With their Red River experience in 1870, it was natural for Butler, Wolseley, and others who had been on the campaign to hope to recruit the same kind of people for the new mission in Egypt, and hence the cablegram asked specifically for recruits from Kahnawake, Akwesasne, and Manitoba (and which silently implied a rejection of river pilots who were not native). In the end, however, the almost four hundred men who would sail to the Middle East represented a broader section of Canadian society, both white and aboriginal, although about sixty of those who joined up were shantymen, voyageurs, and river pilots from Kahnawake, Akwesasne, and Kanesatake, whose ranks included as many as ten veterans of the Red River Expedition along with at least one former soldier from the American Civil War of 1861–65.9
The Red River Expedition at Kakabeka Falls, 1870, as envisioned in an oil painting by Frances Anne Hopkins in 1877 — an artist who was familiar with the world of the fur trade and the Canadian interior.
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The three Iroquois communities that sent men to Egypt shared similar origins in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, long before Britain conquered Canada from France in the Seven Years’ War of 1756–63. In the early 1600s, when Europeans began to penetrate the lower Great Lakes beyond the Saint Lawrence River, the majority of the people they encountered spoke one or more of the various Iroquoian languages of the region, such as the population of the several nations of the Huron (or Wendat) Confederacy near Georgian Bay in today’s Ontario, or the Eries who lived to the west of present-day Buffalo. Like the Hurons, the Iroquois formed a confederacy. At the time, it comprised five nations occupying the land between the Hudson and the Genesee rivers in modern New York: the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca. During the great struggles among the First Nations of the period, the famous conflicts between natives and newcomers, and the colonial wars that pitted France against England, hundreds of Iroquois moved north to Roman Catholic missions and allied with France. The earliest group (including Algonkian speakers as well as Iroquoians) formed a multi-ethnic settlement at La Prairie or Kentake on the Saint Lawrence River in the 1660s. The community soon came to be dominated by Mohawks, and subsequently established a permanent home in 1716 at Kahnawake on the Saint Lawrence, across from Montreal and Lachine. In the eighteenth century, three other Iroquois missions formed under similar conditions, two on the Saint Lawrence at Akwesasne and Oswegatchie (today’s Ogdensburg, New York) and a third on the Ottawa River at Kanesatake, which included a sizeable number of Algonkians until their descendants moved away in the 1860s. The inhabitants of these predominantly Iroquois settlements aligned with natives at other missions along the Saint Lawrence. By the mid-eighteenth century, a number of these Iroquoian and Algonkian villages became known collectively as the “Seven Nations of Canada,” and established their central council fire at Kahnawake.
Beyond the shift to New France, there were other important changes to Iroquois settlement patterns. Hundreds of individuals from the Five Nations within the British colony of New York resettled in the Ohio country in the mid-1700s, forming a group called the Mingos, while others moved westward somewhat later to take up land on the south shore of Lake Erie, becoming known as the Sandusky Senecas. Other natives relocated within traditional Five Nations territory. The best known were the Iroquoian-speaking Tuscaroras, who left colonial North Carolina in the early 1700s in the face of white hostility to settle near the Oneidas, and who joined the Iroquois Confederacy to form the sixth nation of the famous League of the Iroquois. Others, such as the Algonkian-speaking Delawares, moved away from the Atlantic seaboard to live under Six Nations suzerainty in New York and Pennsylvania. After the American Revolution established the independence of the United States from Great Britain and created the Canadian-American border in 1783, about one-third of the Iroquois in New York left the new republic to live within territory controlled by the British in modern Ontario, at Tyendinaga on the north shore of Lake Ontario and along the Grand River north of Lake Erie. As the eighteenth century drew to a close, the Americans forced the people of the Six Nations who remained behind in the United States to alienate most of their lands and move onto reservations, and, in 1806 Americans closed down Oswegatchie. In Canada, several hundred people from Akwesasne, Kanesatake, and Kahnawake moved to the west, largely to today’s Alberta and British Columbia, at the end of the 1700s and in the early 1800s, as a result of their long-standing engagement in the western fur trade. In the early nineteenth century, ongoing pressure from whites to force the Iroquois to vacate New York along with other tensions saw Six Nations people continuing to settle in Ontario (where a group of Oneidas re-established themselves on the Thames River) or moving to Wisconsin, Kansas, and Oklahoma, while the Mingos and Sandusky Senecas lost their territories in Ohio at the same time. Today, as in the 1880s when the Canadian Voyageur Contingent formed, there are Iroquois reservations in New York, Wisconsin, and Oklahoma (although one that existed in Pennsylvania in the 1880s was lost in the 1960s). North of the Canadian-American border, Six Nations reserves are to be found in Ontario and Quebec. Beyond residing in these communities, many Oneidas, Mohawks, Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas, and Tuscaroras pursue their lives elsewhere, especially in Montreal, Toronto, Hamilton, Buffalo, Rochester, and other places around the lower Great Lakes. The move to urban centres began long ago, with some Mohawks and other Iroquois taking up residency in various Great Lakes cities before the 1880s as part of a larger phenomenon in which people left rural areas and small towns to seek opportunities in North America’s urban centres. However, the number of such individuals from the Iroquois world was comparatively small in the latter nineteenth century, with most remaining on their reservations and reserves or finding work within the rural and forested parts of the continent, primarily on a seasonal basis.
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The August 20, 1884 cablegram from London asking for voyageurs reached the governor general at about one in the morning the next day. An hour later, Lord Lansdowne telegraphed Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald at his summer home near Rivière-du-Loup, two hundred kilometres east of Quebec City. Lansdowne enclosed a copy of the message and informed Macdonald that he would send Lord Melgund (who had fought in Egypt two years earlier) “to ask you first whether you see any objection to the scheme, and then for your advice as to the best means of carrying it out.”10 That pair of phrases respected Canada’s sovereignty within the empire because it left the decision to participate to Macdonald, yet it made Lansdowne’s wishes for support clear. (At that time, the governor general represented the British government on matters of foreign affairs in addition to fulfilling the viceregal office, unlike today where the position solely represents the monarch.) Macdonald agreed that recruiting could occur, but decided that the effort should be British rather than Canadian because the situation in Egypt failed to meet two important criteria that would encourage him to make an official dominion contribution. First, he did not believe the United Kingdom was threatened directly; and second, he thought the Sudanese crisis did not concern Canada. Politically, allowing men to be recruited as an imperial enterprise