Chapter 8. Rupert’s Land and the Northern Plains, 1690–1870
Chapter 8. Rupert’s Land and the Northern Plains, 1690–1870
8.9 Community and Crisis at Red River
The HBC continued to trade in all the lands around the bay but increasingly it pushed into the Prairies in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In 1811 it established a fort and settlement at Red River in response to NWC incursions into what the Royal Charter made clear was territory covered by the HBC monopoly.
The Selkirk Colony
This was done under the leadership of the HBC’s Thomas Douglas, Lord Selkirk (1771-1820), a Scot who had engaged in several other settlement schemes in British North America (all with mixed results). Selkirk was moved by the situation of the Highland and Lowland Scots who were forced off their lands by the clearances — the consolidation of feudal lands to enable the building of greater sheep flocks and thus feed the ravenous woollen industry in industrializing Britain. While touring the Canadas he was feted by the largely Scottish Montreal merchant establishment, which included representatives of the NWC. Knowing something of the strengths and weaknesses of their operations, he returned to Britain where he secured an influential number of shares in the HBC and then convinced the old monopoly to move into the Red River Valley. The Red River or Selkirk Colony (also called Assiniboia) was intended to absorb Highlanders, retired HBC employees, and (eventually) demobilized Swiss mercenaries. The fact that it straddled the NWC’s main access routes and trading territories provoked a decade of hostilities between two already deeply competitive firms.
The Selkirk Colony was enormous, four times the size of New Brunswick and 20% larger than Upper Canada. It contained both NWC and HBC posts. It was, as well, home to large numbers of Métis, some of whom were farmers but most of whom earned at least part of their living from the pemmican trade with the NWC. A high-protein mash of dried bison and berry jerky, pemmican was the staff of life for Western fur traders and was literally the fuel that drove the fast-moving, long-distance NWC canoe brigades. One estimate claims that “several million kilograms of pemmican were consumed in the fur country each year.”[1] The enormous scale of the bison hunts in the 18th and 19th centuries were, in this respect, mobile food-processing operations in which Indigenous women were a central part. Far from being just a matter of diet, the production, sale, and storage of pemmican was a huge business that operated symbiotically with the fur trade. Neither economy could survive without the other.
The Red River Colony imposed on that economic order and, when famine threatened the settlement in mid-winter 1814, Governor Miles Macdonnell (1767-1828) issued what became known as the Pemmican Proclamation. This law was meant to stop the export of pemmican to NWC forts in the West and retain it for the HBC settlers. If it had been successful it might have ruined the NWC and it certainly would have impoverished