He had supplied, in a Colony shop, provisions and
all requisites to be purchased by his settlers and on account of their
poverty to be charged to their individual accounts.
George Simpson, who was the new Governor of the United Hudson's Bay
Company, was for two years Macdonell's contemporary, and he in one of
his letters says: "Macdonell is, I am concerned to say, extremely
unpopular, despised and held in contempt by every person connected with
the place, he is accused of partiality, dishonesty, untruth and
drunkenness,--in short, by a disrespect of every moral and elevated
feeling."
Alexander Ross says of him, "The officials he kept about him resembled
the court of an Eastern Nabob, with its warriors, serfs, and varlets,
and the names they bore were hardly less pompous, for here were
secretaries, assistant secretaries, accountants, orderlies, grooms,
cooks and butlers."
Satrap Macdonell held high revels in his time. "From the time the
puncheons of rum reached the colony in the fall, till they were all
drunk dry, nothing was to be seen or heard about Fort Douglas but
balling, dancing, rioting and drunkenness in the barbarous sport of
those disorderly times.
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