John McLean (c. 1799–1890) was a Scotsman who emigrated to British North America, where he became a fur-trapper, trader, explorer, grocer, banker, newspaperman, clerk, and author. He travelled by foot and canoe from the Atlantic to the Pacific and back, becoming one of the chief traders of the Hudson's Bay Company. He is remembered as the first person of European descent to discover Churchill Falls on Canada's Churchill River and sometimes mistakenly credited as the first to cross the Labrador Peninsula. Long overlooked, his first-person accounts of early 19th-century fur trading in Canada are now valued by historians. Under the pen name Viator (Latin for "Traveller"), his letters to newspapers around Canada also helped shift public opinion away from yielding the western territories to the United States during the Alabama Claims dispute over damages for British involvement in the American Civil War.
Contents
Life
Early life
John McLean was born in Dervaig or beside the Loch Bà on the Isle of Mull in Britain in 1797, on 24 July 1798, in 1799, or on 14 December 1800.
With the North West Company
He joined the North West Company in the winter of 1820, reaching Montreal in January 1821. Before leaving for his three-year apprenticeship in May, he studied French for several months with two other trappers under the anglophile curate of St Michel d'Yamaska, Pierre Gibert. The same year, the NWC merged with its long-time rival the Hudson's Bay Company. McLean's apprenticeship transferred to the new company, but his memoirs show that he never abandoned his preference for the old one: "From 1674 to 1813 the Hudson's Bay Company slumbered at its posts along the shores of Hudson's Bay, never attempting to penetrate beyond the banks of the Saskatchewan, until the North-Westers led and cleared the way"... "the chief advantages the Hudson's Bay Company now possess, they owe to the adventurous North-West traders; by these traders the whole interior of the savage wilds was first explored; by them the water communications were first discovered and opened up to commercial enterprise; by them the first trading posts were established in the interior; by them the natives were first reconciled with the whites; and by them the trade was first reduced to the regular system which the Hudson's Bay Company still follows. When all this had been done by the North-West Company, and they had begun to reap the rewards of their toils, and hardships, and dangers, and expenditure,—then did the Honourable Hudson's Bay Company, led on by a British peer, step forward and claim, as British subjects, an equal right to share the trade."
With the Hudson's Bay Company
John McLean entered the service of the Hudson's Bay Company at a most interesting and critical time in its history, during the strife between the Hudson's Bay and North West Companies. He worked on the Ottawa River—the present-day border between Quebec and Ontario—until 1833. During his apprenticeship, he moved progressively further upcountry, from Lake of Two Mountains, to Chats Falls in April 1822, to Fort Coulonge in June 1823. He then directed a post at Lac de Sable on the Lièvre in the wilderness north of Ottawa and Montreal. He spent nine years fending off company rivals, cultivating relations with indigenous trappers, and improving the post's profitability only to be removed to a new territory once things had become easy. He lamented that he "had now served the Hudson's Bay Company faithfully and zealously for a period of twelve years, leading a life of hardship and toil, of which no idea can be formed except by those whose hard lot it may be to know it by experience... what was my reward? I had no sooner succeeded in freeing my district from opposition, than I was ordered to resign my situation to another who would enjoy the results of my labour." McLean's account of his journey across the continent is another of those invaluable accounts that enable us to piece together the history of the Canadian North-west in its earlier days.
Ordered to the Western Department on the Pacific, he travelled—mostly by canoe—from Montreal up the Ottawa, crossed Lake Nipissing to the French River and the sheltered northern bays of Lake Huron, passed Sault Ste Marie into Lake Superior and Fort William on Thunder Bay, stopped on the north shore of Lake Winnipeg at Norway House in Rupert's Land (now Manitoba) for further orders, and finally followed them—past Cumberland House in present-day Saskatchewan and Athabasca and Fort Dunvegan in present-day Alberta and down the Peace River—to New Caledonia (present-day British Columbia), where he expected "to fare like a dog". Reaching Fort St James on Stuart Lake on 28 October 1833, however, he had nothing but praise—"I do not know that I have seen anything to compare with this charming prospect in any other part of the country; its beauties struck me even at this season of the year, when nature having partially assumed her hybernal dress, everything appeared to so much greater advantage." He also complemented Fort Alexandria on the Fraser, his post from March to May the next year, for its scenery, friendly indigenous neighbours, and good food. In September 1834 or 1835, he went to Prince George, then known as Fort George, whose former trader's servants had all been massacred by the locals a few years earlier but which McLean reported as peaceable and prosperous during his time there.
