{"id":6541,"date":"2016-11-02T15:04:00","date_gmt":"2016-11-02T15:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/opentextbc.ca\/preconfederation\/?post_type=chapter&p=6541"},"modified":"2016-11-02T15:04:00","modified_gmt":"2016-11-02T15:04:00","slug":"8-9-community-and-crisis-at-red-river","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/opentextbc.ca\/preconfederation\/chapter\/8-9-community-and-crisis-at-red-river\/","title":{"raw":"8.9 Community and Crisis at Red River","rendered":"8.9 Community and Crisis at Red River"},"content":{"raw":"

[caption id=\"attachment_3766\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"300\"]\"A<\/a> Figure 8.18 Driven from their homeland by poverty and loss of land, the Red River settlers found themselves caught up in similar issues in North America.[\/caption]\n\nThe 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\u00a0in\u00a0response to NWC incursions into what the\u00a0Royal Charter made clear was territory covered by the HBC monopoly.\n<\/p>

The Selkirk Colony<\/h2>\nThis 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\u00a0Highland and Lowland Scots\u00a0who were\u00a0forced off their lands by the clearances<\/strong>\u00a0-- 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\u00a0convinced the old monopoly to move into the Red River Valley. The\u00a0Red River\u00a0<\/strong>or\u00a0Selkirk Colony <\/strong>(also called\u00a0Assiniboia<\/strong>)\u00a0was intended to absorb Highlanders,\u00a0 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.\n\nThe 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 M\u00e9tis, some of whom were farmers but most of whom earned at least part of their living from the\u00a0pemmican<\/strong>\u00a0trade 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\u00a0that \"several million kilograms of pemmican were consumed in the fur country each\u00a0year.\"[footnote]Daniel Francis, \"Traders and Indians,\" in\u00a0The Prairie West: Historical Readings, <\/em>eds.\u00a0<\/em>R. Douglas Francis and Howard Palmer (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1992), 71.[\/footnote] The enormous scale of the bison hunts in the 18th and 19th centuries were, in this respect, mobile food-processing operations in which Aboriginal 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\u00a0operated symbiotically with the fur trade. Neither economy could survive without the other.\n\nThe Red River Colony imposed on that economic order and, when famine threatened the settlement\u00a0in mid-winter 1814, Governor\u00a0Miles Macdonnell (1767-1828)\u00a0issued what became known as the\u00a0Pemmican Proclamation.<\/strong>\u00a0This 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 \u00a0might have ruined the NWC and it certainly would have impoverished the M\u00e9tis, at least temporarily. Tension between the M\u00e9tis and the NWC on the one hand and Macdonnell, the HBC, and the Selkirk settlers on the other had been simmering; the Pemmican Proclamation pushed the colony to boiling point. A fearful two-thirds of the settlers prudently left the colony that spring, assisted by an NWC that was only too happy to see them off. The remainder were more or less chased away\u00a0and the settlement was razed. Selkirk, not to be outdone, found another group of settlers to send to Red River in 1816, along with a new governor,\u00a0Robert Semple (1777-1816).[footnote]Gerald Friesen, The Canadian Prairies: A History<\/em>, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 22-90.[\/footnote]\n

Seven Oaks<\/h2>\nMatters came to a head on\u00a0June 19, 1816, at the\u00a0Battle of Seven Oaks<\/strong>\u00a0(in present-day\u00a0West Kildonan\u00a0in Winnipeg). A party of M\u00e9tis, having recovered pemmican\u00a0from HBC posts farther west, were on their way to a rendezvous at an NWC post when they confronted\u00a0 a party from the Red River\u00a0Settlement, one that included Semple himself. The result\u00a0was a bloodbath. Semple and 19 others\u00a0of the HBC people were killed in the shootout; only one of the M\u00e9tis party died.\n\nSeven Oaks is important in the history of the West and of Canada for at least four\u00a0reasons. First, it aggravated already very poor relations between the two companies. The\u00a0fur trade wars\u00a0were then at full tilt, with HBC and NWC personnel murdering one another across the whole of the West. Second, this chaos was destabilizing and expensive: it stretched both companies to their limit, leading to amalgamation in 1821 under the Hudson's Bay Company name. Third,\u00a0it marked the emergence of the M\u00e9tis as a self-aware nation. The Selkirk Colony gave the M\u00e9tis an issue on which they could start to imagine\u00a0a political destiny and it framed an issue of rights to which the\u00a0M\u00e9tis would aspire.\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_2179\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"172\"]\"""\"<\/a> Figure 8.19 Cuthbert Grant, 1793-1854.[\/caption]\n\nMuch of the legwork in this process has been ascribed to their leader at Seven Oaks,\u00a0Cuthbert Grant. The son of a Scottish trader and a woman of Cree or Assiniboine background, Grant was well educated, intelligent, and articulate. According to his biographer, he mobilized M\u00e9tis feeling in the years leading to Seven Oaks, creating a viable force out of what had been a largely disparate population. The fact that he did so to enable the success of the NWC -- with\u00a0which he and his father had long been associated -- takes nothing away from this accomplishment.[footnote]George Woodcock, \u201cGRANT, CUTHBERT (d. 1854),\u201d in Dictionary of Canadian Biography,<\/em>\u00a0vol. 8 (University of Toronto\/Universit\u00e9 Laval, 2003). Accessed August 29, 2014, http:\/\/www.biographi.ca\/en\/bio\/grant_cuthbert_1854_8E.html .[\/footnote] At Seven Oaks Grant led them to their first \"wartime\" victory and, as is often said, got \"blood on the flag.\" The M\u00e9tis, consequently, would grow as a force on the Plains in the 19th century.\n\nFourth and finally, Seven Oaks was an important military, commercial, and cultural event. It also resonates as an environmental turning point, as the next two sections argue.\n
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Key Points<\/h2>\n