NORWEGIANS IN THE SELKIRK SETTLEMENT 1815-1870

Abstract

NORWEGIANS IN THE SELKIRK SETTLEMENT 1815-1870 By Paul Knaplund Few settlers faced more trying hardships or met with more disasters than did those whom Lord Selkirk brought to the forks of the Red River in the years 1812-15. Supplies for the settlement, seed grain, and animals for breeding had to be brought great distances. Once a year the Hudson 's Bay Company's ships from Great Britain arrived at York Factory on Hudson Bay, and thence supplies traveled more than seven hundred miles by rivers, portages, and lakes to the Red River. There were two alternative sources: by an even more toilsome route from distant Canada; or from the nearest settlements in the United States. Nature itself proved hostile to the colonists: during the first twenty years of the existence of the settlement early frosts, disastrous floods, and devastating invasions of locusts threatened to blot it out. Still more disheartening to the early immigrants was the hostility which they encountered from men of their own race. Though the colony was founded under the œgis of the Hudson's Bay Company, then controlled by Lord Selkirk , the servants of this company in America opposed the new venture. Not infrequently the settlers were thwarted by officers of the Hudson's Bay Company, and at the same time the colonists were exposed to the full fury of the hatred that the rival trading concern, the Northwest Company, harbored for the Hudson's Bay Company and all its schemes. So intense was this hatred that the Selkirk settlement was twice wiped out by the Northwesters. In June, 1815, the first governor of the colony, Captain Miles Macdonald, was forced to surrender himself to the Northwesters. Nearly all i 2 STUDIES AND RECORDS buildings were burned down and the settlers were dispersed. Reënforced by new arrivals from Europe, some of the colonists returned in the autumn, only to be overwhelmed by a greater disaster in the following year, when Governor Semple of the Hudson's Bay Company and twenty men of the settlement were killed in the battle, or rather massacre, of Seven Oaks, on June 19, 1816. The perpetrators of this outrage were half-breeds, incited, and promised great rewards for their foul deed, by officers in the service of the Northwest Company.1 The first man killed at Seven Oaks was a Norwegian , "Lieutenant" Holte, who, as the leader of a small band of Norwegians, had arrived at York Factory in September , 1814.2 To one man of Holte's group, Peter Dahl, belongs the distinction of being the first Norwegian farmer in the Red River Valley, and a successful one. With the coming of Holte and his compatriots hangs a tale. At the time when Lord Selkirk gained a controlling interest in the Hudson's Bay Company and decided to found a settlement in its territory, the company was fast losing ground to the Northwesters. As an aid both to the company and to the settlement, Selkirk determined to build winter roads connecting York Factory with the interior. Most of the servants in the lower ranks of the Hudson's Bay Company were recruited in the Orkney Islands, but at this time the Orkneymen as a group seem to have been deficient both in courage and in physical strength. Selkirk wanted men inured to the rigors of a northern climate, who had had experience as woodsmen, fishermen, and farmers, and who, above all, were strong, resourceful, and amenable to discipline . He was looking, not merely for road builders, but for handy men who might invigorate the service of the company and effect improvements in the ways and methods of living 1 A good account of the early history of the Selkirk settlement may be found in Chester Martin, Lord Selkirk's Work in Canada ( Oxford Historical and Literary Studies, vol. 7 - Oxford, 1916) . 2 Martin, Selkirk's Work in Canada , 111. THE SELKIRK SETTLEMENT 3 at trading posts and settlements. Such men, he believed, might be obtained in Norway and Sweden. Late in January or early in February, 1814, the directors of the Hudson's Bay Company voted to hire Norwegian and Swedish laborers for service in North America...