Later life
He had married Clarissa Eugenia Evans, daughter of the missionary and linguist James Evans, in 1845 or 1846 and settled with her in Guelph, Canada West (in present-day Ontario). He built for himself a stone house in Guelph in 1847, which is still standing, at No. 21 Nottingham Street. While there, he managed a grocery store on Market Square for four years, wrote his memoirs, and sired five children. (Two died in infancy, leaving his son Archibald and Eugenia and another daughter to succeed him.) He opened and managed a branch office of the Bank of Montreal from his house and hired his old companion Erlandson to work there. He helped set up the Guelph Herald, a Conservative newspaper. He was well-read in English, French, and Gaelic and could speak several of the major languages of Canada's indigenous peoples, such that the native traders who visited the town "invariably" called upon him. He became an important member of the town and in 1856 laid the cornerstone for the Norfolk Street Wesleyan Methodist Church (the present Lakeside Hope House).
By then, however, his financial position had been ruined when he was obliged to repay £1300 stolen from the bank in two incidents in September 1855. (McLean's wife and historians have tended to finger Erlandson for the theft as he left an unexpectedly large estate at his death, but at the time McLean supported his friend and employee and accepted responsibility for the loss.) With what he had left, he moved to nearby Elora, where he served as court clerk for the next 25 years. His wife died 6 May 1858, at the age of 32. For some years his mother-in-law, Mrs. Evans, lived with him, and cared for his children.
Following the American Civil War, when Britain had assisted the Confederacy with blockade running and commerce raiding because of its textile mills' reliance on American cotton, the victorious United States had cancelled its Canadian free trade agreement and demanded enormous reparations. For a time, American expansionists, Canadian separatists, and British anti-imperialists all seemed to support the transfer of the western wilderness of British North America rather than resolving the issue monetarily. It was largely unpopulated and the Hudson's Bay Company had long portrayed it as frozen wastes useless for settlement, mostly to dissuade competitors and the encroachment of farmers and civilization into its trapping grounds. Alarmed by this possibility and unwilling to accept the territories' loss to the Americans (inter alia, he considered the War of 1812 to have been an act of unprovoked aggression), he wrote to newspapers across Canada under the name "Viator", vividly detailing the beauty and resources of the Canadian west and advocating the purchase of Rupert's Land from the Hudson's Bay Company. His letters to his hometown Elora Lightning Express were reworked into a short book under the name Remarks on the Great Nor'-West. His accounts have been credited with shifting Canadian public opinion against the land transfer, increasing political pressure to find a separate resolution to the dispute. (In the end, the HBC surrendered Rupert's Land to the British Crown, which granted it to the Canadian Confederation; the Confederation assumed British Columbia's debts and promised a transcontinental railroad to secure its consent to admission; and Britain paid off the United States with $15.5 million, more than twice what the US had spent on the Alaska Purchase.)
Works
Notes of a Twenty-five Years' Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory, London: Richard Bentley, 1849, considered a major source on Canada's fur trade. 2nd ed. in 1932 edited by W.S. Wallace as John McLean's Notes of a Twenty-Five Years' Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory, Toronto: Champlain Society. volume I & volume II
Remarks on the Great Nor'-West, Elora: J.M. Shaw, 1869, first published as articles for the Elora Lightning Express.
Legacy
McLean was the inspiration for one of the characters in R.M. Ballantyne's Ungava, a fictionalized retelling of that station's establishment and operation. He was briefly the namesake of what is now Churchill Falls. After fitful returns and abandonments, the fort he established at the mouth of the George River in 1838 eventually became the permanent settlement of Kangiqsualujjuaq.
Following inquiries by Hugh Templin of the Fergus News-Record, a plaque commemorating McLean—including the mistaken belief that he was the first to cross the Labrador Peninsula—was erected at 21 Nottingham Street, Guelph, Ontario, by the former Ontario Archaeological and Historic Sites Board. The building had been McLean's residence in Guelph between 1847 and 1857.