As Lady Isabella described them, the Chalmers were a quirky frontier family with remarkably strong Scottish covenanter ancestral ties. Through Isabella’s letters home, we were able to explore those uncommon Scottish ties, albeit through the eyes and pen of a very particular Englishwoman loaded with her own opinions about the world.

In her thoughts about the Chalmers, Lady Isabella described the settler experience on the edge of the western frontier in 1876. She had other much different experience with North America however, as she had visited more than 20 years prior.  So to continue our exploration of early Scottish immigrant life, we are going to travel backward in time and place to a much different frontier to meet Isabella Bird in 1854. She is about to disembark the paddle wheel steamer Canada of Cunard steam lines at Halifax Harbor following a “nine-day and five-hour voyage” from her Liverpool departure. We pick up the story in Isabella’s remembrances of the trip published as The Englishwoman In America.

Backward In Time To Halifax 1854.

In 1854 Halifax is the bustling capital of Nova Scotia (New Scotland), which is itself a self governing British province. It would not become part of the Canadian Confederation until 1867.  Nova Scotia had originally launched in 1621 in part as a Scottish scheme to occupy and settle the Crown’s lands in Canada but mostly to financially and socially benefit one Sir William Alexander, 1st Earl of Stirling.  By 1625 Sir William and the Crown were actively selling newly sanctioned Nova Scotia Baronetcies in exchange for a vow to arm, apparel and victualize six colonists for two years (or Buy Now! for a one time payment of 2,000 Merks to the Crown and Boom, you’re a Scottish Baron – Sir Whatnot - True story). There is also, of course, the 1,000 Merks that were payable directly to Sir William for his prior services in ‘discoverie’ of the area. Because there is ever so much ‘discovering’ that has to occur before Crown subjects can be turned loose on a wild land.

Unfortunately for Sir William, and the Crown, and the newly minted Nova Scotia Barons, the French snatched the entire province for their own over the course of three battles between 1629 – 1632.  By 1633 Scots in Nova Scotia were rare as hens teeth. The province had been melodiously renamed Acadia, French not Scottish.  Things remained thus until the worm turned again in 1763 at the end of the French and Indian War and Scotland, now Britain, once again claimed large portions of Canada in the Treaty of Paris.

Fast-forward ninety-one very fast paced years and Isabella Bird steps onshore at Halifax Harbour. It doesn’t take long before she reports contact with exiled Gaels.  During the course of less than 100 years of British rule, the Canadian land mass had become soaked with Scottish immigrants and most of those were Gaelic speaking exiles from the highlands and islands, sometimes by way of intermediate immigration to the Scottish lowlands or even England.

On the international superpower market, lands and towns switch names, allegiance, and sovereignty quickly with nothing more than the scratch of a pen across treaty parchment.  Following the official transfer of Canada to Britain at the Treaty of Paris in 1763, there was a period of practical transition of everything French to everything British. Interestingly, however, almost immediately after the practicalities would have occurred, Nova Scotia began receiving the human overage that Scotland was actively casting off.  From the end of the 18th century through the end of the 19th century, Nova Scotia, together with what was then called Upper Canada – generally southern Ontario on today’s map – served as a type of Gaelic refugee camp for the Highland exodus that was following agricultural improvement and weaponized land use policies of the post-Culloden era.

Halifax and Pictou began accepting hundreds of Gaelic refugees in the early 1770s as clearance, famine, hopelessness – and hopefulness – drove Scots toward the New World.  Although North American history is peppered with bursts of Scottish immigration emanating from various parts of Scotland, those who arrived in the mid to late 19th century were largely Gaels, displaced directly by eviction notice or indirectly by loss of ancestral way of life and relentless cultural oppression in their homeland.

Isabella’s Scots.

