Adventurers And Exiles_The Great Scottish Exodus

by Marjory Harper

  Remittance men and investors

  Remittances did not flow in only one direction. Indeed, the late Victorian era was the heyday of the ‘remittance man’, a figure who fuelled the pens of emigration agents, journalists and satirists for more than a quarter of a century. Coined initially in Australia but employed most extensively in western North America, it was a disparaging term that conjured up images of eccentricity, ineptitude and idle dissipation, going well beyond its literal meaning of an emigrant who received regular allowances from family or friends at home. Remittance men were frequently depicted as supernumerary younger sons, victims of primogeniture or the black sheep of aristocratic families who were exiled because they had failed in academic, business or military life, or had been tainted by moral scandal. As traditional career outlets at home became either less popular, overcrowded or too competitive, they might well be dispatched across the Atlantic to seek their fortunes or to pursue their profligate and leisured lifestyles at a safe distance.

  The notoriety of the remittance men was not entirely their own fault. Some were predisposed to failure as a result of misleading advice from the pens of promoters eager to exploit untapped potential in the emigration market by painting western North America as a sportsman’s paradise. Some were victims of their own erroneous perceptions of Western society, and their place in it, for the youth of late Victorian Britain was reared on a diet of romantic adventure stories about the North American frontier, beckoning those who could afford it to a lifestyle seemingly more exciting and unrestricted than they could expect to find at home. But some had only themselves to blame for the high-handed attitudes, misplaced priorities and inflated expectations which they imported along with their hunting rifles, fishing rods and tennis racquets, and which simultaneously amused and infuriated those with whom they came into contact.

  Only a handful of remittance men were Scots, and some of them settled, rather than sojourned, overseas. But the experiences of men like William Drummond Stewart and the Marjoribanks brothers allow us to test the validity of the stereotype and assess the impact of aristocratic sojourning on the American West. William Drummond Stewart had served at Waterloo and toured the Middle and Far East before he set off for the United States in 1832. As a second son, he did not expect to inherit his father’s 32,000-acre estate, but was able to use remittances, and his contacts with Scottish fur traders, to join the annual rendezvous of Rocky Mountain fur trappers and their suppliers in Wyoming. During his seven-year American sojourn, he returned regularly to the rendezvous, where the debauched atmosphere probably suited his own promiscuous lifestyle. More importantly, towards the end of that time he also commissioned Alfred Jacob Miller, a Baltimore artist who had recently moved to New Orleans, to accompany him on an expedition with a view to painting the West ‘before civilisation closes in’. 52 From over 280 drawings, Miller produced a pictorial history of the West that rapidly won him critical and public acclaim and an exhibition in a New York gallery. Stewart, meanwhile, had returned to Perthshire to claim his estate after the death of his elder brother, although he returned to the United States in 1842 for a final two-year Western expedition, and continued to remind himself of the wilderness he loved by decorating the walls of Murthly Castle with many of Miller’s large oil paintings. He also initiated an exchange of plants, birds and animals with his fur-trader friends, sending out hogs and cattle in return for grizzly bears, antelope and buffalo, and lining the entrance drive to his home with giant yew trees, western hemlock, Douglas firs and sequoia. Most of the livestock that he imported did not survive, but the buffalo, which he shared with his neighbour Lord Breadalbane, thrived and in 1840 attracted the attention of Queen Victoria, who remarked on the ‘strange humpbacked creatures from America’. 53 Stewart died in 1871, after an unsuccessful legal battle to bequeath the Murthly estate to his adopted son from Texas, Frank Nicols, rather than his own brother Archibald. But although ‘Frank the Yank’ did not inherit the land, he stripped the castle of its valuables, including many of Miller’s paintings, and returned to Houston, where much of his treasure was destroyed by floods in the early 1900s.

