Adventurers And Exiles_The Great Scottish Exodus

by Marjory Harper

  14. Ibid., Samuel Chalmers [SC] to Mary Chalmers [MC], no. 62, 21 July 1856. 15. Ibid., SC to William Chalmers [WC], no. 63, 4 August 1856.

  16. Ibid., SC to his parents, no. 76, 7 February 1857.

  17. Ibid., SC to AWC, no. 65, 5 September 1856; AWC to SC, no. 78, 21 February 1857; JC to WC, no. 37, 29 August 1856.

  18. Ibid., SC to his parents, no. 69, 23 October 1856.

  19. Ibid., SC to JC, no. 43, 9 November 1855; SC to MC, no. 39, 20 May 1855.

  20. Ibid., SC to WC, no. 42, 4 October 1855.

  21. Ibid., SC to AWC, no. 61, 17 July 1856.

  22. Ibid., SC to his parents, no. 73, 22 December 1856.

  23. Ibid., SC to AWC, no. 42, 4 October 1855.

  24. Ibid., SC to JC, no. 43, 9 November 1855.

  25. Ibid., SC to AWC, no. 50, 17 December 1855.

  26. Ibid., Dr Walker to SC, no. 70, 12 November 1856.

  27. Ibid., SC to AWC, no. 88A, 18 October 1857.

  28. Ibid., John Milne to AWC, no. 19, 8 December 1855.

  29. Ibid., MS 2884/1/5/3, JC to WC, no. 23, 30 January 1856, and no. 23, 27 February 1858.

  30. Ibid., JC to Elizabeth Cardno, no. 117, 5 November 1858.

  31. Ibid., JC to AWC, no. 58, 13 November 1859.

  32. Ibid., JC to AWC, no. 20, 4 October 1860.

  33. Ibid., MS 2884/1/4/3, WC to SC, no. 119, 27 April 1858.

  34. Ibid., WC to AWC, no. 68, 11 September 1861.

  35. Ibid., AWC to WC, no. 79, 24 February 1862.

  36. Ibid., WC to Elizabeth Jamson, no. 91, 24 December 1862.

  37. AUA, MS 3090/1, fo. 33, David Cardno, Journals of whaling voyages, 1866—1919.

  38. OSA, vol. XIX (Orkney and Shetland), p. 246.

  39. Hudson Bay Company Archives, Provincial Archives of Manitoba [hereafter HBCA, PAM], A.34/2.

  40. Ibid., D.4/99, fos. 3—5, Official Reports (by Governor George Simpson, York Factory), to the Governor and Committee in London, 10 August 1832.

  41. Vilhjalmur Stefansson, Unsolved Mysteries of the Arctic (New York, 1939), p. 136. The record of the expeditions is contained in Thomas Simpson, Narrative of the Discoveries on the North Coast of America effected by the officers of the Hudson’s Bay Company during the years 1836—9 (London, 1843).

  42. HBCA, PAM, A.10/42 FOS 557-557D, Christina Anderson, Lerwick, to William Smith, Secretary of the Hudson’s Bay Company London, 22 December 1857.

  43. OSA, vol. XIX (Orkney and Shetland), pp. 166—7 (Orphir); ibid., p. 135 (Kirkwall and St Ola); ibid., pp. 93—4 (Firth and Stromness).

  44. Charlotte Erickson, Invisible Immigrants: The Adaptation of English and Scottish Immigrants in Nineteenth-century America (Ithaca and London, 1972), pp. 371—2, 375—6, 378.

  45. PP 1873, X (313), Select Committee on the Coal Industry, Q. 4637. See also Q. 4634; R. T. Berthoff, British Immigrants in Industrial America, 1790—1950 (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), pp. 51—2; Gordon M. Wilson, Alexander McDonald, Leader of the Miners (Aberdeen, 1982), pp. 111—13.

  46. Boston Post, 1 September 1885, quoted in Aberdeen Journal, 29 September 1885.

  47. William Barclay, ‘Barre ’s Scotch Population — a history of the immigrants who came here in the years 1880—1889’ (unpublished paper, 1936, Aldrich Public Library, Barre, Vt), pp. 1—2.

  48. Granite Cutters’ Journal, vol. I, no. 9 (January 1902), p. 2. The author of the article was an Aberdonian resident in the USA.

  49. NAC, MG29/C/39, reminiscences of James Gordon, 1889.

  50. 28 October 1907.

