12 The Lands of the Mohawk Institute: Robert Ashton and the Demise of the New England Company’s “Station,” 1891–1922

William Acres

Under the guidance of the New England Company (NEC), a Protestant missionary society that founded the Mohawk Institute in the 1830s, Robert Ashton served as superintendent and principal of the Mohawk Institute from 1872 to 1910. In addition to these two roles, Ashton had the additional role of NEC agent and trustee of lands and properties for the Company.¹ While his power derived from the educational side of his work, particularly at the Institute and Six Nations School Board, Ashton performed a great deal of hidden work—and exerted considerable influence—related to the lands and properties of the NEC’s “Grand River Station.” The “management” of these lands by the Company reveal that it had an interest not only in educating the Six Nations but in appropriating their lands as well.

These “objects,” as they were called, were managed under trusts held by the NEC, governed according to its charitable status in England under the Charity Commission (from 1853). Oversight of Ashton’s daily work was generally fulfilled by the NEC’s governor and treasurer. There was copious additional correspondence going through the Company’s charter clerk—who was always a trained lawyer, skilled in English trusts. This was necessary. In addition to a yearly journal, bimonthly reports, and budgets and accounts, the NEC thought they were exercising sufficient control over their superintendent and the disposition of properties. Over the course of decades, the farm at the Mohawk Institute was expanded on the entrusted properties. These properties had been accumulated over time, specifically between 1836 and 1845, in the form of grants, with purchase, on what NEC minutes invariably referred to as “Indian Lands.”

Primarily, it was the 1845 grant of 9.93 acres where the old Mechanics’ Institute had stood, and on which the new Institute of 1858 was constructed, that is of most importance for understanding the school’s history. Adjacent to the northwest, crossed by the Grand River Navigation Company’s canal cut (1845) sat the Mohawk Glebe, given in surrender (by deeds held in London) in 1828, on which sat a substantial parsonage for a missionary “doing service” for the Six Nations.² According to their sights, each property near the Institute was held on “absolute title,” a recurring phrase in the archival record. These properties were augmented by a large plot of 200 acres, always referred to as the Manual Labour Lot. It was acquired in 1859 on the condition that the NEC occupied the land. That large, farmed property was not under trust, but the conditions for it were set down by the government. Thus, it was a hybrid estate in which the legal differences and expectations blurred during Ashton’s forty years of service. In total, there was a 430-acre property overseen by Ashton.

When Ashton arrived with his wife, Alice Turner Ashton, and their two small children in November 1872, his instructions were to report fully on the Institute. He was tasked with intensifying and expanding the farming operation by using as his base the existing seventy-acre farm with other pasturage areas long used by the farmer employed by the NEC, Robert Park. During Ashton’s tenure, the expansion of Brantford—especially after its 1891 annexation—virtually abutted the lands to the northwest and north. This greatly increased the land values and caught the interest of the wealthy NEC members and encouraged them into a kind of speculation. Ashton was instructed by the Company to fence and determine the exact extent of these lands. Brantford town officials wanted these properties for urban expansion and leisure areas and had begun sales. These were refused by Ashton as the protector of the Six Nations through the NEC with high government connections through NEC member Senator Amos Edwin Botsford.

But, as Brantford grew during the 1890s into a major manufacturing centre for the production of agricultural implements—mainly plows—the fenced fortress of the NEC lots of land became more porous.³ In large degree this was because the so-called Babcock Lot, a property not under the trust arrangement for “Civilizing and Christianizing” the Six Nations, consisting of thirty-three acres, was purchased in 1864 from an intestate farmer’s family and, as such, was freely and clearly the NEC’s to sell. Manufacturers saw this land as highly desirable for the construction of large factories as it ran along what became Mohawk Road with city and water access, close to the railway and the extension of urban utilities. Other than housing workers’ cottages, the Babcock Lot was never a part of the running of the school.

In the 1870s, several small strips of land running south of the Grand River Navigation Company’s canal were given to the NEC through high political intervention in Ottawa to solidify the whole area—the whole area as shown on Ashton’s 1910 “tracing map.”⁴ In 1902 the Babcock Lot was sold to the Cockshutt family, with additional acreage to their subsidiary, Adams Wagon, and partner Verity Plow, all within the ambit of the massive Massey-Harris consortium. By the beginning of the First World War, literally thousands of Brantfordians worked at these enterprises in shift work, many of them living in new adjacent neighbourhoods built in expectation of a complete annexation of the NEC properties.

Thus, the still visible extent of the Institute farming properties, as well the vast brownsite vacated by Brantford’s major industries sat beside each other, emblematic of differences in progress, wealth, and race. The situation put Robert Ashton in a dilemma. His daughter Minnie married a Cockshutt, William Foster. Foster was a member of Parliament and one of four sons of Ignatius Cockshutt, Brantford’s greatest capitalist and father of the hugely successful, internationally renowned Cockshutt Plow Company in 1877. The Cockshutts and their partners expanded operations requiring utilities, hydro, gas, railway spurs, and other industrial amenities of which the Institute was a secondary recipient—all of it organized by Ashton under the growing suspicion of the NEC over his involvement in these land transactions.

The lands of the Mohawk Institute were divested of the NEC by sales to the Six Nations in 1915 and subject to government litigation between 1919 and 1934. In part, these conflicts arose over disputed claims to title initiated by the Confederacy Council of the Six Nations; these conflicts were exacerbated by Ashton’s running of the school, which one member of the NEC described in 1908 as a “reformatory.” The tension between the city, the industrialists, the Six Nations, and the extraordinary burden of child labour required to keep it all going was, in effect, Ashton’s undoing.

Conflicts of Interest

Most of the population of the Six Nations was removed to reserve land before Ashton’s arrival. What he saw when he first arrived was about ten acres under cultivation where the 1858 Institute was built, with an additional sixty acres nearby. Ashton soon began to intensively farm the two-hundred-acre Manual Labour Lot as well. In addition to the farm operations on land under trusts, the Company had absolute title on the Babcock Lot. Over the 1890s and 1900s a contradictory policy, examined here, would be attempted: The Babcock Lot became a site of heavy industry. New legislation compelled expropriations for railways and other services needed by the new factories. All of it was complex and managed with increasing difficulty by an aging Ashton. At the same time, the reason for the Institute’s existence was the farm. By the 1900s, the Six Nations, especially the Confederacy Council, which had long questioned Ashton’s methods with their children, now began a serious questioning of the NEC’s right to title on all their properties, including the lands of the Mohawk Institute.

In 1889 a sizeable deputation of NEC members came to what they called their Grand River Station—schools, churches, parsonages, and the Mohawk Institute itself—and issued their superintendent, Ashton, a series of commands. Ashton was to get electricity brought to the Institute and was instructed to sell the Babcock Lot (32.9 acres). Further, the 1889 policy they drafted instructed Ashton to make inquiries to the deputy superintendent general of Indian Affairs about “what conditions, if any, a capitation grant similar to those allowed to the Shingwauk Home and other Indian Industrial Schools would be made by the Dominion Government.” Moreover, the Glebe itself, of which Ashton was one of the Company’s trustees, was to be divested. Ashton was to commence “transferring the Mohawk Glebe, exclusive of the brick yard, to the Department of Indian Affairs with a view to it being sold and the proceeds invested for the purposes of the trust.” The legality and process of this direction forms the spine in the ensuing problem of breaking an English trust for the use of the Canadian government. It would form the basis for litigation and claims to title for the next forty years.