  Stewart and his countryman Charles Augustus Murray were remittance men in the era before such aristocratic adventures became the subject of public comment. Indeed, it is possible that their writings helped to popularize the romantic images that attracted subsequent generations of wealthy young men to the American West, for both wrote inferior novels based on their experiences, while Murray also published a more straightforward travel account. The second son of the Fifth Earl of Dunmore, he went to St Louis in 1835 after failing twice in his bid to win a parliamentary seat. During his brief sojourn he spent a month in Kansas with a band of about 150 Pawnee Indians, an experience which disabused him of a romantic view of America’s native people derived largely from James Fenimore Cooper. Before returning home — to London rather than Scotland — he also invested in a 20,000-acre estate in Wisconsin, an example that was to be followed by many later remittance men or their parents.

  It was because of family investment in American land that Coutts and Archie Marjoribanks arrived in the United States in the 1880s, each armed with an allowance of £400 per year. The two youngest sons of a newly ennobled Scottish family, they were sent out to manage their father’s ranching interests in North Dakota and Texas respectively. Caught up in the ranching mania that swept the West in the 1880s, their father, the First Earl of Tweedmouth and a long-serving Liberal MP, was one of a number of British investors who became involved, individually and corporately, in the promotion of the American beef cattle industry. After buying a small ranch near Towner in North Dakota for £6,000 in 1882, he put the property in sole charge of his son Coutts, and went on to make a much biggest investment the following year, when he bought 150,400 acres in the Texas Panhandle for $553,000 and constituted the Rocking Chair Ranch Company Limited. Archie, his youngest son, became co-manager along with John Drew, an experienced cattleman who already had ranching interests in the area and who had persuaded the earl to finance the venture. In 1887 Archie’s eldest brother, Edward Marjoribanks, became joint owner of the Rocking Chair Ranch along with his brother-in-law, the Seventh Earl of Aberdeen, the same year in which Lord Aberdeen’s wife, Ishbel, paid a brief visit to both her cowboy brothers while on a world tour with her husband.

  Ishbel Marjoribanks Gordon had been a prolific diarist since childhood, and much of the evidence about her brothers’ lifestyle comes from her pen, supplemented by her husband’s observations, and Archie’s voluminous progress reports and correspondence. It was to Texas that the Aberdeens first directed their steps on arriving at San Francisco in June 1887. On reaching the end of the Southern Kansas Railway — still under construction — they were met by Archie and taken on a three-day journey by buckboard over the remaining 100 miles to the ranch. Despite the heat and dust, Archie was not neglectful of etiquette. ‘Of course shirt-sleeves were the style for such conditions’, his brother-in-law recalled. ‘But he was always very neat and natty in his arrangements, and never adopted a casual “out-west” mode, and I noticed that when we were approaching Fort Elliott, where we were to stay with some friends of his, he carefully put on his coat.’ 54

  On arriving at the ranch, Ishbel declared herself ‘charmed with the place from our first glimpse of it … It was a lovely evening when we arrived and there was a pervading feeling of peacefulness and freedom.’ 55 She praised her brother’s housekeeping, commenting on his practice — common among remittance men — of adorning the interior walls with illustrations and photographs from the London newspaper The Graphic. Although the ranch house had four rooms and four outhouses, there was only one bedroom, which Archie and Drew vacated in honour of their visitors. It was a very brief visit, especially for Lord Aberdeen, who left with Drew the next day to keep an appointment in Kansas City. After a day’s sketching, Ishbel followed on with Archie, and before leaving Kansas City she introduced him to the secretary of the YMCA, in a vain attempt to interes
t her brother in religion.

  The Aberdeens then took the train 1,500 miles north to St Paul, Minnesota, where they were met by Coutts Marjoribanks. Not having seen her second-youngest brother for five years, Ishbel felt ‘quite a pang to find how much of an American and of a ranchman he has become’, 56 to the extent that he had begun to take out application papers for American citizenship. While Lord Aberdeen remained in St Paul, Ishbel accompanied Coutts on a four-day visit to her brother’s ranch, travelling in a private car loaned to them (at Coutts’s request) by the president of the St Paul and Manitoba Railway Company. The HorseShoe Ranch, five miles from Towner, boasted a two-bedroomed log house, an expert foreman, and 500 head of cattle, including a number of pedigree Aberdeen Angus bulls. There was a livestock catastrophe the day after Ishbel arrived, when a new pure-bred bull worth $800 died of heart disease, but despite this setback, the oppressive heat, and the voracious mosquitoes, Ishbel was just as optimistic about Coutts’s prospects as Archie ’s, and greatly welcomed the fact that his nearest neighbour was another well-bred remittance man, E. H. Thursby, the son of a Scottish baronet.

