Braehead: Three Founding Families in Nineteenth Century Canada

John Kendle is a history professor at St. John’s College, University
of Manitoba.

Braehead is the sprawling multifaceted story of three pioneer Scottish families — the Macleods, the Crosses, and the Drevers — stretching from their arrival in British North America in the early nineteenth century to the death of Ernest Cross in 1932.

Robert Cross was from Glasgow. He emigrated with his young family to Montreal in 1826. There his son Alexander became an influential landowner, lawyer, and judge and two of his grandsons, Harry and Ernest, established cattle and business empires in Wyoming and southern Alberta. In 1821 William Drever signed on with the Hudson’s Bay Company and left the Orkneys for York Factory. Twenty-two years later he married Helen Rothney, former nanny to Adam Thom, the first recorder of Rupert’s Land. In 1845 Martin Macleod left the Isle of Skye and settled near Toronto. In 1873 his son James became a commander of the newly formed North West Mounted Police and shortly afterwards married Mary Drever, daughter of William and Helen. Nell, the oldest daughter of James and Mary Macleod, married Ernest Cross in 1899.

In detailing the adventures of these three large families, Sherrill MacLaren has a fascinating story to tell. The most riveting sections are those dealing with the Red River rebellion of 1869-70 in which the Drevers were prominent, the establishment of the NWMP as a viable force in the West, and the brutal hardships confronting Harry and Ernest in their early settlement days. Perhaps because the story becomes so complex and so much has to be abbreviated, her account of Ernest Cross’s empire building is almost cryptic. One would like to see a book on this alone.

Braehead is not academic history and the purists will complain about the factual errors, the sloppy historical generalizations, and the overly romantic and sometimes all too respectful treatment. Nevertheless, the general reader will enjoy this richly textured account which brings both the pioneering experience and the privileged lives of the elite in Canada vividly alive. It is hoped that the rich collections of papers in private hands on which much of this book is based will eventually find their way into public archives for the benefit of all historians — popular and academic.