Monthly Archives: February 2025

Palliser, John

Born: 1817, Dublin, Co. Dublin, died: 1887, Comeragh House, Waterford

Horses, hunting, and debts loomed large in the life of Ireland’s Protestant landed gentry. They shaped the adventurous life of John Palliser.[1]  Palliser learned his outdoor skills at home in the Comeragh Mountains. He absorbed profligate ways from his family on their frequent continental holidays where he learned to speak fluently in French, German, Italian, and Spanish. By the time he turned thirty in 1847 he was pursuing big game on the US Prairies. Palliser became adept enough in its forbidding conditions to hunt and travel alone, accompanied by his big half-wolf white dog Ishmah.[2] His popular book Solitary Rambles and Adventures of a Hunter in the Prairies (London, 1853) recorded his apprenticeship as an explorer. Palliser’s attention then turned northwards, across the ill-defined border along of 49^th parallel and the southern prairies of British North America. Diminished wealth led him to approach the Royal Geographical Society for financial support, casting his travel plans as an expedition exploring routes across the Prairies and into the Rockies. The Society added scientific purposes and submitted the proposal to the Colonial Office.

Canada’s Prairies lay within 1.5 m square miles to the north and west of colonial Canada, comprising Prince Rupert’s Land, granted originally to the Hudson’s Bay Company by Charles II in 1670, and the North-Western Territory. The Indigenous inhabitants, living there since time immemorial, were never consulted. The War of 1812 had put London on notice of US ambitions to seize Canada.[3] By the 1850s, they viewed the Prairies as vulnerable given that American hunters and traders were already active there. Yet they blanched at the cost of a transcontinental railway to enable settlement and assert sovereignty. While American action was unlikely during the emancipation crisis and Civil War, it was time to consider less expensive ways to assert domain. Personal and imperial interests found then a convenient match in Palliser’s proposed expedition. The Colonial Office provided £5,000 (£400,000 today).[4]

Palliser’s dilettantish professional life offered little comfort for the expedition’s prospects. An indifferent student at Trinity College, he left without a degree. Obliged by class to serve as county High Sheriff, deputy lieutenant, and justice of peace, his attention to duties in his father’s Waterford Artillery Militia were fitful. Palliser’s natural intelligence, social skills and outdoor accomplishments revealed his true talents; writes Spry, ‘as much at home in Rome or Heidelberg as he was in Dublin or London, on a Scottish grouse moor or in the Swiss Alps as he was in the wild, beautiful Comeragh Mountains of County Waterford.’[5]

Over three seasons between 1857 and 1860, Palliser’s leadership of the Expedition was the key to its success, marked by indefatigable good humour, supreme tact, and egalitarian charm to all he met. His hunting prowess fed his team and his knowledge of horses ensured success in regular trading for replacement stock from the local Nēhiyawak (Cree) and Siksika (Blackfoot). His personal diplomatic skills de-escalated conflicts within the team and with locals, whether Indigenous or settler, in what was a lawless region beset with all the ill effects of the trade in whiskey, guns, and pelts. Since Lewis and Clark’s violent encounter with members of the Blackfoot Confederacy in 1806, the region had a reputation as hostile. The “scientific” purpose of the Palliser Expedition was to chart opportunities for transport infrastructure, agricultural and mining development, and settlement. This was science as colonisation. Palliser’s success in avoiding violent conflict was all the more remarkable since both Indigenous and his team knew that their research portended settlement and the destruction of the Indigenous way of life.[6]

Canada confederated and established its own government in 1867, a year after the end of the American Civil War. Any renewed US ambitions would have to brush aside a democratic government not a mere colony. London then organised the transfer of Rupert’s Land and the North-Western Territory to Canada through a sale agreement for £300,000 in 1869. The costs of a railway would fall to Canadians, not the Exchequer.

The Palliser Report was a landmark, prodigious with data and insights. As Spry records: “After Prince Rupert’s Land and the North-Western Territory had become western Canada, the Expedition’s successors made much use of its Report. Outstanding among them were the geological survey teams, the North-West Mounted Police, and the negotiators of the Indian treaties. Among them, too, was Sandford Fleming, Engineer-in-Chief of the Canadian Pacific Railway, who was ‘very desirous’ of making Palliser’s acquaintance and did contrive to meet him. He always took a copy of Palliser’s Report with him when going over the ground the Expedition had covered, finding it of great use.”[7]

The transactions between London and Ottawa on the fate of the Prairies represented a profound violation of the rights of the Indigenous and the Métis. Under the leadership of Louis Riel, the Métis of the Red River Settlement armed themselves and established a provisional government in late 1869 to assert their rights to their land, culture, and livelihood. A military expedition led by Garnet Wolseley (from Dublin) suppressed the Resistance.[8] Riel fled to the US and a settlement negotiated with Ottawa established Manitoba as the fifth province to enter the Confederation the following year.[9] To police the vast and lawless prairies, Prime Minister John A. MacDonald created the North West Mounted Police, modelled on the Royal Irish Mounted Constabulary, and appointed George Arthur French from Roscommon, who had briefly served in the Royal Irish Constabulary, as its first Commissioner.[10]

Palliser had other adventures, notably in Siberia, before retiring to Comeragh House, unmarried and relying on his brother-in-law for financial support. After a long walk in the mountains, Palliser died while reading in his living room, aged 70, and was buried at Kilrossanty Cemetery.[11] Comeragh House was burned down at the end of the Troubles in 1923, along with Palliser’s papers. Palliser’s achievement lives on in his Report and in place names in Alberta.

