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The 1790's to the
1850's
Initial interaction
between Scotland and the North American West might best be grouped under
two general headings: the fur trade and exploration. From the 1790s
forward, Scots pioneers played crucial roles in each area. That they did
so can be directly linked to the complex cultural forces that have
molded the Scottish people. Since the explorers usually hailed from the
Lowlands and the fur trappers from the Highlands, the Western Isles, and
Orkney, perhaps it is best to begin with a bit of Scottish geography.
Situated at the
northwesternmost point of Europe, Scotland is blessed with some of the
most spectacular wilderness areas on the globe. Even in modern times,
however, it is a harsh and demanding land. Though Scotland is a country
of 520,411 square miles, only slightly over one-fourth of it is arable.
Lacking an Ireland to break the Atlantic storms, it is both colder and
wetter than its English neighbor to the south. In the Western Isles, for
example, rain falls, on average, seven out of every nine days. The
Scottish Tourist Board recently compiled a pamphlet professing to show
that the climate was not really as bad as reputed, but even it noted
that Paisley, near Glasgow, received only 1.3 hours of sunshine during
the entire month of December 1890. The cotton barons of the early
nineteenth century favored Lanarkshire for their mills because the
steady moisture in the air kept the cotton fibers from breaking.
Eighteenth-century Highlanders used to wish their departing guests
"good weather" as they saw them off.
The east-coast city of Edinburgh receives much less
rainfall than the west of Scotland, but fronting the North Sea brings
challenges of its own. In a famous essay on Edinburgh, Robert Louis
Stevenson credited it with having one of the "vilest climates"
under heaven. Said Stevenson, "The weather is raw and boisterous in
winter, shifty and ungenial in summer, and a downright meteorological
purgatory in the spring." Even the Edinburgh Review complained
that their climate "would scarcely ripen an apple." While
other countries have climate, the old adage has it, Scotland has
weather.
But the Scots have been known occasionally to
overstate their case. Thanks to the Gulf Stream, the west coast of
Scotland provides an ideal climate for growing tropical plants, as seen
today in the world-famous Inverewe Gardens. The sheltered Lowlands and
the fertile northeast region also belie some of these observations. The
proximity to the sea means that the northeast receives late frosts—roses
may bloom until December— and the rich black soil of the land beyond
the Grampian Mountains has supported cattle and sheep for millenia.
Oats, barley, peas, and rye grow well, and when potatoes were introduced
there and in the Western Isles in the early eighteenth century, they
transformed Scottish agricultural life. Other root crops such as
rutabagas and turnips, introduced at approximately the same time,
flourished as animal and human food. Grass for cattle and sheep still
grows abundantly in Orkney, and the sheltered Tay Valley teems with
berries of all varieties. Harsh though the climate was, in short, the
Scots ate well. Variety, however, was another matter. Green vegetables
remained rare until the early twentieth century, and Samuel Johnson’s
jibe that the English fed oats to the horses but in Scotland oats served
as the staple for the people had a degree of truth throughout Scotland’s
long and complex history.
Historians believe that the Scottish nation emerged
from the union of several diverse peoples: the Picts, the Scots, the
Britons, the Angles, and the Scandinavians. But over the centuries,
these divisions were less important than a more famous dichotomy:
the Lowlands versus the Highlands. Eighteenth-century
travelers frequently observed the differences between the "house
Scots" and the "wild Scots." The "wild Scots"
spoke Gaelic, whereas the others spoke a distinct tongue related to
English. Lowland Scotland had cities and culture: Edinburgh, Perth,
Aberdeen, Stirling, Glasgow; Highland Scotland had scenery and romance.
Perhaps, as contemporary poet Maurice Lindsay has phrased it, Scotland
was really only an "attitude of mind."
Lowland or Highland, however, Scotland in the
eighteenth century remained very much an outpost of Europe. Even though
the Scottish border lay but three hundred miles from London, as late as
1753 the Edinburgh stage made the trip only every two weeks. Travelers
who ventured south frequently made out their wills as a final
preparation.6 Regular ship service from Orkney to Aberdeen
did not occur until 1834.
The lack of roads and bridges in the Highlands was
notorious. Since the numerous rivers generally ran parallel to each
other on their way to the coast, they formed remarkable barriers to
overland travel. Local guides were necessary, but even they knew only
their specffic regions. The Hanoverian monarchs began a series of
road-building projects in the early eighteenth century in order to open
the region to commerce as well as to pacify Highland supporters of the
ousted Stuarts, but it was not until the railways penetrated the region
in the mid-nineteenth century that Scotland became relatively easy to
access. Tobias Smollett’s character Mrs. Tabitha, for example,
believed that one could reach Scotland only by sea.
To Scotland’s geography must be added the steady
pressure of population. A population explosion from c. 1750 to the late
nineteenth century placed increasing pressure on a nation already
short of arable lands. During the 1745—1811 period, for example, the
population of the Outer Hebrides rose from 11,500 to 24,500. At least
6,000 Highlanders left for North America during the first five years of
the nineteenth century. At the close of the Napoleonic wars, the
Scottish growth rate approached 15.1 percent a decade. Periodic food
shortages— the two most memorable being the seven ill years of William
and Mary’s reign and the potato famine of the late 1840s— fueled the
exodus.
A central theme of Scottish history, therefore, has
been emigration. Historian George Shepperson has labeled this the
Scottish Volkerwanderung. Others have termed it the Scottish
diaspora. Scotland’s loss, as the National Trust Monument at Culloden
currently phrases it, "has been the world’s gain."