The North American lands and towns that Lady Isabella visited during this particular adventure were far from exclusively Scottish of course.  Yet mentions of immigrant Gaels, Scots, Highlanders and “Anglo-Saxon” Lowlanders are numerous and contemporary census numbers bear out the inference that Canada was fairly soaking with Scots in the middle part of the 19th century.  Nevertheless, Lady Isabella perceives successes in Canada as tribute to the Anglo-Saxon English blood and way of life.  Indeed, she rarely uses the terms Britain or Great Britain, or the United Kingdom, but prefers plain old England, as in her mind, England is the kingdom.

At this time in her life, Lady Isabella Bird had acquired a limited respect and affection for the “highlander” and the Gaelic language and culture, but largely by virtue of her English family’s capacity to send a sickly daughter to the Scottish Highlands for a landscape and environmental cure.  In that role, Isabella knew Gaels only so far as she was allowed to know them. With the threat of upper class punishment or retribution always present in the Highlands of the day, it is likely that most Gaels showed Isabella and her vacationing family only those aspects of Gaelic life and culture that pleased them, and then, only in a very congenial not to mention deferential delivery. It is not surprising that Lady Isabella came away from that limited introduction to Gaelic world with affection and a certain degree of respect.  It is, however, somewhat surprising that she also came away with at least a conversational level of knowledge of the Gaelic language.

While Lady Isabella paints a fun introduction to the early Canadian Scottish immigrant, there is much more to be learned about the world that the emigrant Scot actually faced by listening closely enough to discern the gross stereotypes and social hierarchy that color everything that our lady does and says.

She came to the New World well armed with the stereotypes of the Old World.  Perky and determined, Isabella is also the product of a Victorian world view in which nothing can really measure up to England and the English way.  This yields a clear ‘us and them’ approach to the world and like many during her time, Isabella is eager to ensure that everyone is placed well within their proper social spot in life, with the appropriate life story hung around their neck.

“The Irish are the noisiest of the enemies of England, and carry with them to Canada the most inveterate enmity to ‘Sassanach’ rule.  The term ‘slang-whangers’ must have been invented for these.”

“The Irish are a turbulent class, forever appealing to physical force, influencing the elections, and carrying out their ‘clan feuds’ and ‘faction fights.’”

Slang-whangers? That’s a new one to me but clearly, Lady Isabella does not speak reverently about the Canadian Irish immigrant.

While in North America on this trip, aside from her own English countrymen and women, Isabella generally described four groups of people:  Irish, Scottish Gaels, Indians and Americans.  To Isabella, the Irish and Indians were distasteful but endurable and occasionally could be capable of performing useful service, although inevitably not very well.  Scottish Gaels met along the route in Canada rated better in Lady Isabella’s reflections likely because of her affectionate memories of summers spent with them in the Highlands.  But also because Scottish families often came with some wealth and had been able to establish a vigorous mainstream base for themselves and their Gaelic community. Gaels, on the whole, did not come to Canada as servants but as farmers. Isabella seemed to accept that more readily.

 Isabella Had The Gaelic.

Having spent summers in the Scottish highlands as a child, it is not entirely surprising that the young English woman would have been encouraged to learn the local language.  It is somewhat more surprising that she had maintained some fluency in the Gaelic language into her twenties at least but then, Isabella Bird had her reasons. Sometimes, speaking Gaelic provided the keys to the kingdom:

“Crossing the suspension bridge we arrived at the VR custom house, where a tiresome detention usually occurs; but a few words spoken in Gaelic to the Scotch officer produced a magical effect, which might have been the same had we possessed anything contraband.”

Lady Isabella remarks on many occasions during the Canadian part of her journey regarding the use of Gaelic in social situations.  She regales in Gaelic with the lonely Highlands widow in the Canadian wilderness and exchanges clever quips with the Captain of the ship Peerless, a vessel that the good “Scotch” Captain brought from the Clyde to the Niagara country in 6,000 pieces. At least in the middle of the 19th century, Isabella makes it clear that Scottish Gaelic maintained a significant and respectable role in Canadian Scottish society.

