The narrative thread that unifies J.M. Bumsted’s sprawling biography of Thomas Douglas, the fifth earl of Selkirk, is Bumsted’s own struggle to understand and explain his contradictory, pigheaded, exasperating hero. Or was Selkirk a villain? During his lifetime, 1771–1820, Selkirk was castigated by a host of critics, from peers to peasants, as a rapacious land speculator. But after his death, his fortune and reputation ruined, Selkirk was praised — at least in Red River, the colony he founded in 1812 — as a pious philanthropist.
Red River, now Winnipeg, is Selkirk’s only permanent legacy in Canada, but it was one of many of the Scottish laird’s audacious wilderness adventures: Earlier, he settled Highlanders in Prince Edward Island and on a dismal swamp north of Lake Erie he named Baldoon. An absentee landlord — Selkirk didn’t visit Red River until 1817 — he left “my people,” as he called his settlers, to the mercies of his managers and the charity of the native people. Baldoon failed when the first settlers died in epidemics; Red River was almost destroyed by violent confrontations with Canadian fur traders and Métis hunters. Was Selkirk undertaking scientific experiments in modern agriculture, impetuous philanthropy, or, as Bumsted says of Red River, schemes of “sheer and unadulterated madness?”
An authority on eighteenth-century Scotland, Bumsted tries to portray young Tom Douglas as a child of the Scottish Enlightenment, a flowering of philosophy, science, and radical politics centered at the University of Edinburgh, where Tom was a student. Yet nothing is revealed about this aloof, inarticulate young man to suggest that he was anything more than a dilettante, with the feudal, paternalistic views of his class. Selkirk owed his own title to the deaths, in rapid succession, of his four older brothers, and wasted his time in the intrigues of the House of Lords.
Bumsted speculates that as Selkirk grew older he suffered from manic, obsessive behaviour that destroyed his judgment — the consequence, perhaps, of the tuberculosis that killed him and the drugs, including mercury, he was taking to treat it. Selkirk the swashbuckler began buying up shares in the nearly bankrupt Hudson’s Bay Company, and his Red River settlement was founded, with the company’s connivance, to destroy their hated Canadian rivals for the fur trade, the North West Company of Montreal. The HBC granted Selkirk an immense tract of land that intercepted the Nor’Westers’ historic canoe routes from Lake Superior to Red River and Lake Winnipeg, and he in turn intended to use Highlander immigrants as “shock troops” to drive the Nor’Westers out of the country.
Refusing to take up arms, the Highlanders became human shields in a bloody guerrilla war between the rival companies, with First Nations and Métis siding with one faction or the other. When the victorious Nor’Westers destroyed the settlement in 1815 and transported the settlers to Upper Canada, Selkirk hired his own private army and captured, without resistance, Fort William, the North West Company’s stronghold on Lake Superior. There he remained, lord of the wilderness, for the winter, returning, at his leisure, to account for his burglary.
Lord Selkirk: A Life devotes too much space to political and legal machinations, skims over dramatic events, and barely acknowledges the sufferings of Selkirk’s colonists. Bumsted adopts Selkirk’s own sneering attitude towards the uncouth Highlanders and the North West Company, tarring Canada’s fur trade princes as rogues and thieves, although they included explorers Sir Alexander Mackenzie and puritanical David Thompson. Nor does he place Selkirk’s own melodrama sufficiently in the violent, chaotic context of his time: the American and French Revolutions, the Napoleonic wars, and, in Canada, the War of 1812.
Having spent more than thirty years immersed in the Selkirk papers, Bumsted laments Selkirk’s “almost pathological reticence to reveal his interior life and thought.” Yet I found Selkirk’s thoughts and emotions clearly revealed in the voluminous letters and pamphlets Bumsted quotes. Of the Red River Métis, Selkirk writes: “Canadians, mixed with the bastard sons of others, who had thrown off the restraints of regular society, & cohabiting with Indian squaws have formed a combination of the vices of civilized and savage life.” Selkirk’s own words reveal him to be the prototype of the corporate buccaneer. Lord Selkirk: A Life is a biography for our times.
— Heather Robertson (Read bio)
Heather Robertson's latest book is Walking into Wilderness: The Toronto Carrying Place and Nine Mile Portage, which covers the war between the French, English, and their First Nations allies in the Great Lakes watershed.