Not far beyond Donald MacKay’s cabin and just short of Balnacoil, Suther, Ross, Fallon and their men turned right, away from the then recently constructed Strathbrora road and on to a long-established track paralleling the Blackwater’s eastern or left bank. A mile or two up this track – as if to make the point that the locality the army was here to depopulate had been inhabited for ages – a broch stood (as it still does) on rising ground above the river. When built, 15 or more centuries before the 41st Regiment’s deployment in Sutherland, that castle-like tower is likely to have been garrisoned at times of threat. Neither there nor anywhere else, however, was any opposition offered to the soldiers who, an hour or so into their trek up the Blackwater, marched into Achness.

Because a Latheron man – described by Loch as having ‘formerly belonged to that lawless set, the Kildonanites’ – had taken part in the January assault on James Brander, there were worries that the Achness people might have received reinforcements from Caithness. But that had not happened. ‘On arrival [at Achness]’, Suther reported to Loch, ‘we found the houses . . . empty [and] not a soul about the place except three old women sitting on a knoll.’ Charles Ross had hoped, with the aid of the military, to apprehend men wanted in connection with their participation in one or other of the disturbances that had occurred in Achness since the turn of the year. But word of the troops’ approach, Suther noted ruefully, had reached Achness well in advance of their arrival. Having thus ‘got a hint to be off’, the wanted men, together with almost all the rest of Achness’s inhabitants, had disappeared into the hills that, rising steeply beyond the Blackwater, separated the settlement from other pre-clearance communities around and to the north of Sciberscross. Doing battle with the army, it seems, was not on Achness’s agenda. Here and there on the approaches to the township, however, there were found ‘heaps of stones . . . [that] had been collected’, it was surmised, ‘to give a warm welcome to the sheriff-officers if they had not been supported by such an overwhelming force’.56

The day before, no doubt in response to news of soldiers being en route for Strathbrora, two men from Achness had turned up at Francis Suther’s office in Golspie. With them they had brought a letter proposing that, if Achness’s residents were left where they were until May, they would then ‘remove quietly’. ‘I showed this letter to Mr Ross’, Suther wrote, ‘and he agreed with me that [further delay being thought out of the question] it was absolutely necessary to eject the people and pull down their houses.’ This was of questionable legality in that evictions should have been preceded by summonses of the kind that had never been successfully served. But neither Suther nor the sheriff were in the humour to bother with such niceties. Watched by the now resting soldiers, who took no part in these proceedings, Suther’s men, as Ross reported to one of William Rae’s colleagues in Edinburgh, accordingly set about ‘removing . . . furniture and goods’ from Achness’s homes. They then ‘pulled down the roofs’ of every house and outbuilding in the township.57

There followed one last attempt to give effect to the ‘criminal letters’ or arrest warrants that had been taken out against a dozen or so Achness men. ‘Just as we were coming away’, runs Charles Ross’s account of this development, ‘we descried in different parts of the hills at the distance of nearly a mile, with a river between, two or three small parties of people whom we suspected to be those against whom we had warrants.’ At this, Major Fallon ‘picked out some of the most active of his men and they . . . gave chase’. On seeing these men run towards the Blackwater, the watchers on the skyline opposite ‘started from their hiding places’, Suther commented, ‘and took up the hillside like mountain deer.’ The wanted men, in Suther’s words, thus ‘got clear off’. They also took some pleasure, it can be guessed, from the fate of one of the 41st’s junior officers, a Lieutenant Ash. While ‘pursuing one of the flying parties’, it appears, Ash, as a result of his taking a header into ‘a deep stream’, ‘came . . . by a severe ducking’.⁵⁸

After Achness, the army’s next objective was Gruids. But the direct route to Gruids involved a crossing of the River Shin, and that, it was soon realised, would not be possible. A combination of rain and melting snow had raised the river to a level that made fording it dangerous, and Gruids people had ‘carried off all boats’. The problem was solved by Charles Ross commandeering vessels usually stationed at Meikle Ferry and ordering them sailed up the Dornoch Firth and through the Kyle of Sutherland to the point, just below the tidal limit, where the Oykel and Shin meet. There the Meikle Ferry craft were to await the arrival of Fallon and his soldiers who – having reached Ross-shire by way of the then recently constructed crossing that gave the village of Bonar Bridge its name – marched through Ardgay before setting off along the Kyle of Sutherland’s southern shore in the direction of the waiting boats. Their route took the troops through Culrain. No removals were scheduled there that spring. But anyone watching the red-coated and musket-carrying infantry tramp by would have understood that – despite earlier failures to bring this about – the army was now liable to be sent against anyone resisting eviction.⁵⁹

Having been ferried across the Oykel just beyond Culrain and having made good speed along the River Shin’s western bank, the troops were soon in Gruids. Sheriff Ross had told John Sutherland, Sciberscross’s ex-tacksman, to meet him there. But Sutherland, who some days previously had been accused formally by Ross of ‘connivance’ with his subtenants, was nowhere to be seen. Neither was anyone else. As at Achness, the locality’s inhabitants – a number of whom were wanted in connection with the previous year’s attack on Donald Bannerman – had taken themselves off before the army’s arrival. This meant that no arrests were made. Ejection notices, however, were fixed to every home in Gruids, and the locality’s clearance thus hurried along, as a gratified James Loch put it, ‘at the point of the bayonet’. Throughout the north of Scotland, Loch considered, it was beginning to be grasped that further resistance to clearance would be dealt with speedily, harshly and effectively.60