To the factors of geography and population pressures
one must add another: the politics of eighteenth-century Britain. The
attempt by the ousted Stuart dynasty to recapture the throne culminated
in the Hanovenan victory at Culloden on 16 April 1746. Afterwards, the
monarchy turned to draconian measures. The crown executed a number of
Stuart supporters, confiscated numerous estates, and officially banned
the playing of bagpipes and the wearing of the tartan and other Highland
garb. A distinct Scotophobia swept through England, and those Scots who
ventured south met social hostility on a number of fronts. Since success
in eighteenth-century British society depended upon the favors of highly
placed patrons in government, the Scots in England found themselves at a
distinct disadvantage. As a defense, they usually banded together.
"No Scot ever exerted himself but for a Scot," grumbled one
observer.
While a Jacobite past might decidedly hinder advance
in England, it proved of no significance overseas. Small wonder, then,
that James Charles Stuart Strange and others whose names gave their
politics away sought opportunity abroad. Indeed, as
historian Linda Calley has recently noted, for many
Scots "empire became a profession in itself." In certain
regions, such as India and British North America, family loyalty to the
lost Stuart cause might even prove an advantage. At the very least, it
provoked no public outcry. Georgia Scots fur traders wore kilts in the
late eighteenth century, and in 1777 a band of Scots, accompanied by
pipers, marched unmolested down the streets of St.
Augustine in full Highland regalia.
Poverty, the pressure of population growth, and
political turmoil were hardly unusual in the history of Europe. But the
proximity to the sea gave the Scots an advantage that eluded the
inhabitants of countries such as Switzerland, Hungary, or the Ukraine.
Surrounded by the North Sea on one side and the North Atlantic on the
other, no part of Scotland is more than forty-five miles from saltwater.
Aberdeen and Edinburgh maintained a thriving trade with Baltic Sea ports
from the fourteenth century forward. Scotland also contains 787 islands,
and those who lived in Orkney, Shetland, or the Western Isles met the
sea on a daily basis. For example, famed nineteenth-century Arctic
explorer John Rae, who grew up on Mainland Orkney, had his own boat when
he was fifteen. Legend had it that a person could holler "Hey,
Mac" down the engine room of any nineteenth-century steamer and
receive a response. During the mid-nineteenth-century wars of empire, so
the story goes, a Scottish regiment bound for India found itself
stranded by a local sailors’ strike. Undaunted, the soldiers—all of
whom were fishermen in civilian life—simply sailed the ship
themselves.
This combination of circumstances meant that, from
medieval times to the present day, the Scots developed the reputation of
being a "people on the move." As early as the fourteenth
century, the Germans used the term Schotte as a synonym for trader. In
Scandinavia Schotts carried the same meaning. During the Thirty Years
War, Scottish adventurers fought all over the continent, a saga
fictionalized in Sir Walter Scott’s character Sir Rodenck Dhu.
By the late eighteenth century, Scots merchants, fishermen, traders, and
adventurers could be found stretching from Russia to the Baltic and from
France to Scandinavia. Thus, when Britain began to manifest serious
interest in exploring the uncharted interior of the North American
continent, the Scots were well positioned to take advantage of this new
situation.
One of the most significant dates in British and
North American history proved to be 1667. In that year the Hudson Bay
Company (HBC)—the "Great Company," as the American Indians
would learn to call it—was born in Restoration London. Just emerging
from a brutal and protracted Civil War, Britain was thronged with
capitalist adventurers who dreamed of untold profits from the furs of
North America. Five years later, poet John Dryden celebrated the company’s
first public sale with a bit of doggerel:
Friend, once ‘twas Fame that led thee forth
To brave the Tropic Heat, the Frozen North,
Late it was Gold, then beauty was the Spur;
But now our Gallants venture, but for fur.
From the mid-eighteenth century forward, the
mainstays of the Hudson’s Bay Company and its eventual rival, the
North West Company, lay with its Scottish personnel. The HBC ships
sailed from London, but they often made last calls at the Hebrides or
Orkneys, where they seldom failed to find recruits. The company
maintained agents in Stornoway, the Isle of Lewis, and Stromness,
Orkney, for years. Orkney fur trappers in Canada complained so loudly
about the unseaworthiness of American Indian birchbark canoes that they
eventually brought over a modified version of their own boats to haul
New World trade goods. At one time Orkneymen formed almost a majority of
HBC employees. Today, Winnipeg, Manitoba, probably has the highest
number of Orkney descendants of any city in the world.
Exploration and trading for fur in the eighteenth and
early nineteenth-century North American wilderness presented Europeans
with some of the most formidable living conditions imaginable. The HBC
trading posts established on the shores of James Bay and Hudson’s Bay
in Canada were surrounded by terrain known locally as "the barren
grounds." Communication with supply depots at Fort York, Fort
Albany, and Fort Moose was usually limited to the arrival of an annual
supply ship. The winter temperature fell regularly to 40°F below zero,
and travel overland was as much by lake as by land. Outside of Siberia
or northern Scandinavia, Europe boasted no landscape that remotely
approached this region in terms of physical challenges. One needed
exceptional skills to survive in such surroundings.