  51. Aberdeen Journal, 30 October 1907; Evening Express, 1 November 1907.

  52. Quoted in Lee Olson, Marmalade and Whiskey: British Remittance Men in the West (Golden, Colo., 1993), p. 18.

  53. Quoted in Ferenc M. Szasz, Scots in the North American West, 1790—1917 (Norman, Ok., 2000), p. 131.

  54. The Marquis and Marchioness of Aberdeen, More Cracks with ‘We Twa’ (London, 1929), p. 72.

  55. NRA(S), Survey no. 0055, Haddo House Muniments, Tarves, Aberdeenshire, item 10 in tin trunk, Private Journal of Lady Aberdeen, 27 June 1887.

  56. Ibid., 3 July 1887.

  57. The Marquis and Marchioness of Aberdeen, ‘We Twa’: Reminiscences of Lord and Lady Aberdeen (London, 1925), p. 293.

  58. David Mitchell and Dennis Duffy (eds), Bright Sunshine and a Brand New Country: Recollections of the Okanagan Valley, 1890—1914 (Victoria, BC, 1979), p. 12.

  59. Estelle Tinkler (ed.), Archibald John Writes the Rocking Chair Ranche Letters (Burnet, TX, 1976), p. 5.

  60. ‘As Manager of Rocking Chair Ranch Honorable Archie was a Good Dog Fancier’, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 15 July 1923, p. 8.

  61. Tinkler (ed.), Archibald John Writes the Rocking Chair Ranche Letters, p. 16, Archie to Byron Jones, merchant, Memphis, Texas, May 1892, Rocking Chair Ranche Letters Miscellaneous.

  62. Aberdeen, ‘We Twa’, pp. 90—91.

  63. South African Scot, vol. 1, no. 1 (15 November 1905), p. 24.

  Chapter 9: Issues of Identity

  1. Ellis Island Immigration Museum, Oral History Project, E1-440, Margaret Jack Kirk, interviewed 25 February 1994.

  2. Frederick Niven, The Flying Years (London, 1935), p. 19.

  3. Margaret Bennett, ‘Folkways and Religion of the Hebridean Scots in the Eastern Townships’, in Laurel Doucette (ed.), Cultural Retention and Demographic Change: Studies of the Hebridean Scots in the Eastern Townships of Quebec (Ottawa, 1980), p. 51.

  4. Napier Commission, Appendix A, pp. 166, 169, 172; Angus Young to Donald Young, 23 October 1851; emigrants’ statement quoted in Rev. John Milloy to A. C. Buchanan, 21 March 1864; John Macdonald to Sir James Matheson, 21 February 1866.

  5. John J. Mullowney, America Gives a Chance (Tampa, 1940), quoted in Margaret Bennett, Oatmeal and the Catechism: Scottish Gaelic Settlers in Quebec (Edinburgh and Montreal, 1998), pp. 145—6.

  6. Napier Commission, Appendix A, p. 135, Report of Angus MacCormic in ‘Reports on the Crops grown in North-West Canada, by Emigrants from the Long Island’, December 1883.

  7. NAC, MG 27, C-1352 1L 1B5, The Journal of Lady Aberdeen (unpublished), 7 October 1890.

  8. D. Campbell and R. A. Maclean, Beyond the Atlantic Roar. A Study of the Nova Scotia Scots (Toronto, 1974), pp. 113, 179.

  9. PP 1841 (182), VI, 1, First Report from the Select Committee on Emigration (Scotland) together with minutes of evidence and appendix, Q. 189.

  10. Ibid., Q. 2034, Hon. Christopher Alexander Hagerman, Justice of Queen’s Bench in Upper Canada.

  11. Cuairtear nan Gleann, vol. 2 (1840), p. 31, quoted in Sheila M. Kidd, ‘Caraid nan Gaidheal & “Friend of Emigration”: Gaelic Emigration Literature of the 1840s’, Scottish Historical Review, vol. LXXXI, no. 1, 211 (April 2002), pp. 52—69.

  12. Robert MacDougall, Ceann-Iuil an Fhir-Imrich do dh’America Mu-Thuath (The Emigrant’s Guide to North America) (Glasgow, Oban, Inverness and Dingwall, 1841), translated and edited by Elizabeth Thomson (Toronto, 1998), p. 64.