Clearly, with talk of sales, the Mohawk Institute and adjacent properties were being eyed with a view to the NEC’s departure, sooner or later. At the very least, Ashton was to get the best financial settlements possible. All profits, by law, had to be put directly into the NEC’s so-called objects. The assumption was that sales and other expropriations would go back directly into the Institute—or in the case of the Mohawk Glebe, in accord with the original terms given by the Six Nations in 1828, to a missionary “doing service on the Six Nations.” But English trusts were slippery. Although American, Canadian, and German trusts were—even at this time—becoming far more precise about their terms, the NEC, as an English trust, could dispense their profits in the service of any—or new—“objects,” as long as the purpose was “Civilizing and Christianizing” the peoples for whom the objects were intended. By the end of Ashton’s tenure, a change in Company policy saw the Mohawk Institute be of far less importance than it previously had been to the NEC. Ashton, an agricultural dynamo based at the Mohawk Institute, was soon joined by an industrial dynamo immediately next door.

Today, the railway spurs, rights of way, and various urban extensions Ashton negotiated for the NEC, and for his son-in-law William Foster Cockshutt, can still be seen at the Woodland Cultural Centre in Brantford, located on the grounds of the former Mohawk Institute. Indeed, the extensive forty acres of industrial brownsite abutting the northerly end of the centre’s property was one of the largest manufacturing facilities in the British Empire. All of this was accomplished by Ashton—as agent and trustee of the NEC—more or less following the Company’s general directions.

In 1906, the NEC’s misgivings over the Mohawk Institute, and their work on the “Tuscarora Reserve,” came to a head: They had realized a significant profit on the sale of the Babcock Lot and, by English charitable law, now had to reinvest all of it in missions—but amendments in 1899 to the Company’s charter widened the geographic scope. Now, the Company could look to the West. Moreover, the NEC’s disenchantment with Indian residential and industrial schools meant their focus was increasingly on missions, perhaps day schools, on other reserves. In 1906, they talked with church leaders from Saskatchewan. At that time the questions opened for consultation included:

1. Having regard to the numbers, probable future, and state of civilization of the Indians in Canada is the money now spent at the Company’s Mohawk Institution and on the Tuscarora Reserve, being used to the best possible advantage?
2. Would you recommend any increased expenditure on the Tuscarora Reserve?⁵

What appeared nearly certain was a re-evaluation of the Institute and a move to build further churches on the Tuscarora Reserve. This was done on the recommendation of the Reverend James Leonard Strong, rector of the mission parish at Kenyengeh. It was a rebuke to Ashton’s Mohawk Institute. How had matters reached such a low ebb in the minds of the NEC where the Institute was concerned?

Industry, Mission, and Conflict

The industrial development of NEC lands marked an unexpected turn of events. Members of the Company in England were against any manner of industrial development on their freehold Babcock site, strongly recommending to Ashton that the Mohawk Glebe property be returned to the Six Nations if such a development were to be proposed. Ashton was to “take precautions against the land being used for an obnoxious manufacturing or other purpose which might become a nuisance.”⁶ By 1910–1912, massive industrial development had taken place. Between 1894 and 1912 the Company sold thirty-seven acres of the Glebe, slivers of the Manual Labour Lot, as well as the entire Babcock Lot.⁷

The encroaching city, the demands of the industrialists, and mounting complaints from Six Nations over lands and conditions at the Institute were all difficulties, any single one of which might have been met with negotiation, diplomacy, and resolution. But coming all together, with the First World War interrupting, the question of the NEC’s lands became a decisive issue in the history of the Mohawk Institute. Ashton had already made connections with Brantford residents who had great designs on the Babcock Lot. Whether or not the Company had full understanding of the desires and demands of the industrialists of Brantford remains open to speculation. Their presence would have benefits to the Mohawk Institute: electricity derived from the grid connecting the Canada Starch Company on the former Great Northern Railway Company canal; and a gas line from Dominion Natural Gas soon followed, albeit fitfully and inefficiently owing to problems with the companies and lines from Selkirk on Lake Erie. Subsequently, it would be replaced by gas wells on the southern edge of the Glebe supplying Brantford. Available, cheap power, gravel (for drainage), and a sound water table commended the neighbourhood to industry.⁸

In 1902, the Cockshutts bought the Babcock property and developed it quickly. Seven years later, another section of NEC land was purchased by Verity Plow Company with Adams Wagon, a Cockshutt subsidiary. These purchases indicate that the Company had been completely persuaded about the increasing value of their adjacent properties at the Mohawk Institute, Manual Labour Lot, and the Mohawk Glebe, should their sale ever be realized. The companies on the Babcock Lot were giants in the making, partners of the Massey-Harris manufacturing consortium. W. F. Cockshutt, Ashton’s son-in-law through marriage to his daughter Minnie, had been critically important in making the Company’s properties exempt from further political struggles.⁹ Four days after their marriage, the first “capitation” monies of sixty dollars per student were granted by the Department of Indian Affairs (DIA) to the Mohawk Institute. Cockshutt’s action was not selfless. The DIA’s tenders for machinery as part of westward expansion in Canada’s relatively new “reserved” lands may have added impetus to the Brantford efforts.¹⁰ With increasing unease, through Ashton, the NEC fell under the influence of various wealthy Canadians.

Forced sales to service the massive factory shops with railways and other necessities, sewers, further power and gas, sidewalks, and other modes of transportation soon followed. The Railway Act of 1904, and expropriations of “Indian Lands” in 1906, were not done with NEC cognizance or approval. These sales were, in effect, beyond Company control, as responsibility for them had passed into the hands of the manufacturers who owned the Babcock Lot. Cockshutt, for example, forced expropriation of 11.07 acres of the Manual Labour Lot in 1909, with a further 14.6 acres going to Cockshutt off the Glebe Lot. Here were the first glimmers that the Canadian government was going to exercise a heavy hand in Brantford and at Six Nations.

The NEC had no legal right to any such movement on the unceded Manual Labour Farm. On every conveyance, Ashton was scrupulous in notifying the NEC of terms, so the Company’s officers could perfect the leases for signing by the trustees in the form of indentures. On each deal, Ashton notified the local land registry. He provided the calculation of “Indian Interest” monies on the expropriations, which were duly paid to the Indian Office at Brantford. All of this he found legally sufficient.

But slivers of land were also sold to complete the railway spurs on the southern Mohawk Glebe and Babcock Lot to service Cockshutt’s factories. Only NEC members knew the exact contents of the various leasing arrangements Ashton had made on their lands.¹¹ By 1910, most of the southern part of the Glebe had been open to expropriations of this kind, following federal Railway Act stipulations, with legal rulings by A. D. Hardy.¹² Hardy, alas, approved the expropriation of this section of the Manual Labour Lot to the Municipality of Brantford for a sewer. The monies received went to support St. George’s, the NEC-run residential school at Lytton, which was part of the NEC’s mission in British Columbia. This caused serious misgiving with C. Augustus Webb, the NEC’s charter clerk.¹³ He wrote the following to the Company’s treasurer, Herbert Henry Browell: “I am far from happy about the £1463 received by sale of part of the Manual Labour Farm.”¹⁴ These properties were directly under the Indian Office jurisdiction and should have gone to the Institute for purely moral reasons. But the NEC could disperse funds under trust “objects” as it saw fit—it could not be dictated to by outside forces, not even by the Government of Canada—so long as no laws were broken.

There was obvious dissent among the NEC members about the decision to support the Lytton school in British Columbia, although it was never openly articulated. Perhaps the British Columbia mission’s priority suggested an exit from the difficulties at Brantford.

Ashton was obviously furious, unwilling to touch the matter or this money, perhaps intuiting that his legacy was coming to an end: “for some reason best known to himself, Ashton does not want the dividends paid [from a related sale of lands on the Mohawk Glebe] to himself . . . so if you authorize me to request that he should receive the dividends in the same way as he receives the rents for the various houses and land—paying the proceeds through the accounts—I would act accordingly.”¹⁵ He must have known in the Company’s special meetings and conversations about what to do with these windfalls that none of the financial proceeds were coming to the Mohawk Institute.