On many occasions while in North America, Lady Isabella found the benefit of breaking the ice with Gaelic strangers using their native tongue.  More than anything else, to the Gaels hearing Gaelic spoken, there was the possibility of news from home. It’s not that news was scarce. Given the strong inflow of immigrants, it was common. Nevertheless, things were changing very rapidly in the highlands in the 1850s and each day might bring news that some dreadful thing had happened to some one or some family or some village that was loved and missed.

Why You Should Read Isabella’s Account. 

A great deal of The Englishwoman In America sheds light directly on the life of the immigrant Scot of the Victorian period and for that it is valuable. But it is also valuable for its descriptions of the world in which those immigrants lived. Lady Isabella was curious as well as plucky, determined and creative and she visited slums in Quebec as well as Governor’s mansions. She traveled by land and sea in comfortable vessels and deadly ones and she describes her adventures with a dry sense of English humor, a forever bright outlook and a stiff upper lip. Her accounts are charming and effective in conveying the look, smell, sound and feel of the mid 19th century North American Scottish immigrant’s environment and society. It’s a fun read, very educational and available on Kindle e-reader for not all that many Merks.

Epilogue: Listening To Gaelic Immigrants In Their Own Words.

Gaelic was widely spoken on Prince Edward Island until the turn of the 20th century.  In the 2011 census, 10 individuals on the island reported that Gaelic was their mother tongue with less than 100 claiming to speak the language.

Lady Isabella Bird’s account of Scottish and Gaelic immigrants in mid 19th century Canada is intriguing and a great way to begin to get a feel for life in a different place and time while learning about Scottish and Gaelic heritage.  But the story told by Isabella and others like her fails to explain the tragic statistics like those in the paragraph above regarding the drastic, almost complete, loss of Gaelic language and cultural markers in a place where previously they flourished.  The best place to look for answers to such a question is in the words of the Gaels themselves.  Those words are out there but they have, until very recently, been forgotten by historians and social commentators particularly because the language and the culture is incomprehensible unless carefully and specifically studied.

We now have an initial resource, based upon Gaelic language resources and translated for English readers, that will help begin to unravel the story of the Gael in Canada more clearly. Published just last September, Seanchaidh na Coille: Memory Keeper of the Forest is an anthology of the Scottish Gaelic literature of Canada.  It is edited by Dr. Michael Newton, an outstanding researcher, scholar, writer and fluent in Scottish Gaelic and entirely comfortable translating and interpreting Scottish Gaelic language resources of all kinds.. This book complements his earlier work on North American Gaels We’re Indians Sure Enough: The Legacy of the Scottish Highlander in the United States (2001).

The poems, songs and narratives included in Seanchaidh na Coille offer new and important insights, for the English language reader as well as the Gael, into the mind and experience of the North American Gaelic immigrant.  Indeed, in one small but instructive instance, the reader is placed directly at the moment of Gaelic diaspora when a Gaelic family that had travelled together from the Highlands disburses into the vast Canadian world:

 ”From Quebec we came by boat right into the heart of Upper Canada.  The Tiree people went their own way to Brock.  The Perthshire people to other places on the way, but the majority of the Kilmartin people stayed together until they arrived at Port Stanley.  From there they branched off among the rural townships of Yarmouth, Dunwick, and Southwold.”

We have so few resources that allow us to get to know our Gaelic ancestors through their own Gaelic words.  Seanchaidh na Coille is one little resource with an enormous effect that should be on the desk of every member of the Scottish North American diaspora who is serious about understanding their Gaelic diaspora heritage.

Dr. Newton’s work is grounded in existing scholarship, where it exists on the subject, but because the story is told through careful analysis of Gaelic language literature, his work tends to explode old myths and assumptions of the Gaelic experience and supplant them with the voice of the Gaels themselves. You may believe you know the story of Gaelic immigration to North America. If you haven’t yet familiarized yourself with Dr. Newton’s work on the topic, you simply do not fully understand that story because you haven’t heard it from the Gaels themselves.

So dig in! A copy of Lady Isabella Bird’s An Englishwoman In America paired nicely with Seanchaidh na Coille: Memory Keeper of the Forest, a nice glass of wine, er .. whisky, and a quiet snowy weekend. Got one coming up! How’s that for a plan for a weekend without Outlander?

