Extracted from B.G. Hunter-Eastwood, “Report on the William Brown Heritage House,” Prepared for the Historical Museum of St. James-Assiniboia, Winnipeg, 1988, p. 56-60.

It is difficult to provide more than glimpses, hints perhaps, of William Brown’s early life in the NorthWest and later on in the Red River Settlement. The intervening distance of more than one hundred and fifty years reduces the overall sharpness of focus and makes it difficult to relate the historical record to aspects of an individual’s life. Quite often it is necessary to generalize from what we know about the ‘average person’ to what we think was likely in the specific instance of William Brown. The following discussion will attempt to draw a sketch of life in the Red River Settlement, drawing on a variety of sources. The hardships of the early settlers in Red River have been well-documented elsewhere and it is simply necessary here to establish some common themes which may prove useful in later interpretation.

On his retirement to Red River, William Brown would have been part of a small settlement at the forks of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers. William’s first contract with the Hudson’s Bay Company was dated only 9 years after the North-West Company and the HBC terminated their rivalry in the NorthWest in 1821. The construction of Lower Fort Garry began one year after William first took ship at Stromness, and Upper Fort Garry was started in 1835, the same year in which the HBC Accounts ledger tells us that he ‘retired to Red River.’ The Upper Fort had begun to flourish by the time William retired from Company service in 1841. As one retrospective sketch has stated:

This was the centre of business, government, education, and public affairs for more than thirty years, and was the nucleus of the city of Winnipeg. The fort was sold in 1882 and the front gate is all that remains of this historic group of buildings.¹

The non-native population tended to be heavily Protestant, reflecting the preference of the HBC for Scots and Orkneymen as employees. A heavily pastoral account from the early 1850’s describes the Settlement as follows:

The neat little white frame and log cottages with their well-cultivated garden spots and field enclosures, have an air of charming and quite repose, while in the distance, the grazing troops of cattle and horses dot the plains with gentle animation. Here and there a windmill, or a pointed church spire, lends an additional and suggestive beauty to the landscape. Here they live in peaceful simplicity, and in all the rural quiet of their ancestral village hamlets among the highlands of Scotland.²

The population of the entire Settlement, which one observer estimated at “ten to twelve thousand” by 1868, also contained a substantial proportion of “mixed breeds of French and Indian lineage, descendants of the courriers-du-bois, who, after the expiration of their service in the companies, have settled here and married Indian wives.”³

William Brown is not likely to have had the kind of pastoral existence attributed by the un-named author of the early 1850’s. Further, William had by 1850 married a woman of Indigenous descent, and there is strong evidence in the historical record that other men of Scottish or Orcadian origin commonly married Indigenous women. They did not hold themselves aloof in the manner in which Marcy elsewhere describes as those “who have maintained their nationality intact, without any commingling with the aboriginal race.”⁴

Early settlers had first to prepare land to which they had access, either as owners or as tenants, and the difficulties of doing so were several. The land had first to be cleared of trees and brush; then it had to be broken with plows drawn by oxen or horses. Oats, rye, barley, and wheat could then by sown by hand. As a consequence, the area which each farmer cultivated tended to be small, and the chances of economic success poor. In the first real estate census in 1832, for example, a Mr. Kauffman had 7 acres under cultivation. In the Census of 1849, the population of Red River was 5,391. There were “754 houses…[and] Cultivated land amounted to 6,329 acres.”⁵ A reasonable estimate would therefore place the average size of cultivated land worked by a single farmer at something less than 10 acres. This argument is supported by the fact that thirty-odd years later, in 1881, Magnus Brown had one the largest areas under cultivation in Headingly: 50 acres. This is likely to have been substantially larger than the area cultivated by his father in earlier years.

In terms of the latter point, crop failures were common, despite the fertile soil of the region. Locusts, drought, early frosts, and late flooding were common. For example, during the years 1813-1856, there were 21 full or partial crop failures in the Red River Settlement.⁶ Inasmuch as the chances of failure were roughly 50/50, many farmers supplemented their farming activities with the buffalo hunt, trapping, or freighting goods. In the two latter activities, the economic influence of the Hudson’s Bay Company would have been considerable, since it dominated the trade in goods of the region, provided some of the necessities of life such as salt and clothing, and was a source of currency for value received. It was also the owner of the milling equipment which farmers required to produce flour, crushed grain and “shorts.”

There is some evidence that William Brown fit this general pattern. He was a farmer in St. John’s parish; he possessed carts which could have been used to carry goods for the Hudson’s Bay Company or for other settlers; and he may well have continued to employ some of his fur-trade skills in trapping during the first winters of his retirement. He had an account for ‘Sundries’ with the Hudson’s Bay Company, with a balance of L 10/ 2/6 in June of 1858.⁷ It is also possible that William Brown engaged in the production or procurement of pemmican for the Company or in market gardening for the Company store or its personnel.⁸

¹ E.K. Paul, “H.B.C. and Manitoba”, The Beaver, Volume IV, October, 1923, p. 5.

² No author, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, June 1851, p. 174.

³ R.B. Marcy, Op. Cit., p. 287.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ W.F. Green, Red River Revelations, (Winnipeg: Red River Valley International Centennial, 1974-1976), pg. 154. The reference to Mr. Kauffman is to be found on p. 148.

⁶ G.H. Sprenger, “The Metis Nation: Buffalo Hunting vs. Agriculture in the Red River Settlement (Circa 1810-1870)”, Western Canadian Journal of Anthropology, Volume 3, No. 1, 1972. pp. 168-169.

⁷ HBCA E. 7/52 (b), Colonists Accounts with HBC, Outfit 1858, Red River Account Book, p. 2, under Dr. (Debit) Stock.

⁸ K.D. McLeod, editor, The Garden Site, DkLg-16: A Historical and Archaeological Study of a Nineteenth Century Metis Farmstead (Manitoba: Historic Resources Branch, Department of Cultural Affairs and Historic Resources, 1983). McLeod notes that a major aspect of the bison hunt was its dependence on the credit/debit system maintained by the HBC. Many families were indebted to the Company as a result and, as we saw earlier, William Brown did not emerge from his HBC employment untouched by this system.