Such expropriations for railways were impossible for the NEC to reject; they were under federal statute. They were symbolic of the Company’s loss of control. The extent of properties needed by the industries reached a worrying extent with a further “forced” sale of property to Verity Plow of 14.886 acres for a railway spur under the 1904 Railway Act and 1906 amendment from “Indian Lands.” Lacking Cockshutt’s close connection to the government, Verity’s deed was secured externally through lobbying by the Verity family’s adviser, Sir Melvin Jones, a man of great influence who had lobbied the government separately, pausing only for a courtesy visit to the members of the NEC when he was in London. The Company’s shocked response was that this conveyance had taken place largely without their knowledge.¹⁶

Normally, the fund’s sales or expropriations would have been applied directly to the Grand River Station, to the Mohawk Institute, or Six Nations parishes, “for the purposes of the Trust.” But Company intentions were wearing thin with the Mohawk Institute and with Ashton. The funds were certainly plentiful and required immediate reinvestment in charitable “objects.” Only now, without any local knowledge, the focus was on the West, on British Columbia—specifically St. George’s, the NEC-run residential school at Lytton—as well as building new churches for the Six Nations.

The NEC mission at Lytton began in the 1890s following an earlier fledgling mission at Kuper Island. It was begun by the Reverend R. J. Roberts, a missionary who went west after working at Cayuga Station on the Six Nations’ territory. There was an idea that a girls’ school, All Hallows, might be joined to it, so new buildings and resources were needed. Lytton had the additional advantage of not having difficult conditions on lands; nor was there an activist Indigenous community nearby. Rising NEC interest in the Lytton school paralleled Ashton’s demise at the Mohawk Institute. This caused mounting troubles within the NEC.

A Point of Crisis: The End of the NEC

It is not entirely clear that even Ashton grasped at the end of 1910 the full extent of what the NEC was then contemplating. They wanted permission to do one of three things: (1) sell the Glebe (this could have only been to the Six Nations); (2) buy ten acres of the Manual Labour Farm adjacent to the Institute lot; or (3) leave the Institute entirely. This is clear from barrister W. F. Webster’s private communication on 7 February 1911 to the NEC governor, John Walker Ford, calling for an emergency meeting of the members. Both men seemed willing to withhold the full extent of the NEC’s plans:

At any rate it is a matter which the Company should decide. All that has been decided up to date is that Blake [a lawyer] should be asked to obtain powers for the [NEC] to buy or sell the remainder of the Mohawk Glebe and the Manual Labour Farm. The Company has not decided that full information should be given of materials which do not appear to be connected with their proposal nor as to their intention to make the Mohawk less “permanent.”¹⁷

The NEC had not abandoned their view of leaving the Institute entirely. Instead, they wanted to push up the value of the Mohawk Institute lot itself in a proposed sale—to be affected when the ten acres of the Manual Labour Lot were added to the ten acres of the Mohawk Institute, a twenty-acre parcel the NEC could buy, and, more importantly, sell, freehold. A 1909 note made clear what was being withheld from all but the NEC members: “That as lately as 1903 the Company have seriously considered the desirability of buying the Glebe themselves.”¹⁸ As the governor wrote to charter clerk Webb, in strictest confidence, “The bit we want is part of the Manual Labour Lot which we should want in selling the Institute but which probably the Government would be unwise to sell us & so enhance the price of our freehold against themselves.”¹⁹ Ashton’s empire had already, in NEC minds, been divided into small pieces. The more pressing question was whether any of these plans were legal.

To address this, the NEC actively pursued lawyer Blake’s counsel on how the Mohawk Glebe could be released or sold. Blake was very pessimistic when he eventually saw the full panoply of the trusts. He refused to engage. Blake realized that all the accounting, past and present, done on all NEC properties would have to be precisely tabulated. He knew the NEC wanted out of the Mohawk Institute, yet the trust was another matter. By 22 February 1911, barrister W. F. Webster clearly felt that the Company was “under attack.” Canadians, he mused, writing to NEC Governor John Walker Ford, were intractable over the Glebe: “in case after your time or after Ashton’s death” another such attack was mounted; at least there had been a dress rehearsal.²⁰

Blake’s refusal to assist was seen by the NEC as the action of an enemy. The Company saw themselves as victims of political aggression by the Six Nations and abandoned by the DIA. What they did not fully appreciate was the depth of the mess Ashton had got them into over the deals he had transacted over the twenty years since the Cockshutt connection had been made. Ashton had achieved the NEC’s supreme position. When briefing Blake in December 1910 on the prospect of selling the Mohawk Glebe (he demurred), Ashton’s encyclopedic knowledge of their arrangements over the last forty years was thought to be airtight: “they have so high [an] opinion of his knowledge of the conditions which govern the questions affecting Indian Lands, they feel clearly of [the] opinion that you ought to see the letter [outlining all land deals on the Glebe and Manual Labour Lot] in case you desire to communicate.”²¹

The reality was not as certain: By 1908 Ashton had serious health issues. His signature was barely legible. His son Nelles was sent as his power of attorney as trustee to London in 1909 for important conveyances as his father was unable to sign.²² Now, pressing legal questions about NEC land holdings around the Institute demanded precise answers the NEC were unable to provide. The Company was clearly anxious. After only five official visits between 1837 and 1889, a further five were made in 1902, 1903, 1904, 1908, and 1910.²³ In 1913, taking full measure with hindsight of their predicament, Webb wrote the following to Governor Ford: “No doubt we are suffering the sins of our Fathers and it is amazing the Rev. R. Ashton should not have taken every precaution in getting the consent of the Indian Department before the Sales took place.”²⁴

Ashton never felt he had needed the DIA’s approval on anything. Framing his position on the land deals now as a sin of omission rather than of commission, Ashton was, thus, immediately relieved of his charge at St. Paul’s, H.M. Chapel of the Mohawks. While he stayed on as an NEC trustee, his power lapsed. Cockshutt, in turn, failed to gain any support for a fledgling parliamentary bill in 1913 that would have allowed NEC trustees to sell the lands if all proceeds were invested immediately in Canadian missions.²⁵ This was the signal for the bishop of Huron, David Williams, to “ride rough-shod” over the NEC pressing a (false) claim as trustee on all of the Company’s entrusted lands.²⁶ In short, the Company’s time as sole actor was over.

The new deputy superintendent of Indian Affairs, Duncan Campbell Scott, seized his advantage in 1913 by personally taking up the cause of the Confederacy Council, which in 1912–14 proposed a plan for purchase of the Mohawk Glebe through their legal counsel, primarily A. G. Chisholm. They radically altered the complexion of the Mohawk Institute, a long-standing project, and introduced a counteroffensive to the NEC’s incessant stonewalling over the production of the right to title on properties past and present. Here began the unravelling of what had begun a century before. Duncan Campbell Scott, in his first address to the Six Nations as deputy superintendent general, on 2 December 1913,

stated that he felt the responsible position of deciding this matter, and now that he was adopted as one of the Six Nations they could count on him to do the fair thing with their matters, he wants them to feel that they have a friend at Headquarters and hoped that when Providence [had] seen fit to take him from office it would be better and he intended to leave the Six Nations better than he found them.²⁷

The chiefs reciprocated this sentiment, and supported Scott entirely.²⁸ But, they put direct conditions on their Glebe purchase:

they also desire that some change might be made in the workings of the Mohawk Institute so as to bring about better results for the amount of money spent on the Institution, as they were doing far more for the advancement of their people, by giving them Education on the Reserve with much less expense and would suggest that the Government take over this School and conduct it as an Orphan School for Indian Children of Ontario, also provide a home for pupils attending the higher schools at Brantford.²⁹