The post A Victorian View Into Scottish North America: Part Two Of Lady Isabella Bird’s Encounters With Scots In Canada And America appeared first on ScotClans | Scottish Clans.

Lady Isabella Bird was an Englishwoman who spent summers in Scotland as a child and who would eventually marry an Edinburgh doctor and settle down in Edinburgh as a base when she was not traveling. Prior to marriage, in 1854, at the age of twenty-two, she left England and began traveling as a hopeful cure for her vaguely ill health.

As we find her in 1873, she is a strong-willed, opinionated, completely independent, remarkably level headed and extraordinarily determined young woman focused on seeing the most fascinating things about the world first hand. This particular 1873 sojourn to the western U.S. was only a part of Isabella Bird’s grand tour of that year, having opened in Hawaii, continuing to the California Sierra and eventually enduring a winter spent in the log and chink settler’s camp at about 7,500 feet at the foot of the final 6,750 or so feet of the mightily impressive Longs Peak (14,256′).

Our window into Lady Isabella’s frontier frolic is given through the wonderful collection of letters that she wrote to her sister back home in England, crafted absolutely contemporaneously with the adventures themselves. The collection has been published as a little book titled A Lady’s Life In The Rocky Mountains and it is wonderful holiday or anytime reading. [NOTE: $2.99 on Kindle now!]

Through parts of the third to sixth letters, we are in the company of the Chalmers family, a Scottish American frontier family with a rather pronounced Scottish identity and somewhat of a special story. Lady Isabella spends a few days with this distinctive family, and it is the Chalmers family that forms the focus of this post. 

Meet the Chalmers: Proud descendants of Scottish Covenanters in the middle of nowhere. 

Many readers will have visited the quaint mountain village that today hosts the popular Longs Peak Scottish Festival but no state highways led the way to Estes Park in 1873. Indeed, the best indication that a pilgrim might find would be a single track game trail, if that pilgrim knew where to look or was able to scare up a competent guide, of which there were precious few. Lady Isabella set out from Fort Collins, Colorado Territory in September to attain the mouth of a canyon, that she had been locally advised contained a boarding house and a sawmill and some of the most magnificent Rocky Mountain country to be seen. The canyon was also a few miles closer to Estes Park so it seemed a step in the right direction and Lady Isabella took it.

There was no boarding house in the canyon and the sawmill was in very poor repair. Isabella did find, in the mouth of the canyon, the Chalmers family. The Chalmers owned 160 acres of land there and had built the rudimentary sawmill nine years ago. They currently sold milk and butter to an assortment of people who had come to the canyon to enjoy the dry Colorado climate as a recommended cure for Tuberculosis. The current Chalmers patriarch brought his family from Illinois to the place in 1864 for that very purpose. The remedy worked and within two years, Chalmers was healthy and the owner of a 160 acre plot of land acquired under the Homesteading Act passed by the U.S. Congress in 1862. (More about the Homestead Act below.)

Here is some of what Lady Isabella Bird relates to her sister about these lightly peculiar early members of the Scottish American diaspora – and our focus - the Chalmers:

Chalmers Homestead:

A rough and shaky bridge, made of the outsides of pines laid upon some unsecured logs crossed the river. … On the other side was a log cabin partially ruinous and the very rudest I ever saw. It’s roof being of plastered mud being broken into large holes. It stood close to the water among some cottonwood trees. A little higher there was a very primitive sawmill, also out of repair, with some logs lying about. An emigrant wagon and a forlorn tent with a campfire and a pot were in the foreground.

Chalmers Cabin:

… I got down and found a single room of the rudest kind with a wall at one end partially broken down. Holes in the roof. Holes for windows. And no furniture but two chairs and two unplanned wooden shelves with some sacks of straw upon them for beds. There was an adjacent cabin room with a stove, benches and table, where they cooked and ate, but this was all.

