“An Indian of Considerable Consequence”: British Travellers, “Big Chiefs,” and Settler Colonialism in 1790s’ Upper Canada

This article examines the travelogues of two late eighteenth-century British travellers: Patrick Campbell and Isaac Weld. Travel writing was a pursuit intimately tied to promoting empire, and by endorsing Upper Canada as an attractive destination for British settlers, both travellers encouraged the dispossession of Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee peoples. As tourists, Campbell and Weld were also fascinated by the idea of “Indian” chiefs. Realizing that Upper Canada was as much an Indigenous world as a British one, and recognizing the role played by the Haudenosaunee in imperial defence, they turned their fascination with chiefs to rhetorical advantage. Ignorant of actual Haudenosaunee governance, Campbell and Weld instead invested sovereignty in select Kanyen’kehaka men who conformed to their pre-conceived notions of what chiefs ought to be like. Friendship between these men and the British proved useful in travel writing, justifying British acts of settler colonialism on the basis that, unlike the Americans who waged wars to dispossess the Northwest Confederacy, the British were welcome and the moral power on the continent. The importance given to chiefs to secure this friendship reminds scholars that what Susan Hill called the “Big Chief” school of analysis has a long literary past that has historically justified empire.