The Wild McLeans

Louis A. Knafla is a history professor at the University of Calgary.

The McLean brothers—Allen, Charlie, and Archie—and Alexander Hare
were tried, convicted, and hanged in 1881 for the murder of constable
John Ussher in December 1879. The McLeans have come down to us in
historical folklore as one of the most notorious outlaw gangs in western
Canada. Mel Rothenburger, author of The Chilcotin War (1978) and The
Phil Gaglardi Story (1991), is a descendant of the brothers’ father,
Donald McLean.

Donald McLean was one of the original Red River settlers, descended
from the crofters who had fought for Bonnie Prince Charles at Culloden
in 1746, and who were the victims of the land clearances of the 1790s
and early 1800s. Having been among the first immigrants in British
Columbia to trade with the First Nations peoples, this Scots Catholic
family followed the fur trade tradition by intermarrying with local
tribespeople. Their Catholic, and multiracial, character is used as the
context to explain the extent to which the McLeans of the 1790s were
misunderstood by the Kamloops society into which they failed to
integrate.

Using a rich array of archival and printed sources, Rothenburger is
able to get inside his characters and reveal their thoughts and
emotions. While he may go too far in apologizing for the actions of the
McLean gang, he has produced an absorbing account of a significant event
in the early settlement history of British Columbia.