In the growing rivalry over furs, made worse by a decline in the number of beaver due to frenzied trapping, it was not long before violence entered into the competition for the beaver pelts. Like the American frontier in later decades, the only law that was recognized by Hudson’s Bay Company and the Nor’Westers was the law of the gun.

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The flashpoint for all-out war between the goliaths of the fur trade came from an unlikely and tragic source: the desire of a man to help his fellows before he departed this life. Thomas Douglas, the fifth Earl of Selkirk, was a Scottish laird driven to do something for the poor Scottish peasants before tuberculosis, then a medical death sentence, ended his life. The Scots Highlanders, once the most stalwart farmers in the British Isles, had been driven from their farms by their own lords, for whom they had fought proudly in many a clan battle, to make room for sheep in the notorious Highland clearances of the late 18th century. Grief-stricken at the poverty in which these loyal people found themselves, Douglas was determined to resettle them in Canada. A colony on Prince Edward Island in 1803 proved a great success, with 800 Highlanders happily transplanted to the New World.

In his search for more available land, Douglas made contact with Alexander Mackenzie, although Douglas was unaware of Mackenzie’s true allegiance. When Douglas tried to buy a controlling interest in the Hudson’s Bay Company, Mackenzie went along with him in a 19th-century version of Wall Street insider trading. The unsuspecting Douglas bought the controlling interest in the Hudson’s Bay Company.

The meaning of the earl’s financial coup was that the Bay Company granted him a huge piece of territory that included much of western Canada, plus parts of the states of Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota. Although the company felt empowered to grant Douglas this huge tract of real estate because of its 1670 charter, it deliberately ignored the fact that Douglas’ New World empire was at the very heart of land claimed by the Nor’Westers, including their beaver-rich territory around Lake Athabasca. When land-starved Highland peasants began to arrive at the new preserve along the Red River in 1812, they did not realize their coming was the opening move in an increasingly bitter war. The French Canadians and their Meacutetis relations had considered this country their own land, and they deeply resented the Scots’ intrusion. Matters were only made worse when the French Canadians and Meacutetis, who usually labored for the NorWesters, began to consider the newcomers covert agents for their Hudson’s Bay rivals.

Miles Macdonnell, governor of the Selkirk Settlement, seemed intent on bringing the volatile situation to a violent climax. From the colony’s headquarters at Fort Douglas, he banned the sending of pemmican, an essential frontier food concocted from dried meat and fat pounded together, to the voyageurs of the North West Company who depended on it. Then he ordered all Nor’Wester stockades on settlement land to be evacuated within six months.

The Nor’Westers were not long in retaliating. At an emergency meeting at Fort William, the barons of the North West Company determined to erase the new colony. The man ultimately placed in charge of operations against the ill-starred farmers was Cuthbert Grant, one of the most sinister figures ever to appear in the Canadian West.Like a hired gun in the American West, Grant always seemed to turn up whenever the Nor’Westers appeared threatened by a rival. In January 1806, when Zebulon Pike marched into Minnesota, Grant was the bourgeois, or factor, who greeted him at the Nor’Westers’ post on Lower Red Cedar Lake. The meeting took place on January 3. On the night of January 4, Pike’s tent caught fire and he was saved only by being awakened by the cries of his yelling soldiers. Although Pike never blamed Grant directly for the blaze, he did confide in his diary on January 5: ‘Mr. Grant promised to overtake me yesterday, but has not yet arrived. I conceived it would be necessary to attend his motions with careful observation.’

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