  It was not long before Ishbel was forced to revise her positive assessment of the capabilities and prospects of both her brothers, as the ranches began to lose alarming amounts of money, exposing their managers to the wrath of the irascible Lord Tweedmouth. One of Ishbel’s motives in making her first visit to Canada in 1890 was therefore to purchase a ranch or farm in the West which could be managed by Coutts, who would move from ‘the dreary place in Dakota … where bad luck had dogged his steps and that of his pure-bred Aberdeen Angus cattle which my mother had sent out to him’. 57 It was with this in mind that the Aberdeens purchased a 480-acre property in the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia, a province that was explicitly promoted as a haven for British gentlemen at the end of the nineteenth century. The new property was named Guisachan, after the Marjoribanks family’s sporting estate in Inverness-shire, and by the end of the year Coutts had been installed as manager. His responsibility, initially at Guisachan, then from 1891 at Coldstream Ranch, a much bigger second purchase made by the Aberdeens at the northern end of the Okanagan Valley, was to promote commercial fruit farming as well as to continue cattle ranching, in the hope of revitalizing the economy of that part of the dry belt of British Columbia.

  Coutts’s record in Canada suggests that his sister may have been too charitable in attributing his earlier failure in Dakota to ‘bad luck’ and the malevolent influence of American society. Residence under the British flag did not improve his fortunes, and the severe losses suffered by Lord Aberdeen’s Okanagan Valley ventures were due in part to mismanagement and financial profligacy on the part of Coutts. His priority on moving to Guisachan was to pull down the existing house and build a bigger one, at the same time as he sold off the ranch’s cattle at rock-bottom prices. Remembered in the area as ‘quite a gay blade ’, who liked to be addressed as ‘The Major’, 58 he was more interested in breaking horses and frequenting the saloon than in balancing the books or studying the techniques of fruit cultivation, while his incautious generosity led him to employ too many workmen at excessive wages. After his father’s death he returned to Britain, but came back to the Okanagan with his English wife in 1910, purchasing an orchard property of his own. He continued to be dogged by ill-fortune, for some years later the ranch house was destroyed by fire, and although Coutts, having sojourned in various locations, remained in Canada until his death in 1924, he never achieved the wealth and status for which his sister had striven on his behalf.

  Coutts’s problems were matched by those of his brother Archie. The ‘peacefulness and freedom’ which Ishbel had enjoyed during her fleeting visit in 1887 were probably illusory even then, for others were mockingly critical of Archie’s management style and general competence from the very moment of his arrival in the Panhandle. He apparently introduced himself by telling his cowboys ‘My name is Sir Archibald Marjoribanks’, a name rapidly and permanently converted into ‘Old Marshie ’ by his workforce. 59 An article in the Fort Worth StarTelegram a generation after Archie ’s death took the caricature of the newly arrived eccentric remittance man even further:

  Well, you bally old tin of fruit [he is reputed to have said to co-manager Drew], what’s this deuced Godforsaken wilderness of flatness you’ve brought me to? Tweedmouth and Aberdeen will have to come through with the fiz if they expect me to stay here. Cheerio, who are you, old bean? Eh?

  Archie carefully polished a correct monocle, adjusted it crookedly to his bloodshot eye and gazed upon a tall cowboy who had come out of the house. 60

  Is that cutting caricature a fair representation of Archie Marjoribanks, the aristocratic adventurer? The reference to his bloodshot eye at least is probably accurate, for Archie, like Coutts, was reputed to have liked his liquor, and to have spent much time in Mobeetie, forty-five miles away from the ranch, drinking, playing cards and carousing in any of its thirteen saloons. He was also remembered for having used an English saddle, keeping company with his hounds rather than his cowboys, and keeping the ranch books.