By 14 April 1914, they had concluded the following:

The Council after carefully reconsidering the matter of the Glebe lot at Brantford originally containing 220 acres, and in view of the use by the missionaries, and the New England Company during the long period of 87 years they must have derived enormous benefits and profits from these lands, moreover they have disposed of some 45 or 46 acres to various companies and got some $22598.90.³⁰

The Canadian government, not seeing the Charity Commission as higher in authority, began an “amicable” dispute over this amount. The number was calculated from proceeds the Company had received from expropriations on the Glebe lands already, and subtracted from an arbitrary sale price of $50,000 fixed by Scott at the DIA.³¹ The NEC’s solicitor, Willoughby Staples Brewster, protested that the Company had never offered the Glebe for sale, nor did they want any money for it. As Webb told new Mohawk Institute principal, C. M. Turnell, “surely it follows that if the Company have a good title to sell they have at least a good one to keep.”³² Scott’s agreement with the Six Nations forced the NEC quitclaim of $50,000 in the autumn of 1915. Cockshutt’s abortive proposed bill of 1913 would have seen the Company be allowed release, to sell and buy. But this merely drew further bad odour around the NEC at the Six Nations; it was, in effect, twenty years too late.

Facing the Government of Canada, members of the Company deemed the prospect of litigation unwise, complex, trans-imperial, and very expensive. The third option—for the NEC to leave the Mohawk Institute entirely—was probably their longest-held desire. But, after many consultations with lawyers in both Canada and England, it was deemed impossible by legal means without political support. It appeared, then, that the Canadian government’s plan would be to remove the properties from the NEC’s jurisdiction with or, as it happened, without due regard whatsoever to the Company’s legal trust position under the English Charity Commissioners.

Such a move would erode the NEC’s ability to support the Mohawk Institute. There had never been a moment when the students’ labour was absolutely necessary to run the school, especially after the capitation grants began in 1891. The NEC was being forced out of its charitable “object,” the lands returning to the Six Nations in right of the Crown, thus bringing the running of the farm—and, thus, the Mohawk Institute—under complete oversight. This was antagonistic to NEC thinking, as well as a violation of their trusts. Without such objects—lands, buildings, teachers, equipment, supplies, food, etc.—they were unable to serve the people for whom the “objects” were intended.

There was a very practical dilemma here. In 1915, during the Reverend Cyril Mae Turnell’s first year as superintendent of the Mohawk Institute, he put it succinctly: Without the Glebe, the school could only expand eastward onto freehold farms.³³ Constant development was eroding the farmland: “New land will have to be acquired if the Institution is to justify its existence as an Industrial School”; and among the Confederacy Council the “party in power” did not favour the Church of England, regarding them as a patriarchal artifact.³⁴ There were thoughts of a boys’ school, separate from the twenty-acre Mohawk Institute, possibly retained for the girls’ school, given the likely loss of all of the farm properties. This was never done, despite various schemes.³⁵

Matters did not go straightforwardly for the Six Nations with Scott in charge. The chiefs’ condition that all NEC titles be searched and made good before the balance was paid was never met. Scott acted alone and released the second tranche in 1919 to the balance of $50,000 by making sure to keep this knowledge from the Six Nations Council of Chiefs. Chief Asa Hill, secretary of the Council at Six Nations, replied to A. G. Chisholm’s query on 5 June 1920, referring to the release of the final funds from the sale for the Mohawk Glebe, paid to the NEC, that “Mr. Scott has at no time written me concerning the settlement of the Mohawk Institute Lot” (meaning the Glebe).³⁶ None of the Glebe funds the NEC received went to the Mohawk Institute, nor to the maintenance of a missionary at Six Nations.

Scott, the bishop of Huron, and many others wanted to know what the NEC was going to do with the proceeds from the Glebe sale “on the subject of the possible enlargement of the Institute.” Rumours against the NEC flew when the monies from the Glebe sale went largely to the new mission at Lytton. Turnell was $3,500 in debt at his dismissal, a sum easily cleared by the monies.³⁷ An important link between Six Nations’ demands about conditions at the Mohawk Institute and the future of the Company’s lands was fractured.

Filling the Vacuum Left by the NEC: Ashton’s Legacy

Bad faith abounded. Urban expansion, and the sheer political will required to continue the Ashton system, conflicted. The intensive child labour practised on the Institute farm, and the demands of industrialists—especially in Ashton’s own family—met headlong with the litigation arising from the Confederacy Council in 1913. It was a body uniquely ignored at every turn throughout Ashton’s entire tenure. No example of negotiation or capitulation to their wants and policies is recorded in Ashton’s work. The aftermath of the Ashton years was characterized by far worse than mere stubbornness. The cruelty and severity that lay behind his endlessly optimistic accounts of expansion, cultivation of lands, and student achievements were revealed in a series of events before the Institute was finally leased to the DIA in February 1922.

Running the Institute as a massive farm, based on a for profit-framework imported from the English industrial school system, had beggared the energies and resources of the students. It had strained the patience and temper of the Confederacy Council, which despaired of the lack of education and advancement the Mohawk Institute and day schools were able to provide. This was a far larger, Canadian policy issue. But, on the Six Nations it found a local target with plenty of obnoxious examples on which to focus. Ashton’s militaristic ideal of perfect order, efficient production, and a heavy emphasis on work over education had irritated and incensed leaders of the Six Nations Confederacy Council and parents alike. Conditions at the Institute were very poor. The building in 1903 had been done without any “extras,” stretching the $18,000 in insurance to its capacity and very little beyond.

The combination of ill-treatment of students, poor rations, and bad living conditions only drew further ire. The Six Nations Confederacy Council’s demands over conditions at the Institute were of great moment—and their records, and that of a dissenting NEC principal, Reverend Cyril Mae Turnell, furnished evidence of a grave situation. The Institute had essentially become a Victorian agricultural reformatory under which Ashton descended further into cruelty. Documents created between Ashton’s retirement on 31 December 1910 and the lease to the Department of Indian Affairs in 1922 expose much about the facts of his regime, especially the human cost hidden beneath the photographs and balance sheets, which did so much to sustain the endeavour.³⁸

Ashton would not have known of this; his dementia was already advancing in 1912. But Scott’s immediate plan was to cultivate alliances against the NEC, an easy task given the legacy of Ashton and his son Nelles. After all, given Ashton’s approach to Indigenous education and policies more widely, this medieval trust under an English charity can only have seemed an unwelcome and occasionally noisome relic of vanished world. But Scott did like Turnell. The men became friendly with each other, which provoked hostility and mystification among the Company members, who might have been otherwise disposed to help Turnell further had war, politics, and the problem of the Glebe not been on the table.

