66190: Death of Big Bear Maclean

Stornoway Gazette, 27 December 1929

Several Correspondents have this week favoured us with newspaper cuttings regarding Mr William J Maclean, former Chief Factor, Hudson’s Bay Company, who recently passed away in Winnipeg, “after he had lived 87 years and worked for 65 of them – all of life except a short season of adolescence and a few years of great age.” Deceased, who was nick-named “Big Bear”, because of his friendship with the great Indian chief of that name throughout the Northwest Rebellion of 1885, was born at Scaliscro, Uig, in 1842, and is a brother of our well-known islandman, Duncan Maclean, Gisla. In 1859 he went to Canada, via Hudson’s Strait and Bay, to York Factory, which was then the headquarters of the Hudson’s Bay Company in Rupert Land. Mr Maclean first saw Winnipeg in the autumn of 1860, when it was only a primitive little settlement, giving no evidence of becoming the metropolis it is today. The city was then called Fort Garry and contained only six or seven houses in addition to the Fort.