Allan Macdonell

Allan Macdonell
Allan McDonell
Born	1808-11-05 York (Toronto), Upper Canada
Died	1888-09-09 Toronto, Ontario
Occupation	Lawyer, prospector, office-holder, pamphleteer
Father	Alexander McDonell (Collachie)
Mother	Anne Smith

Allan Macdonell (also spelled McDonell) ((1808-11-05)5 November 1808 – 9 September 1888(1888-09-09) (aged 79)) was a Canadian lawyer, prospector, and promoter best known for his advocacy of westward expansion, Lake Superior copper mining, and early Pacific railway schemes during the mid-nineteenth century.

Early life

Macdonell was born on 5 November 1808 at York (present-day Toronto), Upper Canada. His grandfather, also named Allan, had been a loyalist officer who settled in Glengarry County in 1784. His father, Alexander McDonell (Collachie), served as the first sheriff of the Home District, represented Glengarry in the legislature, and was appointed a legislative councillor after 1831. His uncle was Miles Macdonell, who governed Assiniboia.

Macdonell attended the Home District Grammar School in York and read law under Henry John Boulton, being called to the bar in 1832. He practised briefly in partnership with Allan Napier MacNab before abandoning legal work in 1837, save for a single 1858 case in which he supported George Brown against John A. Macdonald's so-called "double shuffle."

Career

Law and the Gore District

In 1837 Macdonell was appointed sheriff of the Gore District, succeeding William Munson Jarvis in that post. Holding a commission as a major in the Queen's Rangers, he raised and equipped cavalry at his own expense during the 1837–38 rebellion, then resigned the shrievalty around 1842.

Lake Superior mining

In 1846 Macdonell obtained a government licence to explore the Lake Superior region for copper deposits, and he devoted more than a decade to that pursuit. He organized the Quebec and Lake Superior Mining Association in 1847, served as first president of the Victoria Mining Company in 1856, and acted as managing director of the Upper Canada Mining Company in 1865. He attended the Robinson treaty signings of September 1850 and advocated for Indigenous compensation regarding Great Lakes lands.

His mining activities brought him repeatedly to the north shore of Lake Superior, including the area around Fort William, and it was frustration at the Hudson's Bay Company's restriction of his explorations west of Canada that helped turn his attention toward the broader question of western annexation.

Pacific railway advocacy

By the 1850s Macdonell's chief preoccupation had become westward expansion and the opening of HBC territories to Canadian settlement and trade. In 1851 he and a group of associates, including his brother Angus Duncan Macdonell, petitioned for a railway charter from Canada to the Pacific. The application was refused on grounds of inadequate preparation — no agreement had been secured from the imperial government, the HBC, or Indigenous peoples, and no capital had been arranged. That same year Macdonell published Observations upon the construction of a railroad from Lake Superior to the Pacific (1851), a pamphlet that historian Gerald E. Boyce later described as "the text for promoters of the Pacific Railway" for a decade afterward. The work argued that a transcontinental railway would provide Britain with a more reliable connection to the Orient than any Central American canal route.

Further charter applications for a Sault Ste Marie canal (1852) and Pacific railway charters (1853, 1855) all failed. In December 1856 Macdonell addressed the Toronto Board of Trade, launching a forceful attack on HBC land claims and declaring that "British subjects, and above all Canadians, will exercise a right of trade" into the west. He repeated these arguments before a legislative assembly committee investigating the company's monopoly in 1857.

North-West Transportation, Navigation and Railway Company

Success came in 1858 when Macdonell and associates secured a charter for the North-West Transportation, Navigation and Railway Company. His fellow incorporators included William McMaster, Adam Wilson, Thomas Clarkson, Allan Napier MacNab, Jean-Charles Chapais, John Gordon Brown, William Pearce Howland, and William Kennedy. The charter granted the company authority to establish "one single continuous line of communication extending westward from Lake Superior," with powers to procure timber, stone, and materials from Crown lands. Capital stock stood at 20,000 shares of £5 each, expandable by £7,500 per mile of portage railway built. Macdonell served as a founding director throughout the company's existence and was its principal propagandist, authoring three pamphlets on its behalf.

The company's operations depended in part on a mail service between Collingwood and Fort William. In autumn 1858 a Captain Thomas Dick, associated with Macdonell's circle, held the government mail contract and the ship Rescue, which ran that route. He sold both to the North-West Transportation company for £6,000 in company stock — a price later shown to be inflated, and complicated by the revelation that Dick had held the vessel jointly with company directors. Dissident shareholders sued successfully, and combined with capital shortages brought on by the 1857 recession and a second round of litigation, the venture collapsed through 1859–60.

A reorganization in March 1859 produced the North-West Transit Company, headquartered in England with a Toronto executive committee, but it too failed to secure adequate British capital or retain the mail contract, and the original charter expired in 1860 with its objects unachieved.

The Toronto Leader had in December 1856 already labelled Macdonell a "monomaniac" with an "unconquerable penchant for magnificent schemes." Joseph James Hargrave, son of HBC chief factor James Hargrave, dismissed the company's operations by 1871 as "quixotic" and "abortive."

Death

After 1860 Macdonell retreated from public prominence. By the mid-1880s he was living in Toronto, where he died on 9 September 1888.

External links

• Biography at the Dictionary of Canadian Biography