The Young Hugh Macnider – The Future of the Seigneurie

When Archdeacon Mountain passed through Metis on his way home to Quebec City in 1822, he was welcomed by Hugh Macnider. Mountain met Macnider after emerging from several weeks of visiting the sparse parishes of the Gaspé and days walking along the Matapedia River with Indigenous guides.  

Mountain was not impressed. Macnider was a “kinsman” of the community’s founder, Seigneur John Macnider. Mountain was perhaps expecting an urbane and ambitious businessman like the Seigneur. Poor ‘Hughey’, as he was known locally, did not possess much talent or many graces. Mountain described him as:

[a] dull, gawky, young man: in person rawboned & awkward, but rather spare than stout, with hair and bushy eye-brows of a yellow cast: – in character seemingly guileless & rightly & kindly disposed & in principle correct but, habitually passive, & dependent upon the line marked out for him, or the suggestions made at the moment by others : – slow of speech uncouth in utterance, chiefly following the lead given to him in conversation, & appearing to be rather relieved when, even thus, he can find anything to say, – yet, in the manner of saying it, like many other people who are deficient in their proper resources, appropriating & claiming it for his own sagacity.

Hardly an enthusiastic endorsement of the leading member of the Metis settlement! Mountain was perhaps used to higher culture. His family claimed ancestry from the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne. His father was the Anglican Bishop of Quebec and he himself was educated at Trinity College at Cambridge University in England.