Peguis

Peguis was born in 1774 near the St. Mary’s river, close to what would later become the town of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. A prominent member of the Saulteaux Ojibwa people, Peguis was the son of a chief. He inherited his father’s position as a young man. At the age of eighteen in 1792, Peguis led his band west from the Great Lakes region to take advantage of the lucrative fur trade. He and his people settled by Netley Creek on the Red River, in modern-day Manitoba. Peguis was a respected and fearsome chief who sacrificed much for the good of his band. To his enemies he was known as ‘Destroyer,’ and when part of his nose was bitten off during a tribal dispute in 1802, he was thereafter affectionately known as ‘Little Chip’. To the mostly French-speaking Metis and fur-traders of the region, he was known as ‘Peguis’.

Peguis was a valuable ally to the white settlers who began colonizing the Red River in the early nineteenth century. He and his people fed and clothed the starving colonists who arrived as part of Lord Selkirk’s Red River Colony in 1812. They taught them how to hunt buffalo on the plains, and sheltered them from unfriendly tribes. Peguis earned the respect of the colonists who dubbed him the “best friend a settler could ever have.” During the Pemmican War between rival fur-trading companies, Peguis and his band sided with the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Red River settlement. In fact, Peguis tried to warn Red River that the North West Company and their Metis allies were planning to destroy them, but his advice was not heeded. As a consequence twenty-one settlers, including the governor of Red River, were killed in the disastrous Battle of Seven Oaks. Although his warnings were ignored, Peguis and his band did their best to help the survivors, and assisted in burying the dead.

At Fort Douglas in July, 1817, Peguis and four other Saulteaux and Cree chiefs signed a treaty granting the settlers land on the Red River. This treaty, which became known to history as the Selkirk Treaty, was the first of its kind in Western Canada, and formed the foundation of what would become the province of Manitoba. Peguis and his band remained on their land at Netley Creek, and practiced agriculture alongside traditional hunting practices. They grew corn, potatoes, barley, and other grains; and per the terms of the Selkirk Treaty, were sent an annual payment of tobacco from Red River. For his crucial support during the Pemmican War, Peguis also received an annual payment of £5 from the Hudson’s Bay Company for the rest of his life. Peguis allowed Christian missionaries to live and work among his people, and he himself converted in 1840. Upon his baptism, he took the name William King, and gave up three of his four wives. While he had come to embrace European traditions and ways of life to some extent, his attitude towards the settlers changed later in his life. By 1860, Peguis had come to doubt the benevolence and fairness of the white settlers who were arriving in ever-greater numbers and swallowing up lands not granted to them by treaty. However, he would not live to see the consequences of these developments which erupted in the Red River Rebellion of 1869. Peguis passed away on September 28, 1864 in Red River at the venerable age of ninety.