  13. Ibid., p. 22.

  14. Michael Kennedy, ‘“Lochaber No More”: A Critical Examination of Highland Emigration Mythology’, in Marjory Harper and Michael E. Vance (eds), Myth, Migration and the Making of Memory: Scotia and Nova Scotia, c. 1700—1990 (Halifax, NS, and Edinburgh, 1999), pp. 268—9. Kennedy’s translation from Margaret MacDonell, The Emigrant Experience: Songs of Highland Emigrants in North America (Toronto, 1982), p. 80.

  15. Kennedy, ‘“Lochaber No More”’, p. 269, Kennedy’s translation from MacDonell, The Emigrant Experience, pp. 88—90.

  16. Rusty Bitterman, ‘On Remembering and Forgetting: Highland Memories within the Maritime Diaspora’, in Harper and Vance (eds), Myth, Migration and the Making of Memory, pp. 253—65.

  17. Ibid., pp. 30—31; Kennedy, ‘“Lochaber No More”’, p. 271.

  18. ‘From the Gaelic’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, vol. XLVI (September 1829), p. 400.

  19. Kennedy, ‘“Lochaber No More”’, p. 274.

  20. Alexander
MacKenzie, The History of the Highland Clearances (Inverness, 1883), p. 13; Donald McLeod, Gloomy Memories in the Highlands of Scotland: versus Mrs Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Sunny Memories in (England) a Foreign Land: or a faithful picture of the extirpation of the Celtic Race from the Highlands of Scotland (Toronto, 1857), pp. 211—12,

  21. MacKenzie, The History of the Highland Clearances, pp. 259—60, quoting Dundas Warden, 2 October 1851.

  22. MacKenzie, The History of the Highland Clearances, pp. 391, 395.

  23. Ibid., p. 313.

  24. Ibid., p. 307.

  25. Ralph Connor, The Man from Glengarry: A Tale of Western Canada (London, 1901), p. 5, and Glengarry Days (London, 1902), p. 11.

  26. Hugh MacLennan, Each Man’s Son (Toronto, 1951), pp. vii—viii.

  27. Margaret Laurence, The Diviners (London, 1974), pp. 41—2.

  28. PP 1841 (182) VI, 1, First Report from the Select Committee on Emigration (Scotland) together with minutes of evidence and appendix, Q. 2036, Hon. Christopher Alexander Hagerman.

  29. SCA, George Hay to John Geddes, 11 November 1770, quoted in J. M. Bumsted, The People’s Clearance: Highland Emigration to British North America, 1770—1815 (Edinburgh, 1982), p. 69.

  30. Ibid., pp. 73, 110—16, 138—9.

  31. Rev. G. Patterson, History of the County of Pictou (Pictou, 1916), p. 199.

  32. Report of the Baptist Home Missionary Society for Scotland (1831), p. 6, quoted in D. E. Meek, ‘Evangelicalism and Emigration: Aspects of the Role of Dissenting Evangelicalism in Highland Emigration to Canada’, in Gordon W. MacLennan (ed.), Proceedings of the First North American Congress of Celtic Studies (Ottawa, 1988), pp. 28—9.

  33. Ibid., p.16; Glasgow Constitutional, 17 July 1852, quoted in Eric Richards, Alexia Howe, Ian Donnachie and Adrian Graves, That Land of Exiles: Scots in Australia (Edinburgh, 1988), p. 75.

  34. J. S. Marais, The Colonisation of New Zealand (London, 1968), pp. 304, 347.

  35. NRA(S), North-East Survey, no. 1345, John Fletcher to Charles Farquharson, 29 January 1863. See also pp. 85.9.

  36. Meek, ‘Evangelicalism and Emigration’, pp. 27—8, 29—30; D. E. Meek, ‘“The Fellowship of Kindred Minds”: Some Religious Aspects of Kinship and Emigration from the Scottish Highlands in the Nineteenth Century’, in Hands Across the Water. Emigration from Northern Scotland to North America (Proceedings of the Sixth Annual Conference of the Scottish Association of Family History Societies, Aberdeen, 1995), p. 28; Laurie Stanley, The Well Watered Garden: The Presbyterian Church in Cape Breton, 1798—1860 (Sydney, Cape Breton, 1983), pp. 134—6. MacFadyen also served as a minister in Montreal and among Tiree emigrants in Brock Township. The Tiverton congregation had been established after the Tiree Baptist Church lost two-thirds of its membership to emigration between 1846 and 1850.