When the bishop of Huron, David Williams, was invited by the NEC to inspect Turnell’s Mohawk Institute in 1917, he noted that everything had changed from the previous Ashton regime. Earlier, Williams criticized the management of the school as lacking in pastoralia: “the essence of the change is that severity has been replaced by kindness,” the attitude was “free and open, and even smiling countenance, and pupils no longer are eager to run away.”³⁹ There were smiles, laughter, and a general light-heartedness to the place. Turnell’s unpalatable reflections on his predecessors in the Ashton family were too grim. Their “chronic alcoholism” could be overlooked, but the “severity” of their ways could not. The “cheesepairing policy of my predecessors was not real economy.”⁴⁰

Bishop Williams found little evidence of training, but masses of endless, pointless “Drudgery.” The students were working—for what amount is never stated—at outside farms, for the boys, and, for the girls, as maids in great Brantford houses, including the Cockshutts’. These concerns resonated with Chief Josiah Hill and others who had written to the NEC on 11 September 1913 complaining that students were “poorly fed” and “suffering indignities from the staff,” demanding “an impartial investigation.”⁴¹ This was determined to be criminally actionable on Nelles Ashton’s part. With Turnell, as Colonel Andrew Thorburn Thompson reported in 1923, there was a conscious rejection of previous methods, solitary confinement, for example, having been abandoned about “a decade before.”⁴²

It was not long before Turnell was accused repeatedly of financial mismanagement. This rankled the NEC, but his popularity with the government and the Six Nations authorities rose. Turnell was simply unable to stay within the amounts budgeted by the NEC. He was constantly asking for more and more resources. Within this context, Alice Ashton Boyce supplied background information to Company charter clerk C. Augustus Webb. Boyce sketched a slovenly and poor agricultural practice on all fronts—corn left in the fields all winter, now rented from Verity Plow Company—an affront to the legacy of her father Robert Ashton’s enviable farming methods. The children at the Institute were apparently released somewhat from the endless labours required to keep up the farming. They were seen out of uniform in town. Students were, according to Alice Ashton Boyce, running the place. Webb therefore had asked her to “let us know generally how the Mohawk Institution is being carried on, and whether in your opinion the children are being educated too extravagantly for their future life on the Reserve, taking into account their future life there, and whether Mr. Turnell is employing too many teachers.”⁴³

Boyce’s cousin William Foster Cockshutt backed everything she said. Doubtless, information was also coming from the sewing mistress, Susan Hardie, who was very critical of Turnell’s management. No one, it appears, directly addressed Webb’s question about the teaching. As the NEC’s Canadian commercial agent since 1913—meant to serve as a brake on Ashton Nelles—Cockshutt’s word carried enormous weight with the Company. Discipline, the NEC lectured Turnell, had to be maintained on all fronts: “But you must understand that the Indians are a very different class of boy: their ideas of morality are peculiar; and therefore, while we want you to be kind to them, as far as possible—you must maintain discipline—which is a factor in every well-regulated school.”⁴⁴

Against these loaded accusations, implying luxurious training, Ernest Mathews, NEC treasurer, was mentoring Turnell in expensive agricultural methods, many of which were from the perspective of a major landowner on an English estate. The state of farming had fallen badly behind contemporary practices and needed to be revised drastically. The cost was prohibitive, however, and there was a disagreement among NEC members as to whether “experimental” farming was a waste.

The NEC was, justifiably, upset by a series of damning events indicative of poor regulation. Niblock, the boys’ master, had just been dismissed in June 1916 for “unjustifiable and excessive corporal punishment” after an altercation where it had been “considered necessary to import a constable into the school.” This occurred while the Turnells were on an unannounced holiday in Bermuda. Two deaths in rapid succession left Turnell open to serious questions. The NEC was furious they had not been informed by Turnell of the drowning of a boy, Edward Smith, on 29 March 1916. Was a responsible adult present? The drowning of Robert Gibson in the unfenced pool of water at the starch factory a few months later was a worse shock, and there were criminal proceedings against the owners for negligence. “You are succeeding to the headship of a school which has been carried on under a too severe standard of discipline,” Turnell was instructed, but the “Indian” boys, Turnell was informed, could not be considered the same as the boys in “Public Schools” here, with honour and other privileges given by their “Masters.”

Turnell countered that the Ashton method was obsolete. It was beyond his ethics “to tax the children beyond what I know, from my training, that they have physical and mental ability to do.”⁴⁵ By the end of 1917, Turnell’s demise was inevitable. To Scott’s initial consternation, the Company fired Turnell in early 1918. It was unclear if the Institute could continue without having to rely on profits from agriculture.⁴⁶

Wrangling to Control the Mohawk Institute

This was the situation when the London, Ontario, barrister Andrew Gordon Chisholm advanced. His vast compilation of primary materials on the Grand River Navigation Company and other work gave him some facility with the archives at the DIA relating to the Six Nations.⁴⁷ He was, thus, great friends with important Confederacy chiefs, particularly Asa Hill. With his preliminary findings he persuaded the DIA and the Secretary of State and Minister of the Interior Sir Arthur Meighen to pursue litigation against the NEC in 1919 over the Manual Labour Lot—the loss of which, in February 1922, by Chief Justice Audette at the Exchequer Court of Canada, was based on a faulty grant of 1859, the two-hundred-acre plot farmed so intensively under Ashton, apparently void ab initio (from the beginning).⁴⁸ Further, by 1916 the NEC had realized the Glebe was no longer theirs; and the “occupation of use” of the two hundred acres of the lot, critical to the far-reaching farming under Ashton’s design, was under even more scrutiny. Schemes for new ways forward were hatched. Not surprisingly, the NEC was relieved about the fact that everything might be purchased by the DIA, including the ten acres, the Institute, and outbuildings, as long as they retained “control.”⁴⁹ The word “control” was never defined.

These terms exposed a crisis of sorts. If the government would not buy the Mohawk Institute, the NEC was left with the extremely expensive prospect of both capital improvements and daily maintenance—all on reduced land holdings. While the lands adjacent were being divested, the Canadian government refused to purchase the Mohawk Institute and the surrounding ten acres, thus compounding the NEC dilemma: “That by the sale of the Mohawk Glebe Farm the most profitable land for supplying the produce to the Institute and for farming has been taken away.” Experimental farming was to cease, immediately. It might be suitable elsewhere, “where the Indians are not in the advanced state of civilization as the districts from which the pupils of the Mohawk Institute were drawn.”⁵⁰ Typically, this paradox of the “peculiar” morality of the boys contrasted with constant refrains of “advancement” among the Six Nations; the blandishments of Brantford were “detrimental to the missionary work of the Institution,” and Turnell’s efforts “too extravagant.” Was twenty acres enough for a market garden at a girls’ school on the existing site from the Institute and a bit of the Manual Labour Lot? Could two hundred acres be found elsewhere for a boys’ school?⁵¹ These were the ideas mooted by the NEC and their friends. The uncertainty continued until 1921, when, in the summer, Principal Alice Boyce had no idea under whose management the new school term would begin.⁵² Odd as it appears, with Ashton’s demise, the NEC lost its compass at the exact moment it lost use of the lands.

Duncan Campbell Scott wanted the entirety of the Mohawk Institute properties returned to the Six Nations, while refusing to allow the NEC to sell anything more than the Glebe. The church would assume some manner of oversight, spiritual and material, of Six Nations’ mission and the Grand River Station. But DIA control moved forward once Scott supported Chisholm’s documentation for a case to remove from NEC the Manual Lot, the unceded portion in 1919. The department took up exactly where the NEC’s weakness left them exposed financially. On the legal side, Scott forbade the Six Nations from making an adjoining legal motion through Chisholm from Ohsweken in the Manual Labour Lot case in 1920. Then Scott agreed to Chisholm’s taking the case forward, but only on behalf of the Department of Justice and the DIA, not the Six Nations. In this way, every document and letter were under Scott’s surveillance.⁵³ Moreover, at no juncture were the Six Nations allowed into, or notified of, any legal proceedings from 1918. Chisholm’s anger over the exclusion from legal action by the Confederacy Council of the Six Nations galvanized his anger against the NEC. What was being established was Scott’s and the DIA’s authority in deciding what was to the “benefit” of the Six Nations.⁵⁴ As Blake remarked in 1911, “The matter seems to me to be broadening out much beyond what was contemplated when the matter was first entered upon.”⁵⁵ This was an understatement.

