Association copy of a rare Scottish-Canadian work

 [MacKay, Angus] Oscar Dhu DONALD MORRISON, THE CANADIAN OUTLAW; A TALE OF THE SCOTTISH PIONEERS [MEGANTIC OUTLAW]  

s.l. [Quebec], s.n., 1892

1st Edition 8vo (19cm), 118pp, portrait of Donald Morrison and three other illustrations, publishers black patterned cloth, all edges red, rebacked with period cloth. Original endpapers preserved. Ownership inscription of ‘John Leonard, Sherbrooke’ to free endpaper. Leonard (1855-1935) was the lawyer who defended Donald Morrison in court, and in 1905 he became Sherbrooke’s mayor.  His name is written in a different hand on the title page (perhaps a gift inscription from the author/publisher?).  Some marks and wear to edges and corner of the cloth with small areas of loss. Binding  sound. Paper generally very clean.  Small burn mark to p.36 affecting one letter.

A sound copy with important provenance of a book which details, as an epic ballad, events surrounding the longest manhunt in Canadian history.  Donald Morrison (1858 - 1894) was a son of Scottish immigrants from the Isle of Lewis.  The loss of the Morrison family farm in Lac Megantic (in the Eastern Townships of Quebec) in the late 1880s triggered a series of events that culminated in Morrison shooting and killing Deputy Jack Warren, and his being harboured from the authorities for ten months by the local Scottish Hebridean community.  Morrison was eventually caught and convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 18 years hard labour. He contracted tuberculosis in prison and, several hours after being released on grounds of clemency, he died on June 19th 1894.  Morrison was buried in the Gisla cemetery on the Stornoway road in Megantic.  

Angus MacKay (1864-1923) was a Canadian poet also of Lewis immigrant stock.  MacKay’s Gaelic pseudonym - “Oscar Dhu,” -  is a nod to his mother tongue.

John Leonard, though of Irish decent, spoke Scottish Gaelic as well as the Highlanders in the region and the remarkable lengths he went to to aid Morrison in his plight is detailed in Bernard Epps’ biography ’The Outlaw of Megantic’ (Toronto, 1973).  He features in the poignant closing paragraph of Epps’ book: ‘There, surrounded by the woods and hills of home, Donald at last lay down to rest. There the people bade him a last Soiridh! [farewell] - the friends and relatives who had sheltered him, his father, now eighty-two years old, who would lie beside him in less than a year, his mother, seventy-six, destined to go in hard and keep on going for twelve years yet, John Leonard, his friend and lawyer, and Augusta Mclver [his sweetheart] still waiting for a question she would never hear.’ Copies of this work are rare in commerce. Not in the NLS.

 

[ref:1539]£395