Miles Macdonell

Miles Macdonell (* around 1767 in Inverness-shire , Scotland ; † June 28, 1828 in Pointe-Fortune , Lower Canada ) was a British officer and colonial administrator in what is now Canada . He was the first governor (1811-1815) of Assiniboia in the Red River Colony for the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC).

Youth and establishment in Canada

In 1773 Macdonell's family emigrated to North America and settled in Caughnawaga on the Mohawk River near New York . When the American Revolutionary War broke out , the family fled north and Macdonell's father fought for the British crown. In 1783 the family settled in St Andrews in what was then Stormont County , Ontario .

Macdonell showed early military ambitions and was a cadet in the King's Royal Regiment of New York from 1782 until its dissolution in 1784. After that, his trace is lost, he probably returned to Scotland and married Isabella McDonell of Morar. In any case, in 1791 he settled as a farmer with his wife in Osnabruck Township , Upper Canada.

Marriages and failed military careers

Macdonell's first wife died in 1794, leaving him with two sons and two daughters; he then joined the Royal Canadian Volunteer Regiment as a lieutenant and was promoted to captain in 1796 . He remarried in 1798, but his second wife, Catherine McDonell of Collachie, died childless just a year later. After the dissolution of his regiment, he returned to his farm and married Nancy Macdonell. Although he tried to run his farm economically, he continued to look for military positions, as he hoped for a better livelihood here.

Hudson's Bay Company

After various applications for military positions, he was appointed governor of Assiniboia, an administrative office in the Red River Colony, a project of Lord Selkirk within the HBC in 1811 . This earned him a lot of criticism from the relatives who were close to the competitor North West Company (NWC). But the post promised him a steady income and the repayment of his debts, which had accumulated in the meantime, and Selkirk, whom Macdonell had met in 1804, believed in him.

Pemmican war

Macdonell was thrown in the midst of the struggle between the economically troubled HBC and its new rival NWC, the Pemmican War . The HBC wanted to replace the costly supply of their expeditions from Europe with a logistically cheaper supply on site, and at the same time cut off their supply base for the NWC, which was equipping itself in the northern prairie at the Métis for its annual activities. The 300,000 km² area was officially part of the fur trade monopoly of Ruperts Land of the HBC, but fur was not traded here by the NWC, it was only equipped for expeditions.

After Macdonell had brought the first settlers to the new colony in autumn 1812, it soon became clear that self-sufficiency was out of the question for the time being. In January 1814 he therefore issued the Pemmican Proclamation , which prohibited the export of supplies of any kind from the entire Red River Colony, and thus the equipment of expeditions of the NWC; for the latter it was an open declaration of war. This was followed by the first seizures of pemmican, which for Métis and NWC were nothing more and nothing less than robbery, and were answered with looting from the new colonists. The NWC also tried to force the settlers to relocate to eastern Canada, which 40 families gave in in the spring of 1815.

On June 17, 1815, Macdonell surrendered to the NWC against a promise not to attack the remaining settlers. He was brought to Montreal to be charged with pemmican theft, which was not implemented. The clashes in the colony did not end with Macdonell's extradition, but he himself never returned to the West. Macdonell's successor, Robert Semple , had already been appointed in April , but he did not arrive until autumn with a group of new settlers from Scotland. But even this should not be able to turn the tide, as early as the summer of 1816 he was killed in the Battle of Seven Oaks .

Back in Canada

Macdonell retired to his farm in Osnabruck Township in Upper Canada, where he tried in vain to demand what he thought he was entitled to in return for the office in Assiniboia. He should remain in debt for the rest of his life. He never seems to have recovered properly from the 4 years as governor and was probably especially mentally stressed. Most recently he moved to his brother's farm in Pointe-Fortune in Lower Canada, where he finally died in 1928.

Web links

• Miles Macdonell . In: Dictionary of Canadian Biography . 24 volumes, 1966–2018. University of Toronto Press, Toronto ( English , French ).

predecessor	Office	successor
-	Governor of Assiniboia 1811–1815	Robert Semple