The years 1919–22 were studded with legal land mines over NEC properties. Seeing the potential for dire financial loss, the bishop of Huron tried sweeping in to collect and manage his own “Residential School.” He did so with the reluctant assistance of the field secretary of the Missionary Society of the Church of England in Canada (MSCC), Canon Lewis Gould.⁵⁶ Together they tried to obtain the Institute for the Anglican Church of Canada, which managed in some form another seventeen or eighteen schools. But on inspection, in the fall of 1920, the two men found the school in appalling condition.⁵⁷ Henry Weld, the NEC’s English solicitor, coached by Alice Boyce, had meanwhile reported cheerily a few months before that all looked well.⁵⁸ The financial costs were beyond the capability of either the diocese or the MSCC to take over. Immediate repairs were estimated at $40,000.⁵⁹ But the shortfall was already so severe that the DIA had taken over financial management beginning on 1 October 1920.⁶⁰

Williams remained stubborn over the Institute: As chair of the Anglican Church’s “Forward Movement,” whereby the residential schools became the focus of Anglican mission, he was furious at this juncture. He accused the NEC of double-crossing him as he waited for the MSCC and internal diocesan approvals on a June 1920 arrangement to take over running the Mohawk Institute on condition no lands or properties were disposed of; this set him against Scott.⁶¹ Thereafter, he continued to insert the diocese’s claims despite their being groundless.

In the summer of 1921 Sir James Lougheed, superintendent general of Indian Affairs, intervened in the chaos. He ordered Scott to go to London to meet with the NEC, where he was entertained at the House of Lords in August 1921. Everything was on the table. Litigation over the Manual Labour Lot had been already scheduled at the Exchequer Court on historical evidence provided by Chisholm; leases for St. George’s, Lytton, and the Mohawk Institute were negotiated. An arrangement was made whereby an “Anglican” or Church of England presence would be maintained, the NEC paying a stipend of £1,000 for a chaplain, or principal, who would celebrate as needed at the Mohawk Chapel.⁶² The Mohawk Institute itself would be leased for $1,000 a year to the DIA. The bishop’s insistence that he enjoyed an ex officio trusteeship as gained in some manner of inheritance from an original trustee, Bishop John Strachan of Toronto, was later found to be false. But it did mean that the bishop installed a notion in the minds of subsequent principals that the bishop of Huron was a person of some consequence in the operations of the Institute, all without basis.

An attempt by the bishop of Huron to take over all the NEC’s work—including the Mohawk Institute—had met with the disquieting and potentially extremely expensive problem of unsettled land titles. In this, no doubt, the DIA seemed far better positioned to answer and administer issues. It must be noticed, almost surreptitiously, that the initial legal campaign, lodged with Chisholm by the chiefs and put in strategic execution from 1912 beginning with the Glebe, had passed entirely from the latter’s hands in these years. Extensive litigation against the Company on lines anticipated by Webb over failure to notify the DIA of sales of “Indian Lands” and other financial lapses dating back to the 1870s effectively removed the NEC from direct oversight of any mission between 1922 and 1934. Decades went by with annual NEC assistance to the parishes, forming new relationships with clergy at Six Nations to the present day.

The Six Nations, on the other hand, would have no say in the matters they had raised with the NEC over the conduct of the Ashton regime at the Mohawk Institute, culminating in the 1913 conviction of Nelles Ashton, and expanding into other properties and purposes of the English charity. This was largely an attempt by Scott and the DIA to subdue and control the politics of the 1920s. It would be Duncan Campbell Scott and the Indian Department who would succeed the NEC in providing oversight of Indigenous children at the Mohawk Institute.

The Manual Labour Lot was, thus, not really open to adverse possession by occupation, at least once Chisholm contested it.⁶³ When the Institute finally sold its remaining 9.93 acres in 1965, after much wrangling, for $100,000, the NEC was still pressing its historical accounting over improvements, buildings, and other “objects” directed by its trusts dating back beyond Canadian Confederation. Other than minor involvement over the renewal of their lease between 1945 and 1947, and occasional visits, the NEC dissolved its Special Committee for Missions in 1932 when it paid the tax penalty to the Department of Indian Affairs. All of it had been accomplished entirely without the “concurrence” of the Six Nations.

Notes

1. 1 This was not unusual—his predecessor, the Reverend Abraham Nelles, and local merchant William Richardson and others had taken on these positions acting as land agents as well as trustees. In practical terms, all legal surveys, conveyances, and other sales were done by the agent. When transferring funds or signing indentures for the sales etc. these men were acting as trustees.

2. 2 The sole repository for all the materials relating to the historic sales, conveyances, deeds, and indentures referred to in this chapter is at the London Metropolitan Archives (LMA) in the New England Company’s holdings—CLC 540/MS. A box of five bundles, LMA CLC/540/MS 08005 of uncatalogued materials has been reconstructed for the Company’s trusts and accounting of them by the author and Matteo Clarkshon Maciel on a SSHRC Insight Development Grant, 2018–21. These papers were in large part gathered in 1928 for the Government of Canada’s litigation against the New England Company by Gower Edwards, an agent bonded for archival legal searches by the Charles Russell Company of London, England, hired by the Departments of Indian Affairs and Justice. As that litigation never went to trial, as settled in 1928, no judgment was given by the Exchequer (now the Federal) Court of Canada and the materials remained sealed there. The complexity of these materials has been reduced to a few salient examples of sales between 1908 and 1912 (below) for the sake of brevity and clarity.

3. 3 From the 1870s leases were given to Workman and Watts brickyard off the Mohawk Glebe on the southern edge, as well as a lease to the Canada Starch Company. There were gas wells sunk in 1907 near these concerns. This chapter does not investigate the full extent of these leases.

4. 4 Robert Ashton’s tracing map for the Company relating to land sales and expropriations, 1891–1910, CLC 540/MS 08005, LMA, based on the original properties of the Institute Lot, the Manual Labour Lot (1859), the Mohawk Glebe (to the upper end, 1828, 1845), and the so-called freehold of the Babcock Lot (1864) purchased by Abraham Nelles for the Company. The industrial developments on the Babcock began in the 1890s and reached their zenith after the Cockshutt Plow Company purchase in 1902 and subsequent improvements thereafter to 1910.

5. 5 “Committee appointed to consider and report upon the matters of the disposal of Surplus Income and Possible Future Spheres of work,” minutes, 10 June 1908, CLC/540/MS 07940, LMA. The questionnaire had been sent out to interested parties in late 1906—clearly Strong’s view was the favourite; so was the lobbying being done by Archdeacon G. E. Lloyd of Saskatchewan.

6. 6 “With regard to the remaining portion of the Glebe, I have been instructed to write to Mr. Van Koughnet and inform him that the Company are prepared to adopt the course which was suggested by him at your own and the Commissioners’ interview with him at Ottawa on the 24th Sept. last, viz. to advise the trustees to transfer the property to the Indian Department to be dealt with in the Company’s interest. You will no doubt forward the amended draft deed of transfer, which you were instructed to have prepared as soon as it is ready for the consideration of the Company.” Charter Clerk W. J. Venning to Ashton, 18 December 1889, fol. 783r, CLC 540/MS07928/004, LMA.

7. 7 Benson in 1895 thought the Babcock was 59 acres; the actual size was 32.9 acres. Already in 1894, the very important railway right-of-way had gone through allowing the construction of massive manufacturing works. Report, Indian Affairs on the Mohawk Institute, File 7825, Pt. 1A, Vol. 2006, RG 10, Library and Archives Canada (LAC).

8. 8 Flooding continued to be a problem on the properties. In the 1910s, the Company agreed to have a five-acre stretch of the old canal near the gravel pit filled in for this purpose; and Brantford’s leading industrialists lobbied for a large series of dykes to be built along the edge of the properties, without success. CLC MS 540 07920/9, LMA.