“Life,” said Isabella, “was reduced to its simplest elements.”  As for the Chalmers family members themselves? Lady Bird tells us that they “repelled [her] by their faces and manners.”  Mrs. Chalmers was a “hard, sad looking woman” “lean, clean, toothless.”  There was a daughter, an “awkward girl of sixteen with uncombed hair and a painful repulsiveness of face” and “a sour repellant looking creature with as much manners as a pig.” A grown son (“a shiftless melancholy looking youth’) and three “hard unchild-like” small children. “They wear boots, but never two of one pair and never blacked of course, but no stockings.”

They are a queer family. Somewhere in the remote highlands I have seen such another. It’s head is tall, gaunt, lean and ragged and has lost one eye. On an English road, one would think him a starving or a dangerous beggar. He is slightly intelligent, very opinionated and wishes to be thought well informed, which he is not.

Chalmers’ religion:

He belongs to the straightest sect of reformed Presbyterians, psalm singers, but exaggerates anything of bigotry or intolerance which characterizes them. … His great boast is that his ancestors were Scottish Covenanters.

And finally, England:

He hates England with a bitter personal hatred and regards any allusions to the progress of Victoria as a personal insult. He trusts to live to see the down fall of the British monarchy the disintegration of the Empire.

In all, Isabella Bird did not say all that much about the Chalmers family but she certainly said enough to paint a picture of them and their frontier life as she met them in early fall of 1873. What she does not address is the Scottish American background story. What particular set of facts – in Scotland and America - gave birth to this family and brought them to their hard scrabble life?

Lady Isabella’s Colorado Chalmers are likely second or possibly third generation Scottish immigrants that were still defined by their Scottish story and clinging to their Scottish ancestral identity, prejudices and spirituality. We are not told which Chalmers’ Covenanting ancestors came to America or when. We do not even know for certain that Chalmers himself is not the immigrant, however a close reading of Isabella’s letters advises against that. The letters do give us some very juicy clues that allow us to fill out the Chalmers’ likely story, Sherlock Holmes style.

Chalmers: Frenchified Gaels Return as Lowlanders. 

The name “Chalmers” itself carries an interesting history. Present understanding is that the name derived from a Scot carrying the surname “Cameron” who entered the French military service and assumed the name of Camerarius/Camerario (in French: De La Chambre), or Chalmers, as to be more ‘agreeable to the language of that country.’ At least one of this fellow’s progeny returned to Scotland and became the ancestor of Chalmers of Aberdeen-shire and other parts of Scotland. Chalmers today is considered a sept of Clan Cameron and the name itself was used as a code name for various Camerons during the 1745 Jacobite Rising.  Interestingly then, the Scottish name “Chalmers” carries a Gaelic highland heritage filtered through France and reintroduced to Scottish lowlands as protestant, civilized and very zealous Scots. A double helping of Scottishness.

Scottish Covenanters – You don’t see those everyday. 

While somewhat known in America, the story of the Scottish Covenanters who were forced out of Scotland at various times between the 16th – 18th centuries is typically overshadowed by the more popularly understood immigration episodes such as the Highland Clearances and the general long term aftermath of the battle of Culloden.  Yet our early Colorado Chalmers’ are of a different migration. Their greatest claim to fame, as they inform Lady Isabella, is that their ancestors were Scottish Covenanters and that they, centuries on and a continent away, steadfastly remained psalm singing reformed Presbyterians with a deep hatred of all things English and imperial.

Scottish Covenanters were 17th century protestants who refused the Stuart kings’ claim to Divine Right and instead believed that the spiritual head of the Scottish Church was religious and not the king. Many of these strong willed dissenters signed the National Covenant to that effect in 1638 and from then until the Glorious Revolution in 1688 they suffered a range of punitive persecution from the Stuarts as well as Cromwell, including transportation as indentured servants to British North America. Others made their way to Ulster in Ireland only to become part of the early 18th century tsunami of Scots-Irish immigration to the American colonies. Provinces such as East New Jersey accepted hundreds of Covenanter refugees during the 1680s who came to the New World initially under the burden of indenture and who worked, eventually, to gain freedom once again.

