How Highland and Orkney Scots fought the bitter battle for Canada’s fur trade

But it took the English a long time to summon up the courage needed to employ those northern neighbours as members of a regular British army. They were just a bit too frightening, and their final appearance on English soil in 1745 almost confirmed that.

Meanwhile, they could be test-driven in imperial struggles of different kinds, and the results often left their assessors puzzled. For example, Arctic postings figured among those the Scots relished.

By the end of the 18th century they became of serious interest to the governments in London.

The 13 American colonies had broken away in 1776 yet the unknown territory beyond them might more than compensate with exotic products still to be discovered. The explorers of the time always thought first in terms of gold, but in the event it was the furs and ivory of wild animals that generated the liveliest trade.

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The English had in 1670 already started to ship these goods from the Arctic through the Hudson’s Bay Company, even if the routes it used were remote and dangerous. And in course of time Scots mounted a peaceful takeover of the company when it started recruiting from the Orkney Islands, where the locals proved to be the best able to deal with the testing physical conditions along the oceanic routes to and from Kirkwall.

These Arctic goods had also offered trade to the Frenchmen who colonised Canada from the foundation of Quebec in 1608. Most were farmers, but the adventurous ones pushed up the St Lawrence River and its tributaries into the empty interior of the continent where the furs of bear, beaver and deer abounded.

The actual buying and selling were carried on by French-speaking mixed-race Indians, the métis or couriers des bois – “the wanderers of the woods”.

The British conquest of Canada in 1763 made little difference to this native stock. They knew the wilderness better than anybody else and kept the knowledge to themselves because they did not like speaking English. The new imperial masters were content to leave them to it.

Most alike to the métis were the Scots who started migrating to Canada after 1763. They were similar above all in their hardiness, in their fearlessness and in their willingness to meet the demands that a harsh new country made on sturdy ancestral values. The Scots had also exploited the forests south of the St Lawrence even before the American Revolution. After 1776, an alien jurisdiction took over in this region, so the hunters switched to more northerly forests. The trade could anyway be better organised from Montreal than from Philadelphia or Albany, as it had been before. Highlanders (many with Jacobite parents) formed their own commercial structure in the North West Company, also exploiting riches at the centre of the continent.

American revolutionaries were by comparison timid: they still stuck to the safer coastline.

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By the turn of the 19th century, then, a competition for these riches was going on between, on the one side, the Hudson’s Bay Company with its largely Orcadian personnel and, on the other side, the Highlanders and the couriers who ran the North West Company. There was no love lost between them.

A way for one lot to strike at the other lot was to enlist political support. The North West Company had better connections because it could rely on the interest of Thomas Douglas, 5th Earl of Selkirk. During the Scottish Enlightenment he established a philanthropic reputation by addressing the problems of population in a booming economy. He shared this interest with the rulers of Scotland. Like them, he canvassed the solution of emigration.

Selkirk had himself been lobbying the government in London for a grant of land along the Red River, to the west of the Great Lakes in Canada. He would use it to resettle overcrowded Scottish farmers. The UK Government turned him down, however, considering that on the same land it had already granted the Hudson’s Bay Company a fur trading monopoly.

But a Scottish earl was not so easily put off. Selkirk had formed a friendship with Sir Alexander Mackenzie (above), a son of Stornoway who had started his career as a merchant trading to and from New York.

He saved up his profits while he planned a personal project of becoming the first man to cross North America on foot.

He accomplished this in 1793, got knighted for his pains and retired to Avoch on the Black Isle, where his monument still stands.

Mackenzie used more of his fortune to encourage others to join in opening up Canada. Selkirk got in touch with him. The pair bought enough shares in the Hudson’s Bay Company to give them a say in the policies it pursued.

They acquired land to form an agricultural settlement, which Selkirk would supply with a Scottish workforce from the ample sources he felt sure he could open up. Someday, this land beyond the lakes would cease to be a wilderness.

The project of colonisation sponsored by Mackenzie and Selkirk got under way in 1812, with 128 men they recruited in Scotland. These, arriving late in the season, just had time to build a fort on the Red River before the approach of winter cut off all hope of planting successful crops that year.

Luckily, there were enough métis in the area to keep up supplies, but the difficult conditions did not make for a cordial relationship. In fact, relations steadily deteriorated, till in 1816 violence broke out between the métis and the newcomers, mainly over shortages of food.

Another western tradition put in an appearance with a gunfight between the two groups, the so-called Battle of Seven Oaks. The métis got the better of it, and left 21 of their adversaries dead on the land they had been hoping to work. Prosecutions followed, but nobody was ever convicted of the killings.

The further development of the Canadian West remained instead remarkably peaceful, certainly compared to the similar story in the US. Selkirk and Mackenzie both died in 1820, which took the sting out of the quarrels they had provoked.

The further colonisation of Canada proved easy rather than difficult, something few had forecast. The modern country that emerged after the early troubles were over, with well-protected minorities, is still the envy of many in more temperate climes.