Although it is true that the Scots explorers and
traders lacked the religious motivation of Jesuit missionaries who
traversed this wilderness, they had the next best thing. They had grown
up in an environment of mountain ruggedness, lochs, and solitude that
provided an ideal practical training ground for exploring the North
American West. John Rae, for example, positively relished the Orkney
gales. As he recalled in his reminiscences:
I delighted in being out in the worst of weather—snow-storms
in winter, rain and gales all the year round. Cared nothing for, and
felt no harm from being soaking wet either with salt or fresh water
all day long—for a waterproof coat was never thought of."
The innumerable challenges of Highland and Island
life — especially the necessity of being at the beck and call of the
clan leader—produced generations of rugged men and women. The women
were as hardy as the men. They often went barefoot, wearing shoes only
for special occasions such as attending church. Eighteenth-century
traveler Edward Burt observed barefoot Highland women stomping their
washing in tubs "when their legs and feet are almost literally as
red as blood with the cold." During the herring season Highland
women from Sutherland would walk the 130 miles to Wick in Caithness
without any type of shelter. When the herring boats unloaded their
catch, the women remained outside in all types of weather to gut the
fish. They cleaned about thirty-five fish a minute and could keep up the
pace for hours on end. Not surprisingly, these women often led Northern
crofter anti-Clearance agitation. In the 1841 riot at Durness and the
1842 protest at Lochsheil, women sporting shearing hooks and with aprons
filled with stones chased away the evicting officers.
Such a culture thrived on stories of endurance and
bravado. Legends told of Highland soldiers on maneuvers who marched
overland carrying just a bag of oatmeal and a small stone on which to
heat it at night. For rest, they rolled up tightly in their homespun
wool plaids and stretched out on the bare ground. When the temperature
dropped near freezing, they would occasionally dip their plaids into a
stream to freeze them and sleep inside a coating of ice not unlike a
snow cave. One clan chieftain was chaffed by his men as "soft"
when he was seen making a pillow out of snow (sometimes out of a rock).
Sir John Sinclair, compiler of the first Statistical
Account of Scotland in the 1790s, summarized this mood to
perfection:
He [the Highlander] has felt from his early youth
all the privations to which he can be exposed in almost any
circumstances of war. He has been accustomed to scanty fare, to rude
and often wet clothing, to cold and damp houses, to sleep often in the
open air or in the most uncomfortable beds, to cross dangerous rivers,
to march a number of miles without stopping and with but little
nourishment, and to be perpetually exposed to the attacks of a stormy
atmosphere. A warrior thus trained suffers no inconvenience from what
others would consider to be the greatest possible hardships, and has an evident
superiority over the native of a delicious climate, bred to every
indulgence of food, dress and habitation and who is unaccustomed to
marching and fatigue.
Thus, unbeknownst to themselves, Scots Highlanders
and Islanders grew to adulthood in the best possible
"university" that could prepare them for North American
exploration or the western fur trade. Not without reason was the
fur-trapping territory of western Canada termed "New
Caledonia."
The history of Scotland and the growth of the North
American fur trade are forever intertwined. The story of trade and
discovery in the American Northwest, wrote nineteenth-century
journalist A. Inness Shand, "reads like a muster-roll of the
clans," chiefly "the northern clans of the second
order": MacTavish, MacGillivray, McKay, McLellan, McDougall,
Fraser, and Stuart. Peter C. Newman, the premier historian of the HBC,
has observed that virtually all the great names of the company grew up
in Scotland: Simpson, Smith, Douglas, Campbell, Murray, McLean, Leith,
Stuart. The HBC’s chief rival, the North West
Company, was also run by Scots. Its early roster contained such names
as Dickson, Laidlaw, Lamont, McKenzie, Kipp, Stewart, and McTavish.
The Orkney surnames of Isbister, Linklater, Marwick, Sabiston,
Corrigal, and Flett are common today among the Cree and Spokane
Indians of Canada and the Pacific Northwest.
The Scots dominated the nineteenth-century fur
trade. When John Jacob Astor founded his American Fur Company in 1800,
he hired away six disgruntled employees from the North West Company;
all were Scots. A later defector from the North West Company, the
Paris-educated Robert Stuart, eventually became Astor’s business
partner. In 1812 an English traveler ventured onto the Great Plains
and met a party of five fur trappers; the Scots outnumbered the French
by three to two. The fur trade along the south Atlantic coast was largely
controlled by two firms - Panton, Leslie and Company and John Forbes
and Company - almost every member of which was born either in
Aberdeenshire or in towns bordering the Moray Firth.
In many of these fur-trade enterprises, kinship
ties proved far more enduring than company loyalties. Historian James
Hunter has described the North West Fur Company as a unique
combination of business enterprise and extended family of the Highland
type. There were so many Highlanders in the HBC that Lowland employees
complained that the lack of a clan name led to discrimination in
promotion. The common language was often Gaelic.
Because their chief loyalty had been to clan, Scots traders could
shift from company to company or from nation to nation as
circumstances warranted. For example, in the early 1790s James Mackay
moved from British Canada to St. Louis, becoming a Spanish citizen, so
as to better engage in the fur trade. Similarly, a generation later
Ramsay Crooks from Greenock, Scotland, moved from Montreal to St.
Louis, becoming an American citizen, so as to manage the American Fur
Company. The St. Louis—based firm Sublette and Campbell, the only
serious rival of the American Fur Company, was run with equal skill
from 1836 to 1842 by Tyrone, Northern Ireland—born Robert Campbell.
Angus MacDonald from the Isle of Skye entered the service of the HBC
in 1838 and proved so skillful in obtaining Indian furs that in 1852
he was appointed head of the extensive Colville district, including
all traditional posts north of Walla Walla, Washington, far into
British Columbia. MacDonald held this position until 1871, when the
HBC finally gave up its last posts in the United States, and lived the
rest of his life as an American in Montana Territory.
