PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE OF THE EARLY EUROPEAN IMMIGRANT.
THE GREAT WORK OF MR. THOMAS MACNUTT.
According to our information the first Governor of Prince Edward
Island was Chief Justice Stewart, whose private secretary was a north of
Ireland man named MacNutt. He married a daughter of the Chief Justice
and had a large family, the eldest of whom was Mr. Thomas MacNutt's
grandfather, after whom he was called. One daughter married a Davies
and another a Pope, and Sir Louis Davies and Sir Joseph Pope are their
respective sons. Mr. MacNutt's father was the eldest son; he married the
(laughter of an officer in the British Army, whose mother was a Haig, of
the same stock as General Lord Haig. Mr. MacNutt's father engaged in
lumbering in New Brunswick, and it was in that province that Mr. Mac-
Nutt was born in 1850. When Mr. MacNutt was about four the family
moved back to Prince Edward Island, where they originally belonged, and
when he was eight the family made another move, this time to Ottawa,
where Mr. MacNutt senior became Assistant Crown Timber Agent, the
office having jurisdiction over all the timber berths in Lower and Upper
Canada. This was, of course, before confederation. His son Thomas
passed respectively through the Common School, Grammar School, Col-
legiate and Commercial College. He spent several months at Cornwall
during the Fenian Raid of 1866, and this was succeeded by a year and a
half in a shipping office in Quebec. The confinement of office work being
irksome he went fishing for cod, mackerel, etc., off Prince Edward Island;
then timber scouting and hunting and trapping on the tributaries of the
Upper Ottawa.
In 1874 Mr. MacNutt was employed on the staff of the "Special Survey"
under his cousin Lindsay Russell, Deputy Surveyor General. The party
reached Fort Garry early in August, 1874, coming through the States by
way of Fargo and Glyndon by rail, and thence by flat-bottomed-stern-
wheeled steamboat. This work of the Special Survey was mainly to estab-
lish Principal Meridians. Mr. MacNutt put in three summers at that work,
doing work in the bush, east of Lake of the Winds in the winter. They
established the 102 meridian, and the 106th. The work was slow, being
done principally by triangulation. As a large number of block men and
sub-division surveyors had been employed, and millions of acres outlined-
enough for fully half-a-million homesteaders-the work was stopped, and
a large number of surveyors, and hundreds of articled students were
thrown out of work. Mr. MacNutt therefore with A. J. McNeill, now
Indian Agent near Calgary, and Hugh Dennis, now dead, a son of Surveyor
General Dennis, took land north of what is now Minnedosa, then Tanner's
Bibliography follows:
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