Lessons To Be Learned In A Canadian Bicentennial

Canada is viewed as such a young country, owning to its birth of confederacy in 1867. Yet, long before the British North America Act ushered independence from Queen Victoria’s empire, Canada’s history includes an era where the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) was granted an exclusive land charter in 1670 by King Charles the Second. This was named Rupert’s Land, in honor of HBC’s first governor and relative to the king, Prince Rupert of the Rhine.

A vast expanse of some four million square kilometres principally centered around the water basins of present day Hudson Bay, dropping as deep as South Dakota and Minnesota, spanning as far west as the Rocky Mountains, towering into what we now refer to as Nunavut Territory and Northwest Territories, bordered on the east by the Atlantic Ocean, and excepting almost all of Upper and Lower Canada, the charter granted Hudson’s Bay Company a monopoly on the fur trade. In exchange, HBC was to govern the lands and provide law and order.

As per the arrogance of the day, nobody thought to include First Nations in any such governance model, despite countless indigenous peoples inhabiting the lands for thousands of years prior to European colonization.

The fur trade was a lucrative pipeline of untold fortunes, fueled by the insatiable appetite of Continental fashion houses and their in vogue consumers. Flush with such abundance of resources, Canada languished at the pillaging by her colonists, and over the centuries it was perhaps the beaver who suffered the greatest of all, eventually trapped to near extinction.

White British Empire settlers by the scores migrated to Rupert’s Land from the Commonwealth since the granting of the charter, to farm the fertile soil, choosing to stick to ‘their kind’. Meanwhile French migrants seeking to escape tyranny and taxes in their homeland chose to intermingle with the indigenous populations, creating the nomadic Metis.

Fast forward to 1800’s and the Hudson’s Bay Company finds itself with rival North West Company (the Nor’Westers) seeking identical bounty for its shareholders, often leading to skirmishes between the two adversaries as HBC continually encroached on North West Company (NWC) territory. HBC over-trapped charter lands over the years and were desperate to supply its customers.

Both companies had by now forged alliances with First Nations, Metis, and white settlers for conducting day to day business, however HBC remained predominantly white and Protestant, whereas NWC was a robust melting pot of French, Metis, Catholic, and First Nations. The recipe for confrontation could not have been more potent. Indeed, this same stew was set afire centuries before and was served up worldwide resulting in a legion of unstable consequences.

Tensions between the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company were to play out at Seven Oaks (Frog Plain) with the most fatal of consequences. The years running up to this portentous date were fraught with allegations by and against each foe to include sabotage, vandalism, and theft. Today, many of those accusations would rise to the definition of acts of terrorism.

The Governor of the Red River Colony (the area surrounding contemporary Winnipeg, Manitoba), issued the Pemmican Proclamation in 1814, barring pemmican (often described as a putrid, rank foodstuff made from berries and buffalo meat) from leaving settlements, setting in motion a policy of starvation against the NWC trappers. Boats and wagons were prohibited from transporting food supplies to the Metis and free roaming bison could no longer be hunted by the time honored tradition of herd running (where buffalo herds were funneled to a point of running off a cliff to their death), as this trespassed over and destroyed the farmlands of white HBC settlers.

In retaliation, NWC burned crops, razed homes, and rustled livestock. They also captured some boats carrying pemmican and occupied a Hudson’s Bay Company fort. One didn’t need a crystal ball to foretell what the future held.

On June 19, 1816, the HBC was looking to arrest NWC insurgents for their alleged crimes. Close to the center of Rupert’s Land along the Red River, at a place known to the English as Seven Oaks and to the Metis as Frog Plain, the Hudson’s Bay Company, led by Robert Semple, and the North West Company, led by Cuthbert Grant, along with their respective confederates, engaged in a fifteen minute bloodbath that would see the entire contingent of twenty one HBC combatants killed, including Semple himself, with only one of the 60-ish NWC dead.

In terms of war, the North West Company would be considered victorious. Nearby HBC colonists left the area putting an end to the first agricultural settlement in Rupert’s Land.

History does not definitively recount which side fired the first volley in the Battle of Seven Oaks, or as the Metis call it, la Victoire de la Grenouillière. But world history does emphasize the fickle pittance of one religion against another, one color versus the other, one culture over the other, one country posturing to another, and one death count being greater than the other. It’s a chess board in which Canada has not been immune.

The Bicentennial of what would become known as the Battle of Seven Oaks, or Victory at Frog Plain, or la Victoire de la Grenouillière, is this year and serves as a pregnant reminder that our country has been manufactured from the same raw materials of humankind to which every country on this little blue marble has succumb.

The battle site was designated a National Historic Site of Canada in 1920. You may visit its commemorative plaque at the intersection of Main Street and Rupertsland Boulevard in Winnipeg, Manitoba.