Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2512767 in Books
• Published on: 2009-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 517 pages

Customer Reviews

biography which traces the growth of Canada in the early 19th century
The Scotsman Thomas Douglas (1770-1820), Fifth Earl of Selkirk, was an odd combination of businessman and visionary. Affected by the utopian hopes vented by the American and French Revolutions and the encouragement of the British to develop Canada, the Lord Selkirk undertook entrepreneurial enterprises in Canada. Others managed to find modest and sometimes exceptional success in such enterprises. But none of Douglas's ventures amounted to much. In the end, he and his descendants were left with complicated and protracted legal proceedings in which they tried to avoid complete destitution from the abortive ventures.

The three enterprises Lord Selkirk undertook were a settlement on Prince Edward Island; another settlement in lands granted to him in the Red River area of central Canada west of Lake Superior; and in connection with this inland settlement, a fur-trading business to rival the Hudson Bay Company. Douglas met with difficulties in all three because of differences with persons he placed as heads of the different ventures, the difficulty if not impossibility of finding suitable and suitably thankful groups of persons for the settlements, competition from the Hudson's Bay Company, eventual disfavor by the Canadian government, and the improbability of success inherent in such ill-defined, complex undertakings under the best of circumstances. Add to this the fact that Douglas tried to make a go of these enterprises basically from Great Britain with only a couple of trips to Canada, and the visions and plans appear outright to be off-base.

The difficulties for Lord Selkirk make an appearance in Bumsted's Preface. Senior Editor of the Selkirk Papers Project, Bumsted is also the author of many other books on Canadian history. In the Preface, the author remarks that in order to give consistency to the biography, he made the decision to deal with the relation between events in Canada and Lord Selkirk's responses to them at the time the Lord received letters on the events in Scotland, which could be two months or more after the events happened. As seen with this decision by the author, Lord Selkirk was continually trying to deal with affairs in Canada months after they had taken place.

Lord Selkirk did as well as anyone could have under the impractical circumstances. While he was not particularly realistic, he was not incompetent nor insanely hopeful. What kept him going more than anything was Scottish stubbornness. He also had the endearing desire to want to be a part of the new world dawning in the revolutionary era, and he took risks in this.

Lord Selkirk's story is basically the story of the great influence he had on the development of Canada. Mainly, the Red River settlement west of Lake Superior played a major role in the development of the central and western parts of Canada with the commercial activities and large and diverse numbers of people surrounding it, as tentative as the settlement was. What was disappointing and nearly destructive to Douglas was immeasurably and permanently beneficial to Canada.