On one occasion, John McDonald of the Canadian
North West Company was discussing the fur trade with Alexander Ross, then employed by the American Fur Company.
"The Americans have been very
enterprising," McDonald commented. "We are called
Americans," said Ross, "but there were very few Americans
among us—we were all Scotchmen like yourselves."
During their heyday the
Scots fur traders amassed incredible power. James Kirker was once termed
"the king of New Mexico." Dr.John McLoughlin, chief factor of
the HBC in Oregon, lived in regal splendor with a piper who welcomed
guests. George Simpson of the HBC took a piper with him whenever he went
on an inspection tour. Kenneth McKenzie, who founded Fort Union on the
Upper Missouri, presided over a larger territory than many a European
monarch.
Since both Highland and
fur-trade society were largely oral cultures, the prowess of these men
soon evolved into legend. And of all the fur-trade legends, none is as
remarkable as the adventures of Hugh Glass. Born in Pennsylvania of
Scotch-Irish parents, Glass migrated to the western plains and in June
1823 staggered, exhausted, into Fort Atkinson in Council Bluffs, Iowa.
His arrival was greeted with astonishment, because his compatriots had
heard that he had been killed on the Great Plains. One version had him
dispatched by Arickara Indians; another placed the blame on a white
bear.
When Glass recovered
enough to tell his story, the astonishment grew. The previous year,
Glass had signed up to travel with Major Andrew Henry up the Missouri
River. But after several weeks, he was surprised by a large white
grizzly bear and badly mauled in his arms, legs, and shoulder. His mates
dispatched the animal, but Glass was too severely injured to continue.
As it was questionable whether he would survive, Major Henry selected
two men to stay with Glass and either wait until he recovered or bury
him, whichever came first. After five days the trappers chose a third
alternative. They took his rifle and provisions and abandoned him. When
they caught up with Henry’s party, they reported that Glass had died
and they had interred him as instructed.
Left for dead, the
exhausted Glass dragged himself to a nearby spring where he lived for
ten days on cherries and buffalo
berries. Too weak to stand, he began crawling across the prairie.
Fortunately for him, he stumbled onto the partial remains of a buffalo
calf recently killed by wolves and thus sustained himself for several
days. Fueled by revenge, he eventually made his way to Fort Kiowa, a
post on the Missouri River. Shortly afterwards, a party of trappers
bound for the Yellowstone River and a Mandan village at Tilton’s fort
stopped by the fort, and Glass joined them in pursuit of his tormentors.
When the trading party
approached an Indian village, the main group went on ahead, but Glass
left the boat to take a slightly different route. This proved fortunate.
As he drew near the village, Glass discovered that a band of Arickara
Indians had attacked and killed all the traders. Glass immediately fled
into the high grasses and escaped capture. He spent the next
thirty-eight days alone before he arrived at Major Henry’s
establishment on the Big Horn River, where he spent the winter
recovering.
Discovering that his main
betrayer had moved on to Fort Atkinson in Iowa, Glass volunteered to
carry letters to this post. With four companions, he left Henry’s camp
on February 29, 1824, for the Powder River, the Platte, and finally the
lower end of the Black Hills. There the party was again attacked by a
band of Arickara, this time led by Elk’s Tongue, and again Glass
barely escaped into the wilderness. As Glass phrased it,
Although I have lost my
rifle and all my plunder, I felt quite rich, when I found my knife,
flint, and steel in my shot pouch. These little fixers make a man feel
right peart, when he is three or four hundred miles from any body or
any place-all alone among the painters and wild varmints.°
Fifteen days’ journey
brought him to Fort Kiowa, then finally on to Fort Atkinson at Council
Bluffs. There he confronted his old antagonist. But his opponent had
since enlisted in the army, and Glass found he could not bring charges
against him. The officer in command resolved the quarrel
by providing Glass with a new rifle and other necessary provisions. Then
Hugh Glass went back to life in the fur trade.
This saga remains today
as the premier frontier adventure story. Other than Glass himself,
however, there is no proof for the tale. Consequently, it probably
reflects the Scottish folk legends of endurance and triumph over
treachery as much as it does life in the American fur trade. The oral
culture of the immigrants proved remarkably flexible.
Although not, perhaps,
quite so dramatic, the lives of several other Scots or Scotch-Irish
trappers achieved similar regional fame. James Kirker, "Don
Santiago Kirker, the king of New Mexico," proved the most notorious
of the lot. Born in Kilross, near Belfast, in 1743, Kirker arrived in
New York in 1810, where he served on an American privateer during the
War of 1812. In 1821 he made his way to St. Louis, where he dabbled in
the fur trade and three years later began trapping in earnest in the
Mexican Southwest, chiefly in the Rio Gila region of western New Mexico.
In 1835 he was licensed to trade with the Apaches of the region and
learned their ways well. On occasion he seems to have served as a fence
for their stolen goods. Political and commercial difficulties sent him
farther south, and the governor of Chihuahua eventually contracted with
him to raise a private army to raid the Apaches. Kirker’s army,
composed of Shawnee Indians plus assorted renegades, then began a
systematic campaign of murder. The Mexican government allegedly promised
him two hundred dollars for each Apache scalp. By his own account,
Kirker killed 487 people. After this, he accepted Mexican citizenship
and a colonel’s commission in the Mexican army. (By this time he had a
Mexican wife and family, in addition to a neglected New York wife and
family.) When the Mexican-American War broke out in 1846, Kirker again
switched sides, becoming both a spy and an advisor for the Missouri
Volunteers. In turn, the Mexican government placed a ten-thousand-dollar
bounty on his head, which forever prohibited his return to Mexico.