The many Irish gentry like Palliser involved in colonisation shared similar characteristics. Protestant (mostly[12]), landed gentry by birth, heritage, upbringing, and lifestyle, variously profligate and impecunious, many made careers advancing the British Empire’s interests. From North America to the Middle East, from Africa to Asia, they brought leadership, courage, good horsemanship, and hardy constitutions to their roles as very effective colonisers. Though largely forgotten, their actions were often consequential, not least for those on the Empire’s receiving end.[13] Personal rather than imperial objectives drove Palliser. However, Palliser helped open the Prairie North-West to colonisation with all its devastating effects on the Indigenous population. He was a significant participant in a broader strategy that extended Canada’s jurisdiction to the Pacific.

Further Reading:

Irene Spry, The Palliser Expedition, The Dramatic Story of Western Canadian Exploration 1857-1860 (Toronto: Macmillan, 1963).

Irene Spry (editor), The Papers of the Palliser Expedition, 1857-61 (The Champlain Society, 2013): her Introduction is masterful.

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[1]DIB: Settled on the fertile Goldenvale between the Galtee and Comeragh Mountains, William Palliser left Yorkshire for Ireland, becoming archbishop of Cashel from 1694 to his death in 1727. English novelist Anthony Trollope borrowed the Palliser surname for the main character in his ‘Parliamentary’ novels that were popularised by a BBC dramatisation in 1974, The Pallisers. Trollope’s fifteen-year stay in Ireland was formative to his development as a public servant and novelist.

[2] Irene Spry, The Palliser Expedition, The Dramatic Story of Western Canadian Exploration 1857-1860 (1963), p. 3. Palliser brought Ismah and a menagerie of deer and buffalo back to Ireland, all to unhappy fates. Ishmah’s taste for sheep put him in Lord Dunraven’s private zoo and the buffalo died of TB. Spry’s account of the Expedition is a classic, detailing the thrills, dangers, and hardships of the expedition, and detailing the significance and impact of the Palliser Report as the standard reference work for decades. 

[3] The Duke of Wellington, outraged by this stab in the back, set about fortifying Canada with canals, citadels and Martello towers: see Wellington and Ottawa: How an Irishman and a Pot of Spanish Silver Transformed Canada at www.eamonncmckee.com.

[4] See Irene Spy’s Introduction, The Palliser Papers, op cit. Palliser had the persistent support of fellow Irishman and official John Ball in securing this funding.

[5] Ibid, p.2.

[6]Palliser recommended against trying agriculture in a triangle of semi-arid steppe that later bore his name, the Palliser Triangle. Yet the impulse to settlement over-rode his advice and generations of farmers there endured punishing periodic droughts. Palliser also recommended preservation of the buffalo herds to help Indigenous survive.

[7] The Papers of the Palliser Expedition, pp cxxxii-cxxxiii.

[8] According to the DCB, Wolseley “moved a force consisting of nearly 400 British troops, over 700 Canadian militia, and a large party of civilian voyageurs and workmen from their port of embarkation at Collingwood, Ont., to the Red River between 3 May and 24 August, without losing a man. Altogether the expedition made 47 portages and ran 51 miles of rapids.” The expedition’s projection of Canadian authority was an unmistakable signal to the US about who ruled north of the 49th parallel. Wolseley was born in Dublin in 1833 and his family seat was in Carlow. However, his father died when he was young, leaving his widow to raise seven children.  Under financial pressure, she educated Garnet in Dublin rather than England (as was the custom) and he joined the British Army to start a career, without having to purchase the commission thanks to his father’s service.  Wolseley became the leading commanding officer of his era, with active service against the Fenians in Canada, in Burma, India (rebellion), China (Opium War), Egypt, and the Crimean War.

[9] The Irish Governor General, John Young (Lord Lisgar), had wisely warned Macdonald against executing Riel if intercepted. Riel’s execution after the 1885 North-West (Second) Resistance embittered the Métis and French Canadians against the federal government and exacerbated tensions along ethnic, linguistic, and confessional lines across Canada.

[10] French served from October 1873 to July 1876 and led the famous 2000 km ‘march west’ of 1874, establishing bases at Fort Macleod, Swan River, Bow River, Fort Walsh and Fort Saskatchewan to ‘bring order’ to the region. The iconic red tunics were chosen to impress the Indigenous and to distinguish themselves from the blue tunics of the US cavalry. See The Irish and the Colonisation of the Prairie North-West at http://www.eamonncmckee.com

[11] Kilrossanty is near Lemybrien, County Waterford. The charming Church and Cemetery are deserted but well-tended. I found the Palliser grave, a low crypt enclosed by a modest railing, appropriately enough beneath tall pines.  A bronze plaque is there, presented in August 1977 by Alberta to honour Palliser’s expedition as a significant contribution to the development of the Province.

[12] William F. Butler, from Tipperary, was Catholic and had a storied career with the British Army. He had volunteered as an intelligence officer for Wolseley on his march west to counter Riel’s Resistance. Like Palliser, Butler’s published account of his adventures on the Prairies was popular: The Great Lone Land (1872) and The Wild North Land (1873).

[13] Leading the army of the East India Company, Richard Wesley, supported by his younger brother Arthur, seized India between 1798 and 1803, laying the foundation for the British Raj; Arthur of course defeated Napoleon. Lord Dufferin diplomatically and Wolseley militarily combined to secure the Suez Canal and control of Egypt for Britain. When Viceroy of India during the 1880s, seven of Dufferin’s Lieutenant Governors were Irish. He led the destructive invasion of Burma.