9. 9 The Cockshutts applied for a building permit in 1902, with about twenty further permits granted by 1909 for the expansion of their factories. All of the expropriations for rail spurs and rights-of-way followed. See the documents for these expropriations and purchases, CLC 540/MS 080050, LMA, which contains the discovery materials for litigation against the NEC between 1908 and 1934.

10. 10 Douglas J. Leighton, “A Victorian Civil Servant at Work: Lawrence Van Koughnet and the Canadian Indian Department,” in As Long as the Sun Shines and the Water Flows, ed. Ian Getty and Antoine Lussier (UBC Press, 1983), 114n52. Leighton is especially illuminating on the decline of J. T. Gilkison in the 1880s, pp. 112–13.

11. 11 The Company kept notoriously poor records of these properties.

12. 12 See, for example, a railway expropriation of 10.88 acres in 1908 for Verity Plow off the southern edge of the Glebe, dated 6 March 1908, CLC 540/080050, LMA, as it appears on Ashton’s tracing map.

13. 13 Webb had been charter secretary following the very long service of W. J. Venning—a relation of many Company members—and was not entirely clear himself on the precise nature of the properties. At one time he panicked because he thought the Mohawk Glebe expropriations were not under trust—but they were. These many conveyances created financial intricacies in the form of new sub-trusts necessary to wrap up profits from expropriations whereby monies were sent for expenditures within the Company’s normal remit.

14. 14 Herbert Henry Browell (1856–1915), treasurer, barrister, related to many Company members through his mother, Charlotte Busk. His father Edward Mash Browell, a Company member, had been instrumental in hiring Ashton as he was one of the Board of Visitors at Feltham Industrial School, where Ashton was a schoolmaster between 1861 and 1872.

15. 15 Correspondence, p. 423, CLC 540/07928/6, LMA. G. A. Ditcham, principal of St. George’s Lytton wrote to the Company stating he could purchase four hundred acres of land for $2,000 at that exact juncture. Correspondence, p. 438, CLC 540/07928/6, LMA. Webb seems to have felt the profit should have gone directly to the Institute or the missions to the Six Nations. Clearly Ashton felt very strongly that the profits should have been reinvested into the Institute, but he had virtually no say in the matter, even after forty years of service.

16. 16 Jones travelled to London to lobby the Company personally on behalf of Verity in 1910. The sale realized $15,000 off the Glebe with an additional 1.144 acres off the Manual Labour Farm of about $1,000. David Roberts, “Sir Melvin Jones,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 14, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/jones_lyman_melvin_14E.html.

17. 17 Webster to John Walker Ford, 7 February 1911, CLC MS 540/080050, LMA. Webster was willing to divulge all the trusts and properties and their terms to Blake but was certain it would be voted down by the members.

18. 18 Undated fragment of note by W. F. Webster on what are probably notes sent by Blake to the Company on trust documents. Blake enjoyed very close relations with Company charter clerk Augustus Webb and his wife, Mary Hoare Webb. CLC MS 540/080050, LMA.

19. 19 Ford to Webb, February 1911, CLC MS 540/080050, LMA.

20. 20 John Walker Ford to Augustus Webb, February 1911, CLC MS 080050, LMA.

21. 21 C. Augustus Webb, Company charter clerk, to S. H. Blake, 4 December 1910, CLC MS 540/080050, LMA

22. 22 On 22 April 1909 Ashton Nelles was sworn to witness the conveyance of 10.88 acres for a railway right-of-way and gravel pit for a consideration of $2,184.50 authorized by Judge A. D. Hardy on 13 February 1909 from the Mohawk Glebe. The conveyance was taken to London by Ashton Nelles already with his father’s signature. CLC MS 540/080050, LMA.

23. 23 CLC 540 MS 07928/008, p. 71, LMA.

24. 24 CLC 540 MS 07928/008, p. 71, LMA.

25. 25 16 April 1913, CLC 540 MS 07920/10, 1913–25, LMA. “Unexpected opposition” from the secretary of the interior, T. W. Crothers. At about this exact time charges were made against Nelles Ashton, and these went through Duncan Campbell Scott, newly named deputy superintendent general of Indian Affairs, directly to Crothers’s office. 11 October 1913, typed insertion at p. 69 in the minutes, CLC 540 MS 07920/10, 1913–25, LMA.

26. 26 CLC 540 MS 07928/pp. 707, 758, 766, LMA; Williams’s attempts, p. 872, 10 October 1913. Webb’s was an entirely accurate characterization of Bishop Williams.

27. 27 Extracts taken by the Reverend R. B. Farney of Simcoe, Ontario, from materials gathered 1 December 1922, at the Brantford Indian Office, Council Minute Books of the Six Nations, 1912–15, sent in 1925 to Chancellor F. P. Betts of the Diocese of Huron, noted Bay 20, Shelf 368, Box 3 [file 2], PREC-2011-18-02, CH-2011-43-02, Chancellors’ Papers, Huron Diocesan Archives, Huron University College.

28. 28 CLC 540 MS 07920/10, 1913–25, p. 69, LMA, notifying Cockshutt of the chiefs’ concurrence with Scott over the Glebe, 15 December 1913.

29. 29 CLC 540 MS 07920/10, 1913–25, p. 4 of brief, included by Farney. This may have been a pointed criticism of the new regime under Nelles Ashton (1879–1956), whose criminality and alcoholism are discussed elsewhere.

30. 30 CLC 540 MS 07920/10, 1913–25. This full resolution was printed and presented in its entirety to the Company on 19 May 1913, dated 17 April 1914, CLC 540 MS 07920/10, 1913–25, p. 82, LMA.

31. 31 Throughout, the DIA and NEC used words like “amicable,” “friendly,” or Webb’s “devoid of antagonism.” CLC 540 MS 07928/9, p. 124, LMA.

32. 32 14 June 1916, CLC 540 MS 07928/9, p. 691, LMA.

33. 33 The Reverend Cyril Mae Turnell was an English clergyman who was hired in short order in 1914 to replace Nelles Ashton following his conviction for cruelty to children at the Institute. After Nelles Ashton’s stint in rehabilitation in Virginia for severe alcoholism, Cockshutt wanted to reinstate his cousin; Nelles’s sister, Alice Ashton Boyce, refused to work with him. The Company would not entertain his coming back. Turnell was a graduate of St. John’s College, Cambridge, and came highly recommended. He was fired in late 1917 for financial reasons.

34. 34 Turnell’s correspondence was rife with such unwelcome comments. See CLC 540 MS 07920/9, p. 165, LMA: his report of 26 June 1916; on Six Nations politics, to Webb, 10 July 1916.

35. 35 Company lawyer Harry C. Weld following his visit to Ottawa and Brantford, November 1919, CLC MS 540/07920/9, LMA.

36. 36 Chief Asa Hill, secretary of the council at Six Nations wrote Chisholm, 5 June 1920, that of the release of the final funds of sale for the Mohawk Glebe, paid to the Company the year before from their funds, no one had been informed of anything by Scott. See Hill to Chisholm, File 134, 275, Pt. 1IA, Vol. 2670, RG 10, LAC.

37. 37 CLC MS 540/07928/9, pp. 904–5, LMA. In 1920, Scott received notice of the amount sent from the NEC for their new girls’ school at Lytton: $20,661 in direct (from sale of Glebe) and a further grant of over $4,000. CLC MS 540/07928/9, pp. 904–5, insertion by date, on receipts from Louis Laronde, new Principal at Lytton, which he sent to Webb, 25 November 1920, printed and sent on to Scott.

38. 38 Turnell’s correspondence relating to Ashton’s decline is found in CLC/540 MS 07920/9, LMA passim, see following notes. A comprehensive book of newspaper clippings, photographs, and other material is found in a scrapbook possibly kept by Ann Ashton Boyce [Rogers], 1906–22, CLC/540 MS/FO2/004, LMA.