The sole surviving
daguerreotype of Kirker reveals a dark-skinned man with a fierce
countenance. A profile in an 1847 St. Louis newspaper commented
favorably on Kirker’s intelligence, demeanor, and accent, the latter
so unique "that few would suspect him of being a son of the Emerald
Isle." After serving as guide and scout, James Kirker died in
California in 1853, an acknowledged "bad man."
A Scots trader named
Craigie earned a much more admirable reputation during his sojourn in
the northern Rockies. In the late 1840s through the 1850s he served as
the fort master at Fort Walla Walla on the Oregon Trail. Craigie arrived
in America as a common laborer with the HBC and rose steadily in the
ranks. His home by the Boise River brought him the occasional salmon,
but he and his Panack (Bannock) wife existed marginally on hunting and a
few vegetables. He had almost no contact with whites save those who came
through on the trail.
Craigie’s reputation
derived from his understanding of Christian stewardship. Over the years
he housed and cared for a number of exhausted travelers who surely would
have perished without him. When English visitor Henry J. Coke rode to
Oregon in 1850, he found Craigie caring for a Swiss who had been
severely injured when his rifle exploded. "Many are the instances
of his charitable deeds," Coke wrote, "and many are the
travellers on these plains who survive to pray for blessings on this
disinterested and generous being, to whom they owe their
preservation."
The French trappers were
prominent on the northern fur trade frontier. Their Spanish counterparts
played the same role on the southwestern frontier. But Scots and
Scotch-Irish fur trappers were ubiquitous. No area of the
Trans-Mississippi West was without them.
Explorers
If the Highland and
Island Scots dominated the North American fur trade, Lowland Scots
often, though not always, led the way as explorers of the West. The
motivation of the explorers, however, derived less from the geography of
their homeland than from the geography of the mind. And here we must
turn to the Scottish Reformation and the Scottish Enlightenment.
The Reformation of 1560
created a sense of Scottish destiny that manifested itself in a myriad
of ways. The leaders of the Reformation began to create a distinctive
semireligious mythology: like ancient Israel, Scotland was a poor and
seemingly insignificant nation. But like Israel, God had chosen it to
play a leading role in His plans for the establishment of true religion
and the betterment of humankind.
A key means to this end
emerged in the scheme devised by reformer John Knox to educate Scottish
youth. Knox’s plan was to place a school in every parish to teach
reading, writing, and catechism. The goal was to allow people to read
Scripture for themselves, for no priest could assist a person in
achieving salvation. The second level of schooling consisted of a
grammar school in every town to teach grammar and Latin; next came a
high school or college in the most important towns to further classical
studies. The culmination came with a university system that boasted a
three-year arts course plus medicine, law, and divinity. The ancient
Scottish universities—St. Andrews (founded 1410), Glasgow (1451),
Edinburgh (1583), King’s College, Old Aberdeen (1495), and Marischal
(1593)—provided the capstone to a system that far outclassed the
educational structures of England or the Continent.
The system was not
exactly free, since parents usually paid tuition fees (sometimes in
kind, such as peat for the stoves). But the teachers’ salaries were
paid in part by a tax on heritors and tenants or from burgh municipal
funds. The educational conditions
in the Highlands and Islands proved so challenging that the Society in
Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (SSPCK) also established a
parallel system of schools. The various Scottish statistical accounts
show the enormous influence that Scottish education had in the
eighteenth and early nineteenth-century rural Lowlands, the only area
that approximated Knox’s ideal.
Scotland’s goal of a
basic education for all males proved a far cry from contemporary English
distrust of the educated masses. Philosopher George Davie has argued
that because of its educational system, Scotland produced a
"democratic intellect" with a mythology to match. Indeed,
Scots have always valued a man who could "better himself." The
popular image of the poor lad (the "lad-o-pairts") carrying
oatmeal and herring en route to a university proved a common one. Myth
though it was, it reflected a degree of truth. All through the
nineteenth century, Scots scored well in any survey of literacy. In the
parlance of the day, only the Jews rivaled the Scots in their respect
for scholarship.
Knox’s concern for
education culminated in the famous Scottish Enlightenment of c. 1750—1810.
The names of philosopher David Hume, economist Adam Smith, historian
William Robinson, educator William Small, architect Robert Adam, and
philosopher Lord Kames reflected the high calibre of Scottish thought.
In a manner far different from that of the French Enlightenment,
Presbyterian clerics often stood at the very center of the Scottish Age
of Reason. Lawyers, economists, and geographers were equally common. In
eighteenth-century Edinburgh, it was said, a person could stand at the
Market Square and shake hands with fifty men of genius in an hour. Just
one statistic will illustrate this point: from 1750 to 1850, the
Scottish Universities educated ten thousand medical doctors; Oxford and
Cambridge in the same period educated five hundred. Historians are still
trying to comprehend the period when Scotland led the
Western world in the realms of medicine, economics, history, and
jurisprudence.
