Douglas, Thomas, 5th Earl of Selkirk

Douglas, Thomas, 5th Earl of Selkirk (1771-1820), Scottish nobleman who established the first European settlement in the Canadian interior. Douglas was born at the family seat, St Mary’s Isle, Kirkcudbright, Scotland, the seventh and youngest son of Dunbar Hamilton Douglas, the 4th Earl. In 1778 he narrowly escaped a kidnapping attempt at the hands of the US naval officer John Paul Jones, who had originally intended to ransom him for American prisoners; the incident did much to shape his later views and actions in the politics of North America. Educated at Edinburgh University, he succeeded to the earldom of Selkirk in 1799, his six elder brothers having all died before that date, and soon became interested in the problems resulting from the highland clearances and the possibility of colonial emigration as a solution.

This interest became a quest and largely dominated his activities after 1802 when he secured crown lands on the Island of St John (now Prince Edward Island) and established 800 selected Scottish emigrants there. During 1810-1818 he played a leading role as a director of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) in the long, protracted conflict with its rival in the fur trade, the North West Company (NWC). In 1811 Douglas was given a grant of land by the HBC in what today comprises large portions of Manitoba and Minnesota, in order to establish a settlement at the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine rivers—the beginnings of what is now the city of Winnipeg. The first group of settlers arrived the following year. The settlement served Douglas’s twin aims of providing homesteads for displaced Scottish crofters and bolstering the British presence in central North America to counterbalance growing US influence. Simultaneously, it also helped the HBC to disrupt the activities of the NWC, led in that region by the explorer Simon Fraser, for whom the Red River was a major trade artery.

The confrontation was tenaciously pursued—with the pen in Britain, but with weapons in British North America, where it flared into an armed clash at the Seven Oaks Massacre (June 19, 1816), in which 20 settlers were killed by a band of NWC-backed Métis. Douglas had Fraser and four others arrested and sent for trial in Montreal, but their acquittal left the situation in stalemate. Douglas finally achieved a breakthrough in 1817 when he concluded a treaty with the native peoples of the area, the Assiniboine and the Plains Cree. This, despite his loss of the southern part of his land grant to the United States following an international agreement in 1818, allowed him to establish his settlement, which he called Kildonan, securely. Selkirk’s health deteriorated rapidly thereafter and he died on April 8, 1820, while in the south of France.