  37. Public Archives of Nova Scotia, RG1, vol. 326, no. 171, ‘Miscellaneous papers relating to Cape Breton, 1780—1809’, quoted in Stanley, The Well Watered Garden, p. 44.

  38. NAS RH4/80/5. George Forbes to John Forbes, Pittelachie, Tarland, 21 June 1846.

  39. SCA, BL3/452/9, Rev. Roderick MacDonell, Culachie, near Quebec, to Bishop Geddes, Edinburgh, 1785. Thanks to Dr Christine Johnson for this and the following references from the Scottish Catholic Archives. See also A. I. Macinnes et al. (eds), Scotland and the Americas, c. 1650—c. 1939: A Documentary Source Book (forthcoming).

  40. SCA, BL3/45/10, Captain John MacDonald, London, to John Geddes, Coadjutor Bishop of Lowland Vicariate, Edinburgh, 8 January 1785.

  41. SCA, Preshome Letters, PL3/6/10, Rev. Angus MacEacharn, St Andrews, PEI, to Alexander Cameron, Coadjutor Bishop of the Lowland Vicariate, Edinburgh, 14 December 1807.

  42. SCA, BL5/59/7. Rev. Angus MacEacharn to Alexander Cameron, 3 December 1819; SCA, BL5/81/18, Rev. Angus MacEacharn to Alexander Cameron, 23 June 1820.

  43. SCA, DA9/44/1, Rev. George Corbett, parish priest, St Andrews, Ontario, to Bishop Angus MacDonald, Oban, 19 March 1884.

  44. SCA, DA9/44/5, Alexander, Archbishop of St Boniface, Manitoba, to Bishop Angus MacDonald, Oban, 18 May 1844.

  45. SCA, DA9/44/8, Rev. David Gillies, Villa Maria, Wassilla, North West Territories, to Bishop Angus MacDonald, Oban, 19 June 1886.

  46. Inverness-shire Archives, D122/129, Glasgow Colonial Society, Eighth Annual Report, 1835, extract of letter from Rev. P. McIntyre, 7 March 1834. 47. Stanley, The Well Watered Garden, p. 122.

  47. Stanley, The Well Watered Garden, p. 122.

  48. ‘The Scotch Church at Chascomus, South America’, The Church of Scotland Home & Foreign Missionary Record (1 November 1862), p. 210.

  49. Frederick Stewart Buchanan, ‘The Emigration of Scottish Mormons to Utah, 1849—1900’ (MSc thesis, University of Utah, 1961), p. 50, quoting from The Millennial Star, vol. XXIII, p. 156.

  50. Ibid., p. 18, quoting Alexander Wright’s Journal, 17 July 1842.

  51. Utah State Historical Society Archives, Salt Lake City, J. Mackintosh, Lochgilphead, to Daniel Mackintosh, Salt Lake City, 2 January 1851.

  52. Buchanan, ‘The Emigration of Scottish Mormons to Utah’, pp. 37, 79.

  53. Ibid., p. 133, quoting from ‘Utah Scottish Bagpipe Band, suggestions for a meeting to be held Sunday, February 19, 1939’.

  54. Norman Mackenzie to his brother, 1 February 1866; John Macleod to Sir James Matheson, 23 February 1866, both quoted in Napier Commission, Appendix A, pp. 174, 173.

  55. Bennett, Oatmeal and the Catechism, pp. 16—17.

  56. Sir Andrew MacPhail, The Master’s Wife (Toronto, 1977 edition), pp. xi, 101—2.

  57. MacLennan, Each Man’s Son, p. viii.

  58. MacDougall, The Emigrant’s Guide to North America, p. 19.

  59. Bernard Aspinwall, Portable Utopia: Glasgow and the United States, 1820—1920 (Aberdeen, 1984), pp. 43—85.

  60. MacPhail, The Master’s Wife, p. 119.

  61. Eric Richards et al., That Land of Exiles, pp. 101—11.

  62. Marais, The Colonisation of New Zealand, pp. 349—50.

  63. Tom Brooking, ‘“Tam McCanny and Kitty Clydeside”: The Scots in New Zealand’, in R. A. Cage (ed.), The Scots Abroad: Labour, Capital, Enterprise, 1750—1914 (London, 1985), p. 184. See T. M. Hocken, Contributions to the Early History of New Zealand (Settlement of Otago) (London, 1898), p. 132, for comments on emigrants’ indifference to education.