This emphasis on
schooling and scientific advances helped produce some of the first
explorers of the North American West. The range of first hand Scottish
western adventurers is remarkable. One should probably begin with the
story of James Cook. Son of a Scots farm worker who had moved to the
Yorkshire town of Marton, Cook rose rapidly in the service of the
British navy. Later he entered historical legend as the "Pacific
Columbus," for just as Columbus "discovered" America en
route to India, Cook "discovered" Hawaii while searching for
the elusive Northwest Passage.
On March 29, 1778, Cook’s
flagship the Revolution, with a companion vessel, Discovery,
sailed into what is now Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island. They remained
there almost a month, recording detailed scientific, geographical, and
meteorological data of the region. Although Cook was a naval officer,
not a businessman, he anticipated that great profits could be made by
trading British goods for fur from the Natives. Unfortunately, the most
famous Scottish sea captain of his generation died the next year in
Hawaii; his crew returned to Britain in 1780.
Six years later, a ship
named in his honor, Captain Cook, deposited another Scot in the region,
surgeon John Mackay. Mackay had volunteered to spend a year living with
the Nootka natives. Supplied with paper, pens, and ink, plus a Native
wife, Mackay gradually learned the language and customs of his hosts.
Although Mackay’s records eventually proved disappointing, his venture
still ranks as the first attempt at serious New World ethnography. A
contemporary Scottish merchant from St. Louis showed a similar
scientific orientation. When he helped outfit Welshman John Evans for an
exploratory trip up the Missouri River, he urged Evans to keep an eye
out for "an animal which has only one horn on its forehead."
Three further stories
illustrate the theme of Scots exploration of the Trans-Mississippi West
in more detail.
Alexander MacKenzie
Mackenzie was born c.
1767 in Stornoway, Western Isles. His Voyages from Montreal, on the
River St. Laurence, through the Continent of North America, to the
Frozen and Pacific Oceans, published in December 1801, became one of
the most influential books of its day. Based on two lengthy overland
trips that Mackenzie took in 1789 and 1793, the book related the saga of
the fur trade as well as his own adventures. These two overland journeys
proved landmarks in the exploration of the North American continent. On
the first, a journey of 102 days, Mackenzie traversed the region from
Fort Chippewayen at the head of Lake Athabasca to the Arctic Sea down a
mighty river that currently bears his name. On the second he became the
first white man to cross the Rocky Mountains and reach the Pacific
Ocean.
Mackenzie’s ultimate
goal in each case had been to solve the three-hundred-year question that
had animated Captain Cook: was there a Northwest Passage? Publication of
his Voyages proved conclusively that there was no practical sea
route across the continent. The only way lay by overland travel, and
this involved crossing 50 large lakes, 200 rapids, and 130 carrying
places, which ranged from 25 paces to over 13 miles.
Mackenzie’s
Voyages also revealed the scientific bent of the Scots
Enlightenment. Armed with the latest instruments, he carefully recorded
latitude and longitude readings at every step, often while his crew
anxiously looked over their shoulders in fear of possible Native attack.
On occasion Mackenzie would borrow vermilion, mix it with
melted grease, and write his name and the date on nearby rocks. On a
rock in Dean Channel near Vancouver on the Pacific Coast, he wrote his
most famous grease-and-vermilion inscription: "Alexander Mackenzie,
from Canada, by land, the twenty-second of July, one thousand seven
hundred and ninety-three." This rock has been positively
identified, and a permanent plaque now marks the spot.
A shrewd observer,
Mackenzie made a number of trenchant comments about the terrain and
Native peoples of North America. He noted that the climate on the
Pacific Coast was far more similar to European climates of the same
latitude than was the climate of the interior, although he believed the
weather of the interior was improving. He also discovered that the
interior tribes, who had had much less contact with white traders, were
much easier to bargain with than the coastal bands, who had dealt with
traders for generations. Not unnaturally, some tribes viewed his queries
about the nature of the land with considerable suspicion. One coastal
group, the Bella Coolas, whose leader had once been shot at by whites,
treated Mackenzie with great contempt. So eager were they to have him
leave, he noted, they provided him with poles and food to speed him
along. Mackenzie devoted much space to American Indian matters and the
attractiveness of their way of living. So enticing was their life, he
observed, that it took less time for Europeans to adopt their ways than
for the Natives "to rise to civilization."
Mackenzie dedicated his
book to George III, and in February 1802 received a knighthood. Although
the rest of his career proved somewhat anticlimactic, the reputation of
his Voyages has never faded. It probably influenced Lord Selkirk
to try his Highland resettlement scheme in Red River, Manitoba, and it
certainly alerted Thomas Jefferson to the potential of British rivalry
for the rich lands of the Pacific Northwest. Spurred on by reading
Mackenzie’s Voyages, Jefferson outfitted the famed expedition
of Lewis and Clark in 1803. Thus, Mackenzie’s account of his trips
across the continent proved one of the most pivotal books in the entire
history of the North American West.
The Travelling Botanists
Scottish culture has long
admired those men and women who could master the intricacies of the
natural world. The gentleman or lady farmer remains a highly respected
person today. As historian Susan Delano McKelvey has shown in her study
of nineteenth-century botanist-explorers, Scots naturalists led the way
in the botanizing of the North American West.
Archibald Menzies was the
first Scots botanist to explore the Pacific Coast. Born in Weem, Menzies
studied flora at his ancestral home, Castle Menzies, but eventually
trained as a surgeon at the University of Edinburgh. Appointed assistant
surgeon in the British Navy, Menzies sailed to the Pacific Northwest
with Captain George Vancouver in 1792, 1793, and 1794. Whilst there he
catalogued over one hundred varieties of flowering plants. Menzies’
extensive journal (1792—94; first published, in part, in 1923) is very
revealing. It shows Menzies’ awareness that he had stumbled onto a
genuinely new natural world. About sixteen species are dedicated to him,
and he introduced Britons to a wide variety of trees and plants,
including the California poppy, the tree lupin, and the Sitka spruce.
