Miles Macdonell

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Miles MacDonell (ca. 1767 – 28 June 1828), was the first governor of the Red River Colony (or, Assiniboia), a 19th-century Scottish settlement located in present-day Manitoba and North Dakota.

He was born in Inverness, Scotland, around 1767. In 1773, his father, Colonel John Macdonell (Spanish John), of Scothouse, Inverness-shire and three of his cousins chartered the Pearl and brought over five hundred of their families and friends, at the invitation of Sir William Johnson, and settled at Caughnawaga, on the Mohawk River, in New York province. At the end of the American Revolution, Colonel Macdonell migrated with his family to Canada, and took up his residence at St. Andrews, near Cornwall, where he died in 1810.

The son Miles, who showed military tendencies at an early age, was appointed ensign in the King's Royal Regiment of New York in 1792, lieutenant in the Royal Canadian volunteers in 1794, and captain in the same corps in 1796. At the request of Lord Selkirk, he came to London in 1803, and was induced by that nobleman to assume the post of governor of Selkirk's planned colony on the Red River in the Northwest territory. Selkirk, a shareholder in the Hudson's Bay Company, had bought 300,000 km² (116,000 mi²) of land in the Red River Valley from the company in order to provide a home in the New World for destitute Scots and to deny the land to Hudson's Bay's commercial rival, the North West Company.

Macdonell collected the first body of colonists, composed principally of evicted Scottish Highlanders from the Sutherland estates, in 1812. He sailed from Stornoway for the colony in 1811. The group wintered at York Factory, and reached the Red River the following August. On his arrival, he was at once met with opposition from the agents of the Northwest Company, whose headquarters were at Montréal. On 11 June 1815, representatives of the Northwest Company attacked and fired upon the colonists, and demanded the surrender of Governor Macdonell, who, to avoid the loss of blood, gave himself up voluntarily. He was taken to Montréal as a prisoner, and charges were laid against him by his enemies, but his case was not tried. During his ten or twelve years' connection with the Red River Colony, he was its leading spirit and took an active and decided part in the feuds of the Hudson Bay Company and Northwest trading companies, after which he returned to his farm at Osnabruck, Upper Canada.