  64. Reports on the Schemes of the Church of Scotland, with the Legislative Acts passed by the General Assembly, Colonial Committee Report, 1920.

  65. The South African Scot, vol. 1, no.1 (15 November 1905), p. 2.

  66. Bitterman, ‘On Remembering and Forgetting’, p. 260.

  67. Richards et al., That Land of Exiles, p. 39.

  68. Wilmington Gazette, 4 December 1800.

  69. Quoted in Richards et al., That Land of Exiles, p. 114.

  70. Gerald Redmond, The Sporting Scots of Nineteenth Century Canada (East Brunswick, 1982), p. 20.

  71. Inverness Courier, 13 July 1842, quoted in Macinnes et al. (eds), Scotland and the Americas. Thanks to Dr Hugh Dan Maclennan for this and the following reference.

  72. Kingussie Record, 2 May 1903, quoted ibid.

  73. Celtic Monthly, vol. I, no. 11 (August 1893), p. 166.

  74. Falkland Island Magazine, August 1892, quoted in Macinnes et al. (eds) Scotland and the Americas. Thanks to Jane Cameron, Falkland Islands Archivist, for this reference.

  75. Wilfrid Campbell, The Scotsman in Canada (London, 1911), pp. 421—3.

  76. Angus MacKay (Oscar Dhu), By Trench and Trail in Song and Story (Seattle, 1918), p. 116, quoted in Doucette (ed.), Cultural Retention and Demographic Change, p. 148. See also Bennett, Oatmeal and the Catechism, p. 45.

  77. See above pp. 29.30.

  78. William Bell, Hints to Emigrants (Edinburgh, 1824), pp. 103—4.

  79. Inverness Advertiser, 16 March 1852.

  80. Henry G. Dalton, The History of British Guiana, 2 vols (London, 1855), vol. 1, pp. 306—7. Thanks to Dr Roderick McDonald and Dr Do
uglas Hamilton for this and the following two references.

  81. Lady Nugent’s Journal of her Residence in Jamaica from 1801 to 1805, edited by Philip Wright, (Kingston, 1966), p. 29.

  82. AUA, MS 602, The Journal of John Anderson, St Vincent Special Magistrate, 1836—9, p. 79.

  83. Frederick S. Cozzens, Acadia: or a month with the Blue Noses (New York, 1859), pp. 150, 199, quoted in Harper and Vance (eds), Myth, Migration and the Making of Memory, p. 29.

  84. Wayne Norton, Help Us To A Better Land: Crofter Colonies in the Prairie West (Regina, Sask., 1994), p. 47.

  85. Ibid., p. 36, from NAS AF51/198/514, T. J. Lawlor to Sir George Trevelyan, 21 January 1895.

  86. Dundas Warden, 2 October 1851, quoted in MacKenzie, The History of the Highland Clearances, p. 260.

  87. A. M. Burgess to Hon. E. Dewdney, 18 July 1889, quoted in Kent Stuart, ‘The Scottish Crofter Colony, Saltcoats’, Saskatchewan History, vol. XXIV, no. 2 (Spring 1971), p. 47.

  88. E. J. Cowan, ‘The Myth of Scotch Canada’ in Harper and Vance (eds), Myth, Migration and the Making of Memory, p. 62.

  89. Ibid., p. 65.

  90. Robert Louis Stevenson, From Scotland to Silverado (Cambridge, Mass., 1966), p. 211.

  91. Cowan, ‘The Myth of Scotch Canada’, p. 59.

  92. Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (London, 1875), edited by R. W. Chapman (Oxford, 1924), pp. 86, 119—20.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This book could not have been completed without assistance and encouragement from a number of sources. At an institutional level, I benefited greatly from an extended period of study leave awarded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board under its Research Leave Scheme (RLS-AN 2017/APN 13372). As I have travelled throughout and beyond Scotland in pursuit of research materials, I have received generous and enthusiastic help from an army of librarians, archivists and museum curators at the McCord Museum, Montreal, the National Archives of Canada, Ottawa, the University of Cape Town Library, the Cape Archives Depot and the National Libraries of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. A special tribute should be paid to the meticulous research of the late Claire Laburn of Cape Town, whose studies into Scottish settlement in Eastern Natal were cut short by her untimely death in 1991, but whose working papers are held in the Manuscripts and Archives Department of UCT Library. I drew heavily on Claire ’s notes, particularly when investigating the activities of John Walker.