Barnston, George

George Barnston 1800-1883

George Barnston was a hard-working and very intelligent man who worked for the Hudson’s Bay Company. It was that work that brought him to Tadoussac late in his career. His strong interest and study in botany and insects were recognized by professionals in those fields.
George Barnston was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and educated as a surveyor and an army engineer. He joined the North West Company in 1820 (at twenty years old) which united with the Hudson’s Bay Company a year later. Barnston started his career as a clerk at York Factory in Manitoba, then transferred to the Columbia District in 1826, where he assisted Amilius Simpson in surveying the Pacific Coast and later helped James McMillan establish Fort Langley (near present-day Langley, B.C.) before serving in two other forts in Washington State.
In 1829 he married Ellen Matthews, a half-native daughter of an American Fur Company employee, and he fathered eleven children. The oldest of these was James who, in 1847, went to Edinburgh for a medical degree.
After a year’s furlough in England, Barnston was appointed to Tadoussac in 1844. This was a move that he said made possible “having my children better educated, an object ever near to my heart.” It is likely that education took place in Montreal, as Tadoussac would have been a very isolated and undeveloped community at that time. In fact, Barnston described our beloved village as “an extended, troublesome, and complicated” charge, (as Simpson had warned him it would be); one beset by free traders, smugglers, and encroaching settlement. But it was an opportunity for him to prove his abilities and justify Simpson’s confidence in him, and in March 1847 he was promoted to Chief Factor.
He served in Tadoussac for seven years, then later took posts in Manitoba and Ontario before retiring to Montreal in 1863. Retirement freed Barnston to pursue scientific research, primarily in botany and the study of insects - areas in which he had already done a great deal of work in the field and as a writer. Barnston first studied insects at Martin’s Falls and kept a journal of the area's temperature, permafrost, flora, and fauna for the Royal Geographical Society of London. He visited several scientific societies on furlough in England in 1843–44. “Finding that I was kindly received at the British Museum,” he wrote to George Simpson, “I handed over without reservation all my collection of insects to that institution, at which the gentlemen there expressed high gratification.” Over half of his specimens were new to the museum. He later gathered an extensive herbarium at Tadoussac, which he described in his correspondence with Hargrave, and in 1849–50 sent a collection of plants to Scotland. He also supplied specimens to the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, D.C.) and to McGill College.
After 1857 he frequently published articles, mainly in the Canadian Naturalist and Geologist. An active member of the Natural History Society of Montreal, he served as its president in 1872–73 and later became a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1882.
It would appear that in his retirement, George Barnston lived in Montreal but spent summers in Tadoussac studying the natural world.
George Barnston died in Montreal in 1883, and the funeral was held at Christ Church Cathedral. The Royal Society of Canada paid tribute to Barnston as both a “diligent naturalist” and “a man of kind and amiable character, loved and respected by all who knew him.”
 



Alan Evans