A talk to the Friends of the MacNab Circle at Dundurn Castle on February 19, 2002
Pamphlet of 24 pages contains 22 illustrations

Richard Beasley (1761-1842), the first settler at the Head-of-the-Lake, now Hamilton, Ontario, in the 1770s, grew up in Albany, N.Y. The pre-revolutionary influences of the social and political events he experienced as a boy guided his work as fur-trader, magistrate, great landholder, politician, militia commander and reformer in Upper Canada as hehelped to form a civilization out of the wilderness. His stand against authoritarian government brought him trouble and eventually he lost his homestead on Burlington Heights to Allan MacNab who built his Dundurn Castle on the foundations of Beasley's home.

As a trader in furs, Richard partnered Richard Cartwright (his cousin with whom he had the famous Cartwright-Beasley correspondence) at Kingston, Robert Hamilton at Queenston, Tom Barry in Toronto and Peter Smith in Port Hope. He knew Chief Joseph Brant (who was 18 years his senior) growing up and had a close association with him and the Mohawks who frequented his tavern on Burlington Heights. Richard, as agent for Brant, brought Mennonite settlers to Block Two (Waterloo County) and encouraged settlement elsewhere on the behest of Lt.-Gov. Simcoe. Richard formed the militia, built grist and saw mills (re: the Ancaster Old Mill), and tried to reform the paranoid restrictions of the Family Compact against settlement. As speaker of the Assembly in 1804, he prevented Reverend Strachan's bill for establishing common schools under Anglicans, a step toward making Anglicanism the state religion, although he himself was Anglican, and earned the hatred of Strachan who worked secretly against him for years. Richard was the most prominent Canadian to support Robert Gourlay's reforms and consequently after 1820 suffered reprisals from Lt.-Gov. Maitland and the Strachan-inspired Family Compact - to which the talk refers, adding new details in footnotes.

By 1826, the British colonial office began siding with the political reformers in correcting the corrupt land practices, and Richard, in the Assembly, gained his magistracy back. As a moderate reformer he worked with those such as William Lyon Mackenzie who later became radicals to bring about change. Government land policies and the still influential Strachan working through his former students such as Allan MacNab and John Solomon Cartwright combined in 1832 to undermine him financially.

Richard had witnessed the horrors of the American Revolution, the fighting from Fort Niagara, the battles of the War of 1812, in which he was the Colonel of the 2nd York regiment, the swift development of wilderness into a metropolis and the eventual triumph of reform government - in all of which he played a major role. This talk touches upon all these aspects.

The MacNab Circle, formed in 1969, honours Sir Allan MacNab with a birthday dinner, Feb. 19, every year, accompanied by a lecture or dramatic presentation directly related to his life and times.