Menzies’ forays
remained confined to the Pacific Coast. Thus, John Bradbury has been
acknowledged as the first trained botanist to explore the interior of
the great West systematically. Historians dispute whether Bradbury was
born in England or Scotland, but they agree that his 1809 botanizing
journey west from St. Louis was the first of its kind. Working under the
auspices of the Botanical Society of Liverpool, Bradbury catalogued
almost one hundred of "the more rare or valuable plants discovered
in the neighborhood of St. Louis and on the Missouri." The 1817
publication of his Travels in the Interior of America was eagerly read
on both sides of the Atlantic, as it provided the first description of
the great valley of the Mississippi River.
Menzies and
Bradbury had a number of successors. Thomas Drummond of
Perthshire botanized through Texas from 1833 to 1835 before dying in
Havana while on his way home. William Frazer Tolmie from Inverness,
officially employed as an HBC physician and surgeon, was the first to
collect plants from the lower slopes of Mount Rainier in 1833.
Historians have finally identified the "friend of Mr. Tolmie,"
who supplied him with scores of additional regional specimens, as HBC
fur trader John MacLeod. Tolmie’s colleague, Meredith Gardiner, also
did sporadic botanizing in the region before ill health drove him to
Hawaii.
The Americans lagged
somewhat in this department. Jefferson instructed Lewis and Clark to
gather plants on their way west in 1804—1806, but Washington did not
formally explore the natural world of the Pacific Northwest until the
famed Wilkes Expedition of 1841. The chief botanist for this venture was
William Dunlop Brackenndge of Ayrshire, now acknowledged as the first
person to assess the natural resources of Washington Territory
systematically.
The most famous of all
the Scots explorer-botanists was David Douglas. Born at Scone in
Perthshire in 1798, Douglas was early apprenticed to William Beattie,
head gardener at Scone Palace, who was in charge of the Earl of
Mansfield’s estate. Ever curious, Douglas enrolled in classes in
science and mathematics; by 1817 he had risen to the position of
undergardener to Sir Robert Preston at Valleyfield. While there, he read
through Sir Robert’s extensive library of botanical works. Shortly
afterwards, he moved to Glasgow’s famed Botanical Garden, where
Professor William J. Hooker noticed him and took him along on a
botanical trip to the Highlands to gather strange and exotic plants.
In 1824 the HBC and the
Royal Horticultural Society sent Douglas, then twenty-five, to the
United States on a similar mission. The next year he took a longer
voyage around Cape Horn, landing at Fort Vancouver in April 1825. During
this lengthy journey he discovered and catalogued a vast range of new
animals, including the California vulture and the California sheep. He
found several species of pines, but his name will always be associated
with the majestic conifer, the Douglas fir, whose Latin name, Pseudetsiga
menziessi, also commemorates the botanical efforts of Archibald
Menzies.
Douglas delighted in the
exploration of the American West. "Not a day passed but brought
something new or interesting either in botany or zoology," he noted
in his diary on March 20, 1827. Virtually all his writings reveal his
sense of wonder regarding the world of nature, in which he saw evidence
of "an infinite intelligence and power in the Almighty hand."
This combination of scientific accuracy and romantic theism reflected
two of the central themes of the Scottish Enlightenment.
Both the Natives and the
trappers of the Columbia River basin looked with amusement on the shy,
intense explorer tracking "the vegetable treasures" of the
region. The Natives termed him "King George’s Chief" and
marveled at how he could light his pipe with the sun byway of a lens.
They also nicknamed him Olla-Diska, Chinook jargon for fire. As
his journal shows, Douglas interacted well with the Chinook. Indeed, he
often relied on Natives or trappers to bring him specimens. Later, he
also enjoyed the friendship of the Franciscan friars of California. By
no means a modern ecologist (he amused himself by shooting seals and
killing birds), Douglas nevertheless collected avidly wherever he went.
Over the years, Douglas
made several trips to the Pacific Coast. He voyaged to America in 1823
and again in 1824—25. In 1827 Douglas crossed the Rocky Mountains
eastward on his way to Hudson’s Bay, and from there he returned to
England. Brewster’s Edinburgh Journal published extracts from
his letters, and his journals were later serialized in W. J. Hooker’s Companion
to the Botanical Magazine. Although he received several offers to
publish his travels, he never finished the manuscript. His Journal
Kept by David Douglas During His Travels in North America, 1823—1827 did not appear in print until
1914. In the fall of 1829 he sailed again for the West and spent 1829—32
in California; during the next two years he lived largely on the Fraser
River in Canada. From 1829 forward, he was lionized in Great Britain,
consulted on matters of botany as well as foreign policy. (He stoutly
insisted that the Columbia River was the most logical boundary between
the United States and Canada.)
Douglas’s years in the
public limelight did not prove happy ones. Uncomfortable with all the
attention, he became sour and difficult to work with. Even his friends
tired of his extreme irritability. His mentor, W. J. Hooker, noted that
they "could not wish, as he himself did, that he were again
occupied in the honorable task of exploring North West America."
