page 260 bio

 

Name: William Tiger Dunlop

Birth Date: November 19, 1792

Death Date: June 28, 1848

Nationality: Canadian

Ethnicity: Scottish

Gender: Male

 

Dictionary of Literary Biography on William Tiger Dunlop

 

"Tiger" Dunlop's Statistical Sketches of Upper Canada, for the Use of Emigrants: By a Backwoodsman (1832) will not provide statistics on the Canadian settlements in the years before the 1837 rebellion. Nor will his Recollections of the American War, 1812-14 (1905) give insight into the causes and implications of the 1812 War between the British Canadas and the United States. They will give a sense of the huge, energetic, eccentric author, glorying in his own oddities as well as in the raw, envigorating life of the frontier. They give also the pleasure of seeing the writer wrestle his experiences in battle and in the backwoods into vivid, sophisticated style.

 

William Dunlop was born in Greenock, Scotland, and received a medical education at the University of Glasgow in a time when Scotland was bursting with creativity and achievement in science, political thought, architecture, and engineering, as well as literature. Self-confidence and self-discipline were in the air. They impelled young Dunlop first into a career in the army as surgeon. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars he was slated for Spain but sent instead to the Canadian frontier in 1813.

 

At Ganonoque, Fort Erie, and Niagara, he saw action; in 1815 he volunteered to lead a party from Lake Simcoe to Penetanguishene, cutting a military road from December to March to the potential northern shipbuilding center. Then he was shipped back to England with the dim prospect of half pay at the age of twenty-four.

 

Shipped next, through family business interests, as a civilian to India, Dunlop tried journalism in Calcutta (taking an important stand against censorship). Next he undertook to prepare Saugog Island, near Calcutta, for settlement by clearing it of tigers. He conquered innumerable tigers by throwing snuff in their faces and then shooting them point-blank--or so his tale ran. The tale earned him the sobriquet "Tiger." The exploits also earned him "jungle fever"; he was invalided home in 1819 via South Africa. After his convalescence, from 1820 to 1824 he sent articles to Blackwood's and was welcomed by the magazine's brilliant circle including John Galt.

 

Dunlop moved to London, carrying his Edinburgh reputation for wit and energy. He edited the British Press and Telescope, (magazines focusing on affairs in India), helped edit a medical textbook, and dabbled, like Galt, in business management.

 

Galt, excited about the settlement of Canada, talked Dunlop into going to the New World in 1826. As "Warden of Woods and Forests," Dunlop had the job of inspecting Canada Company lands. Diving into the woods west of Toronto, he was in at the founding of Guelph, and was himself the founder of Goderich. "Founding" involved chopping a hundred-mile road from Guelph to the beautiful harbor on Lake Huron, building a rough receiving house, packing out a wheel of roads for an elegant townsite, and claiming and clearing a fine holding across the river. Here he would build "Gairbraid," the fabulous bachelors' hall visited by many travelers in the next twenty years.

 

When Galt fell out with the Canada Company and was recalled in 1829, Dunlop stayed on, eventually becoming general superintendent of the Huron Tract. Meantime, roaring through the bush, hunting, drinking, and fraternizing, he collected materials for Statistical Sketches of Upper Canada, for the Use of Emigrants: By a Backwoodsman. Journals in England--especially Blackwood's and Fraser's (which had featured his portrait and feats in 1830 and 1833)--hailed Statistical Sketches of Upper Canada, for the Use of Emigrants: By a Backwoodsman as the best of its multitudinous kind. Dunlop wrote on the climate, the cookery, the canals, the soil, the sects, and the sports, always with gusto, frankly reporting drawbacks, but openly calling working-class immigrants to come to Huron. Far from the folk art of a raw frontier, Dunlop's book controls his own turbulence with style and self-conscious structure.

 

Dunlop settled into local and provincial politics in the later 1830s as the colony moved toward splitting among the Family Compact, William Lyon Mackenzie's radicals, the colonial governors, and the Canada Company. In spite of lack of support from compact, company, and government, Dunlop raised a militia, "The Huron Invincibles," to patrol western frontiers against American attacks fomented by Mackenzie's rebels. Wearied by his subsequent effort to get pay for his militia, Dunlop resigned from the company, and stood for Parliament, for the seat first held by his now-deceased brother Robert. He won a bitter contest. In Parliament at Kingston and later Montreal, he paced, roared, and pounced, delighting the gallery, wearying opponents, and sometimes flabbergasting his party.

 

Though returned in a series of elections, he was gradually weakened in constitution by the pace of his travels, his drinking bouts, and his political rages. In 1846 he resigned his seat, accepting a well-paid sinecure as "Superintendent of the Lachine Canal." He then worked on a memoir of his earliest, most energetic foray through Canadian life. In Recollections of the American War, 1812-14 he recalls landing in Quebec, the eager dash upriver, the "brigandish" exploits, and the dreadful scenes of horror and sorrow as he mopped up after battle. The aging writer rekindled a great narrative force as he moved from the natural drive of travel account through the anecdotal richness of pungent war scenes to the culminating energy of the Penetanguishene road building. Dunlop died at Lachine, Quebec, and his body was brought back by Louisa McColl Dunlop, his devoted, ferocious sister-in-law, to Goderich.