39. 39 Winnifreth, 1992, p. 107; original report at CLC MS 540/07920/9, LMA, by date of insertion in the minutes, inspection 13 April 1917, report 26 April 1917.

40. 40 26 September 1916, CLC MS 540/07920/9, LMA. For a more balanced view of Susan Hardie, cf. Alison Norman, “True to Our Own Noble Race: Six Nations Women Teachers at Grand River in the Early Twentieth Century,” Ontario History 107, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 5–34, especially 17–22. For Alice Boyce’s attempt to replace Hardie because of her older ways and limited views having been at the Institute since the age of twelve, see 20n68.

41. 41 11 September 1913, CLC 540 MS 07920/10, 1913–25, LMA.

42. 42 Report by Col. Andrew T. Thompson, Commissioner to Investigate and Enquire Into the Affairs of Six Nations Indians (F. A. Ackland, 1924), 22, https://epe.lac-bac.gc.ca/100/200/301/pco-bcp/commissions-ef/thompson1924-eng/thompson1924-eng.pdf. Hardie said she had to whip all the girls; Alice Mary Ashton Boyce Rogers, assistant principal, said whipping was rarely used. Hardie said darkened rooms were not used for solitary confinement: “This practice was abolished more than ten years ago.” But, in 1914, Boyce asked for more such cells to be constructed in the aftermath of ill-discipline following her brother’s trial, which means they had been added for such a purpose in the new school building of 1903. October 1914, CLC MS 540/07290/9, 1913–25, LMA.

43. 43 This was also recorded the same day the Company asked Boyce to replace Turnell. 14 March 1918, CLC 540 MS 07928/9, p. 970, LMA.

44. 44 22 June 1916, CLC 540 MS 07928/9, p. 700, LMA.

45. 45 CLC MS 540/07920/9 by date of insertion in the minutes, report of 28 February 1917, LMA.

46. 46 CLC MS 540/07920/09 minutes, passim, unpaginated insertions of Company typed exhibits within the Minute Book, 1913–25, LMA.

47. 47 Vol. 268, nos. 3–10, V. P. Cronyn Archives, Huron University College, known as Chisholm’s “Extracts” from a larger set of documents of about one hundred pages; these were sent by the Department of Indian Affairs to the Reverend R. B. Farney at Simcoe, 7 February 1922, unsigned, sent from Scott’s office. Vol. 268, nos. 3–10, V. P. Cronyn Archives, Huron University College, File 2, Chancellors’ Papers, CH-2011-18-02, PREC 2011-11-02 by date. The preliminary précis of the various NEC holdings from 1919 were later hugely augmented, but Farney’s immediate concern was the legal implications ahead on the lands during Williams’s haste to rush into assuming a lease from the NEC. It is assumed that Chisholm used papers compiled in 1919–21 by G. M. Matheson, registrar of the Department of Indian Affairs, “Quantities of Land held by New England Company on Grand River, 1849,” pp. 182–4, no. 51, Vol. 10023, RG 10, LAC. Chisholm’s compilation would serve as the basis for all future litigation, 1922, and 1924–32, but would be amended significantly by hundreds of further documents.

48. 48 R v The New England Company, [1922] 63 D.L.R. 537, https://epe.lac-bac.gc.ca/100/205/301/ic/cdc/aboriginaldocs/court/html/rvnewengcomp.htm, is the judgment by Audette, C.J., of the 1922 Exchequer Court against the Company over the Manual Labour Lot. No financial penalties were included, hence Chisholm’s further “instrument of Intrusion,” which began wider historical accounting claims against the NEC on behalf of the Six Nations beginning in 1924. Exchequer Court of Canada, B-4015-B (case was settled, 1932).

49. 49 CLC MS 540/07920/9 by date of insertion in the minutes, February 1917, LMA.

50. 50 CLC 540 MS 07928/09, pp. 975–6, LMA. Both quotations are from the same resolutions, passed 22 March 1918.

51. 51 Weld’s report, CLC MS 540/07920/9, LMA.

52. 52 Insertion in the minutes, by date, August 1922, CLC MS 540/07920/9, LMA. The legal uncertainties over lands attached to the Institute were also sub judice during these years, which augmented the stress.

53. 53 29 November 1920, File 510,305, Pt. 1, Vol. 3202, RG 10, LAC. Scott refused to recognize Chisholm as acting for the Six Nations or “any other Indians,” either in the general claims against the NEC or in the Manual Labour Lot case before the Exchequer Court. On 5 November 1920, he instructed Chisholm to relay the message to the council that he was no longer in their service and was instead working on behalf of the Departments of Justice and Indian Affairs. See File 134,275, Pt. 1A, Vol. 2670, RG 10, LAC.

54. 54 These are given at great length, with lawyerly debate over every single item in File 510,305A, Vol. 3202, RG 10, LAC; charter clerk Webb signed an affidavit on 9 January 1919 attesting to the accounting sent on behalf of the Company by auditor W. B. Peat. See File 134,275, Pt. 1A, Vol. 2670, RG 10, LAC.

55. 55 File 134,275, Pt. 1A, Vol. 2670, RG 10, LAC. G. M. Matheson’s file on a single property, the Manual Labour Lot (RG 10, Vol. 10023) was begun 1919 and completed in 1921.

56. 56 The Anglican Church’s successor body, established in 1902 to replace the foreign missions of the Church Missionary Society, which had announced its intention to leave Canada entirely in 1920.

57. 57 Indeed, in all but trusteeship, the Mohawk Institute, having had solidly Church of England instruction and chaplaincies since its inception, was considered, rightly, to be an Anglican school, just not under the umbrella of the MSCC.

58. 58 Weld had relations in London, Ontario, which allowed him slightly more time to investigate the legal side, and his report was primarily on the titles of the church and parsonage properties on the Six Nations in addition to the Institute lands; for which, until 1919 there had been no concerted effort either by the diocese or the Company to organize these papers into a single archival group. While the Six Nations Confederacy had asserted control over the parish properties in 1906, this was not acknowledged by the Company.

59. 59 This was the exact figure given by the Indian Department architect, Ogilvie, in June 1917, by date of insertion in the minutes, CLC MS 540/07920/9, LMA.

60. 60 By date of insertion in the minutes, CLC MS 540/07920/9, LMA. Duncan Campbell Scott’s correspondence noted in the September 1920 meeting of the Company at p. 373 of the minutes.

61. 61 Report of the meeting with the bishops of Huron and New Westminster, 23 June 1920, CLC 540 MS 07920/9 by date, LMA. Williams even had the diocesan synod held in Brantford in that year to strengthen the campaign to take over the NEC’s work at the Institute and Six Nations mission.

62. 62 In practice, the incumbency of the chapel rested with the bishop from 1922, but Nelles and Ashton had such long tenures—combined they ran from 1837 to 1913—that the bishop of Huron’s right had never been exercised or, indeed, tested. Thus, the practical solution was to have the officer at the Institute who was in Anglican orders become the incumbent of the chapel. The possibility of a legal transfer of trust from the NEC to the Incorporated Synod of the Diocese of Huron was first mooted in 1920, specifically the parishes on Six Nations, but also including the Institute.

63. 63 The essence of Chisholm’s case was that, left unchecked, the NEC would have received fee, full freehold, of the two-hundred-acre Manual Labour Lot, by “adverse possession,” on 5 April 1920. His case lasting from 1919 to 1922, which began the final unravelling of the Institute properties under the NEC, is detailed for those years, as noted above, in File 134,275, Pt. 1A, Vol. 2670, RG 10, LAC. Audette, C.J., of the Exchequer Court of Canada ruled in January 1922 that the occupation of use was void ab initio by reason of the unceded lands.