In the summer of 1834
Douglas sailed to Honolulu, where he mysteriously disappeared. Later,
his body was found in a cattle trap. The cause of his death has remained
an item of speculation. Notoriously shortsighted, he had a habit of
wandering into difficult situations. (While in Oregon country, trappers
once had to rescue him from a ravine into which he had fallen and had
lain injured for several hours.) Others, however, have suggested either
murder or suicide.
Still, his fame rests
less with his words than with the approximately seven thousand species
he sent back to Britain, largely to the Kew Gardens and the Linneaus
Society, which made up approximately 13 percent of the then-known
species of plants in the world. He single handedly introduced
twenty-four plants to Britain. David Douglas was also the first
travelling botanist to become a national hero, and even those who have
forgotten his actual deeds recall his name through the Douglas fir.
Alexander Forbes
Although Mackenzie and
Douglas achieved the greatest reputations, other Scots explorer-writers
earned lesser fame as well. One was merchant and adventurer Alexander
Forbes. In California: A History of Upper and Lower California (1839),
Forbes penned what is probably the first full account in English of the
Pacific Coast. A friend of the Franciscan padres, who had established
missions in the area, Forbes drew upon their knowledge and experience
for his study. He especially relied upon Fr. Francisco Palou’s A
Life of the Chief Missionary Father Junipero Serra, published in
Mexico in 1787; an unpublished manuscript of a 1715 journey from Sonora
to Upper California; and the 1776 journal of the travels of Padres
Dominguez and Escalante across the Southwest. Staunch Protestant though
he was, Forbes found much to praise in the Franciscan priests.
Although he admired the
Franciscans as individuals—especially Father Antonio Peyri, the head
of Mission San Luis Rey for thirty-four years—Forbes had little good
to say about the Spanish mission system in general. He compared the
California mission system to the enslavement of the Blacks in the West
Indies and observed that although the Spanish termed themselves
"rational creatures" (gente de razon) , they called the
Natives "beasts" (bestias).
His descriptions of
Spanish agricultural innovations were extensive. He praised California
cattle, potatoes, flax, grapes, and olives, but he termed their farming
methods "most rude and backward." Still, even Forbes’s
cautious praise of Spanish enterprise marked him out as unique, since
the Black Legend fueled most British commentaries on early California.
For example, English traveler George Ruxton could not find a single
redeeming Mexican trait when he visited California in 1847.
Though Forbes dismissed
the mission system and Spanish agriculture on the whole, he was
fascinated by the California landscape. Since he viewed California as a
unique region having nothing in common with Mexico save Spanish culture,
he predicted that it would eventually become a major power in its own
right. Because Mexico owed Britain monies due on a recent loan, Forbes
suggested the Mexican government might cede California to Britain as
full payment. The British Isles teemed with a surplus population of
"human beings with superior intellects," he noted. If they
could only be settled in California, they would turn the region into a
breadbasket. If California were placed under good management and with a
British population, the region would most certainly realize all that had
been predicted for it.
The idea that Britain
might colonize California received serious consideration in London. But
the vast lands of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand provided sufficient
alternative outlets for surplus population, so no serious attempts were
launched. By the time of the 1849 Gold Rush, all such ideas had been
abandoned.
But others read Forbes’s
writings, too. By the late 1830s, native Californians worried aloud
about the impending invasion by the Americans. Even though the Russians
were firmly established in Fort Ross at Bodega Bay, they were not half
as feared as the dreaded "Yankees." If Santa Anna had won in
Texas in 1836 (where, incidentally, five Scots, including a piper, died
at the Alamo), rumor had it that the Americans would have overrun
California within a year. Forbes’s predictions that California would
come under civic rather than ecclesiastical control and that an
English-speaking population utilizing western management techniques
would turn it into a cornucopia were eventually realized, but by a far
different group of people than he had envisioned.
Forbes was not the only
Scot who tried to make his fortune in pre—Gold Rush California. At
least fifty identifiable Scots plied their trade in this region well
before the Americans arrived. Their number included Mary Anderson, wife
of a Monterey shipbuilder, who is usually cited as the first English
speaking woman on the West Coast and the mother of the first child of
foreign parents, and Alfred Robinson, the first traveler to
sketch the San Luis Rey Mission in 1829. Other Scots included Hugo Reid
of Cardross, who had studied at Cambridge. His twenty-two essays,
published as Letters on the Los Angeles County Indians (the tribe
of his wife), became a valuable source for anthropologists and
historians. William Money’s The Reform of the New Testament Church,
set in parallel columns of Spanish and English type, has been hailed
as the first book published in Los Angeles. Money has also earned the
dubious distinction of being the "first outstanding eccentric of
Los Angeles," thus inaugurating a lengthy tradition.
The books penned by these Scottish
explorers of the American West not only reflected the influence of the
Enlightenment, they also achieved the status of classics in western
writing. The Journal of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage to the Pacific
Ocean (1781), Menzies’ Journals (1792—94), Mackenzie’s Voyages
(1801), Bradbury’s Travels (1877), Douglas’s Journal (1828—29),
Forbes’s California (1839), and Reid’s Letters (1852)
have become vital firsthand accounts for understanding this period. One
might also include Canadian Alexander Ross’s studies: Manitoba,
Adventures of the First Settlers on the Oregon or Columbia River (1849),
his two-volume The Fur Hunters of the Far West (1852) and The
Red River Settlement (1853). In fact, no other books of the era
began to approach these Scottish accounts, either for accuracy or for
historical significance. The legacy of the Scottish Enlightenment
traveled well beyond the north of Britain. It had a major impact on the
American West as well.
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