Although the Glorious Revolution and actions of King William essentially obviated the context for Convenanting Prebyterianism in Scotland, the zealous fervor and prejudices followed immigrants to America and Mr. Chalmers appears to be everything that might be expected of their progeny – even after the intervention of two centuries.

Scottish American Homesteaders.

Lady Isabella describes the Chalmers operation in fairly unflattering terms and in particular she highlights the abysmal failure of their life as Colorado homesteaders.

They have 160 acres of land. A squatters claim and an invaluable water power. He is a lumberer and has a sawmill of a very primitive kind. I notice that everyday something goes wrong with it and this is the case throughout. If he wants to haul timber down one or other of the oxen cannot be found. Or if the timber is actually underway, a wheel or part of the harness gives way and the whole affair is at a standstill for days.

The cabin is hardly a shelter but is allowed to remain in ruins because the foundation of a frame house was once ‘a-dug’. A horse is always sure to be lame from want of a shoe nail or a saddle to be useless from a broken buckle and the wagon and harness are a marvel of temporary shifts, patchings and insecure linkings with strands of rope. Nothing is ever ready or whole when it is wanted.

Yet Chalmers is a frugal, sober hardworking man and he, his eldest son and a hired man rise early, going forth to their work and labor till the evening.

The Chalmers’ homesteading failure is certainly not due to the strict and deep Presbyterian faith and dogma that Mr. Chalmers imported from Scotland. Indeed, Lady Isabella describes the Chalmers as the frontier equivalent of the modern workaholic, sparing little time for anything other than work and religious devotion. Yet they seem never to get anywhere.

The Chalmers sawmill is described as having become decrepit after only nine years of operation and as soon as one thing is fixed another two are broken at the homestead. We are not told what line of work Mr. Chalmers was in while in Illinois. He may have been, like so many others, unprepared by background, skill and knowledge to succeed on the Colorado frontier, even though the United States Government and various private interests aggressively solicited men like Chalmers to give the frontier a try. If so, he would not be the only Scottish American and Scottish immigrant lured west by the offer of “free land.”

In the late 1850s and early 1860s the United States was engulfed in issues surrounding slavery, free labor, small versus large landholders and civil war. In 1862 the U.S. Congress passed the Homestead Act as part of that conflict.

The Homestead Act of 1862 provided that any adult citizen (or person intending to become a citizen), including free slaves, who headed a family could qualify for a grant of 160 acres of public land by paying a small registration fee and living on the land continuously for five years and by making necessary improvements to “prove up” a homestead clam. If the settler was willing to pay $1.25 an acre, he could obtain the land after only six months’ residence. Families picked up what they had and gambled it on free land in the west.

Despite an aggressive campaign to draw Americans and fresh immigrants to the western frontier, the law ultimately did not provide the catalyst to create a new class of small landholding farmers and such from the stock of eastern and Midwestern urban dwellers. While an enormous amount of land was transferred from First Nations, to the U.S. Government and into white private landholders, much of the land granted under the 1862 Homestead Act fell quickly into the hands of speculators. Some land was hoarded into huge land owning conglomerates and much was resold at great profit while new immigrants were left wondering how to make it in the New World.

The Chalmers sawmill story smacks a little of all too this common homesteading story. The mill itself was likely constructed as a necessary improvement to prove up a homestead claim. Following issuance of the homestead “patent” that granted private title to the land, Chalmers seems to have dropped the ball and allowed the mill and homestead to fall into serious disrepair. While he got his mill built, no one, it seems, told Mr. Chalmers how to run it.

These were the Chalmers, one of so many Scottish American families who brought their ancestry and added what they were able to a new nation. They may not have succeeded at the sawmill business but perhaps that “invaluable water power” ultimately brought prosperity to a deserving psalm singing Presbyterian Covenanting family carrying on Scottish traditions in America.

The post Meet The Chalmers: Lady Isabella Bird finds Scottish Covenanters in the 1873 Colorado Territory appeared first on ScotClans | Scottish Clans.