That lesson, Loch hoped, would shortly be reinforced by the trial of people alleged to have committed criminal offences in the course of the Achness protests. In the event, just three such people – John Matheson, John Sutherland and Ann MacDonald – appeared at the High Court’s springtime sitting in Inverness. Sutherland and Matheson were the Achness men who had tried to negotiate with Suther on 9 April and who had instead found themselves sent under armed escort to Dornoch Jail. How or when MacDonald was detained is unclear. But she was probably taken into custody mainly with the aim of making it plain that women – contrary to popular opinion – were no more immune than men from prosecution. Charged, like Matheson and Sutherland, with ‘violently deforcing and obstructing officers of the law’, Ann MacDonald went free when, in Inverness, it became apparent that the charges against her and Sutherland could not be sustained by the available evidence. Matheson, however, was sentenced to six months imprisonment.⁶¹

At Inverness, the several other individuals still being sought in connection with the Achness assault on James Brander were declared ‘outlaws and fugitives’. All were said to be ‘skulking in the hills’ to avoid arrest. But Francis Suther, the Marchioness of Stafford was pleased to learn, anticipated no more trouble from them or their Ascoilemore backers. ‘The appearance of the soldiers put an end to all their hopes,’ Suther reported of Donald MacKay and his fellow tenants. ‘They are completely cowed.’⁶²

That seems unlikely. In North America, MacKay’s lack of subservience, whether to his HBC superiors or to his many fur trade rivals, had made him disliked and feared in equal measure. Soldiers or no soldiers, that aspect of his character had not changed. Not long after he was, in his own words, ‘cast out of [his] wooden house’ at the end of May, MacKay would write in the most excoriating terms to the Marquis of Stafford about the ‘grief and sorrow’ resulting from Ascoilemore’s clearance. That was not the action of a man acquiescing tamely in his fate. Nor was MacKay’s subsequent departure for Barney’s River. A Canadian historian, Marianne McLean, has written persuasively about the ‘extraordinarily self-confident’ communities established in her country by men and women whose emigration from the Highlands was ‘largely triggered by the introduction of sheep farming’. This ‘remarkable achievement’, McLean comments, was not the work of a beaten-down, disheartened and demoralised people. That is surely the case; just as it is equally the case that the drive and determination so much in evidence among North America’s Highland settlers is also discernible in the sheer élan with which many of the Stafford family’s Sutherland opponents countered policies meant to put them firmly in their place.63

There was thus to be no question of people involved in Strathbrora’s last stand against clearance now falling in with plans for their ‘improvement’. This became apparent towards the end of April when, the earlier bar on offering crofts to families from Achness, Dalfolly, Ballenleadin and Ascoilemore having been rescinded, Francis Suther ‘sent an officer among them’ with instructions to urge acceptance of coastal ‘lots’. That mission, Suther acknowledged, was a failure. Of the 30 or so families who could have done so, only three took up croft tenancies on the Sutherland Estate. Of the others, some went to Caithness. ‘But the bulk of them’, Suther informed Loch at the beginning of June, ‘seem to have a wish to go to America’. Achness’s former inhabitants had already been ‘promised’ help by Joseph Gordon, Suther wrote. Ascoilemore residents, he went on, expected – and were indeed to get – similar assistance. Some sailed that June for Pictou on the Ossian. Others – including Donald MacKay who, in the interim, found temporary accommodation in Brora – left the following summer on the Harmony or the Ruby.⁶⁴

Long before that of course Ascoilemore had ceased to exist. ‘Strathbrora is now effectually cleared of all its turbulent people,’ Francis Suther reported on 4 June 1821. ‘The removings [at Ascoilemore] were completed [last week] . . . and [its] houses demolished . . . [N]o business of this description has yet been done so quietly . . . I went myself with the party in case of opposition, as though I had learned . . . [Ascoilemore’s occupants] had given up all intention of resisting, yet knowing their characters I could not altogether trust them.’ This mistrust, however, had proved misplaced. All had gone well. The few interior communities that had succeeded, if only for a year or two, in avoiding the fate of all the rest had been dealt with: ‘We are now, I think, settled.’65

James Loch too was cheerful. ‘I am happy to say that the Sutherland removals are entirely completed,’ he informed Lord Stafford – then in Paris. That was in mid-June. Not for another month would it become apparent that one Ascoilemore removal – the one with which this book began – was to cause Loch and his employers more anxiety than any other eviction since Patrick Sellar’s destruction of William Chisholm’s home at Badinloskin.⁶⁶

* Denoon had himself been involved, 10 or 12 years earlier, in shipping emigrants from Scotland to Pictou.

* ‘America’, in the early nineteenth century, often signified what is today called North America. The term was applied, in other words, to what became present-day Canada as well as to the USA.

* Alexander was an ancestor of Glen Matheson – to whom much of this information is owed.

† Nothing is known for sure of Julie but she is likely to have been of Métis background.

* This name did not survive. The locality where MacKay’s Nova Scotia home was situated is today known, more prosaically, as Marsh.

* This was the route followed in 1819 by James Brander and his evicting party when (as mentioned earlier) they moved on from Strathbrora to Kildonan.