  But it was his bookkeeping that demonstrated a puzzling paradox in his character. On the one hand he was meticulous in submitting progress reports to his brother in London, and impatient with what he felt were the haphazard business practices of suppliers, failing to accept that merchants on the frontier often had no control over the quality of the goods they received and distributed. In 1892 his range boss, Sam Balch, was reprimanded for acting on his own initiative in placing an order, as severely as the merchant himself was censured for supplying allegedly unusable products. These included molasses that were ‘unfit to eat’, bacon that was ‘execrable ’ and flour that was ‘musty and black’. 61 Yet while criticizing others for careless business practice, Archie himself was guilty of much more serious neglect. His failure to have the Rocking Chair brand and the ranch Articles of Incorporation recorded meant that, in law, the business was operating illegally, and therefore could not prosecute in the event of any cattle theft. This was to prove Archie ’s undoing, for it was theft, much of it perpetrated right under his nose by his co-manager Drew, that brought the ranch into serious financial difficulties. The fraud came to light only in 1893, when the Rocking Chair’s London management, alarmed at huge cattle losses over the previous three years, called in the state rangers to investigate why 12,000 head of stock carried on the books translated into only 2,500 on the ground. Although Drew’s guilt was quickly uncovered, the unwitting Archie had cosigned every annual report and was therefore equally culpable in the eyes of the law.

  In disgust at this fraud and incompetence, the London management stopped payments on all cheques signed by the two co-managers, dispensed with their services and in 1896 sold the ranch at a substantial loss, which forced the Second Baron Tweedmouth to sell his London home, the Marjoribanks family’s sporting estate in the Scottish Highlands and his late father’s art treasures. As for Archie, his lifestyle had by that time caught up with him and he was in declining health. His appointment in 1895 as an aide-de-camp to his brother-in-law during Lord Aberdeen’s term as Governor-General of Canada was little more than a nominal position, and when he died in 1900, three years after marrying a Tennessee heiress and setting up home near Bath, England, it was rumoured that his death was brought about by his own hand.

  Lady Aberdeen always blamed her brothers’ problems on arbitrary bad luck and the eagerness with which unfriendly interests defrauded gullible but well-intentioned young men. The evidence suggests, however, that both Archie and Coutts played a more active part in their own downfall than their sister was willing to admit, and were badly out of touch with the realities of Western life, laying themselves wide open to ridicule and failure. Less culpable, but also unfortunate in his experience of the West, was her own husband, the Earl of Aberdeen. Although not a remittance man, he lived in Canada for five years, when from 1893 to 1898 he served as Governor-General. During that time the family escaped as often as
possible from the pressures of Ottawa to the peace and quiet of their British Columbian bolthole. But they did not regard the Okanagan Valley ranches simply as upmarket holiday homes or even as a tool in the attempted reformation of Coutts Marjoribanks. George Grant Mackay, the Vancouver-based Scottish real estate agent who first directed the Aberdeens’ attention to the Okanagan in 1890, persuaded the earl of the benefit he would bestow on the whole area if he would subdivide large parts of the property into orchard units of between twenty and 100 acres for sale to small investors.

  15. Apple tasting, 1890s, at Coldstream Ranch, Vernon, British Columbia.

  Significant sums of money were duly invested, but, as Lady Aberdeen later recalled ruefully, ‘the golden age predicted always receded’62 and in 1903, after more than a decade of deficits, Guisachan was sold and Coldstream incorporated as a limited company. The earl’s Scottish estates could not supply capital for the British Columbian venture indefinitely. In 1921 the company was dissolved, Lord Woolavington of Petworth became sole owner of the estate and Lord Aberdeen’s involvement with British Columbia came to an end. His financial embarrassment had been due not to laziness or dereliction of duty, but to naïvety, marketing problems and the myriad hazards of introducing a new type of agriculture to an unfamiliar environment, as well as the mismanagement of employees like his brother-in-law. Ironically, however, the emergence of the Okanagan Valley as one of Canada’s major fruit-growing regions in the twentieth century was in no small way due to the pioneering efforts of the former Governor-General in redirecting the regional economy from cattle ranching to fruit farming, as well as actively promoting immigration and employment.