Miles Macdonell
Miles MacDonell ( – 28 June 1828) was the first governor of the Red River Colony (or, Assiniboia), a 19th-century Scottish settlement located in present-day Manitoba and North Dakota. Miles Macdonell Collegiate, opened in 1952, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, was named in his honour. Biography He was born in Inverness, Scotland, around 1767. In 1773, his father, Colonel John MacDonell of Scothouse (Spanish John), Inverness-shire, and three of his cousins chartered the Pearl and brought over five hundred of their families and friends, at the invitation of Sir William Johnson, and settled at Caughnawaga, on the Mohawk River, in the Province of New York. Miles, who showed military tendencies at an early age, was appointed ensign in the King's Royal Regiment of New York in 1792, lieutenant in the Royal Canadian volunteers in 1794, and captain in the same corps in 1796. At the request of Lord Selkirk, he came to London in 1803, and was induced by that nobleman to assume the post of governor of Selkirk's planned colony on the Red River in the Northwest territory. Selkirk, a shareholder in the Hudson's Bay Company, had bought 300,000 km² (116,000 mi²) of land in the Red River Valley from the