Canadian History: Told By Us

In today’s news

In todays blog post I'm am going to be talking about the event at Seven Oaks. On June, 1816 there was a bloody battle between the HBC and the NWC. In 1814 Miles MacDonnell governor of the red river colony, he issued  the pemmican proclamation which banned the HBC from selling pemmican to anyone who was outside of the region, this was because of they didn't have much  food to support there own people. The NWC company didn't like this because they valued the pemmican because of its high protein content. IN 1816 a group of mainly metis which included some French-Canadians and English led by Cuthbert grant. They stole some pemmican to sell though the NWC they encountered a small group of HBC settler along the red river at seven oaks a gun fight broke out between the two groups. Early reports suggested that the French fired the first shot at the HBC. the Metis were very good shots and they have a lot more people then the HBC by around three times as many men. one that day 22 HBC men were killed and one First nations Person. Since then everyone has been debating whether you would called this even either a battle, massacre or incident.

A man by the name of Coltman said that the event was a battle. I think this because the metis didn't fire the first shot. If they were planning on massacring the HBC they would've shot them. I think it was portrayed as a massacre throughout history because it was such a single-sided story for the Metis. This also could be used as propaganda against the Metis so they can make a lot of people not like them. When you would say massacre pretty much everyone would think of a big bloody battle wit heavy casualties on one side and a significantly less on the other side. But for a battle you'd think it be more one sided and more planned out and formal. What I think is that it was an incident like the one HBC guy had a miss fire killing one and then the Metis killed them all.

How I think each of these groups would have portrayed this event are for the Metis they call it and incient because only one of them died in this battle. But for the HBC they could use the word massacre for make the metis sound bad, they could say that they were ambushed after they stole there pemmican from them.