People: Scots of Windsor's Past

Rankin Family:

Col. Arthur Rankin

Colonel Arthur Rankin (1816-1893)

Many members of the Rankin family emigrated from the ancestral home in Ayrshire to Northern Ireland during the Plantation of Ulster in the early seventeenth century; among these were the paternal ancestors of Arthur Rankin. George Rankin left Ireland for Quebec sometime in the early nineteenth century and settled in Montreal, where he met his wife, Mary Stuart, the daughter of Scottish immigrants. When Arthur was fifteen, the family relocated to Amherstburg, Upper Canada, in 1831, where George worked as a teacher.

Rankin was restless as a youth. When his family relocated from Lower to Upper Canada, he seized the opportunity to run away and be a cabin boy on a New York- City-Liverpool packet boat. While his family cultivated new roots in Upper Canada, Arthur lived the life of a sailor, finally returning home in 1835. He apprenticed with his brother, Charles Stuart, to be a surveyor, and took up practice in the Windsor area.

However, Rankin's taste for adventure had not been satisfied by his years at sea. In November 1836, he fought a duel on Belle Isle with a Detroit lawyer to settle a quarrel they had had over a woman in a bar in Sandwich. While there is no record as to whether Rankin had offended the woman or was defending her, he shot the lawyer in the groin and was subsequently arrested. Detroit authorities released him after the wound healed.

Several months later, Rankin moved to Toronto to pursue a career with the militia, where he received a commission as an ensign for the 2nd Queen's Light Infantry. Daring escapades soon followed: in August 1837, while he was returning to his unit after a leave to visit his family at Sandwich, the steamer on which he was traveling stopped in Toledo, where two American bounty hunters boarded with a fugitive slave from Kentucky they had picked up in Canada. Rankin, who had inherited a distaste for slavery from his uncle, the noted Canadian abolitionist Charles Stuart, confronted the Americans, arguing that they had no right to seize a man from Canadian soil. Debating was to no avail, so Rankin hatched another plan, finding allies with three other passengers, an Englishman and two Americans, and two black crew members. When the steamer pulled into Cleveland harbour, the crewman jumped ship and obtained two pistols from a friend who worked near the docks. Hamilton writer David Beasley gives a colourful account of the action in McKee Rankin and the Heydey of the American Theater:

Following a series of daring escapes, Rankin eventually brought the slave, whose name was David Miller, to Toronto by way of Fort Erie, where he found work as a bricklayer fir "liberal wages."

A year after this adventure, Rankin was transferred to the 2nds Battalion of Provincial Volunteer Militia, and in early February 1838 helped to recapture Pelee Island from the Patriots in the Upper Canada Rebellion. Rankin was then stationed at Sandwich, where things remained quiet until the following winter.

On 4 December, 1838, at 2:00 A.M., the American Patriots crossed the Detroit River into Canada by steamboat. They attacked Windsor - a tiny community with only three hundred residents and twenty militiamen - set fire to the British barracks, burned the steamer Thames along with several houses, and killed four militiamen before positioning themselves at the Baby farm. The captain of the Sandwich battalion, however, had taken ill, leaving Rankin in charge of the barracks.

Battle of Windsor Mural

Battle of Windsor Plaque

When Rankin heard news of the attack, he mustered a company of sixty men in Sandwich and marched to Windsor, arriving at roughly 7:00 A.M. Under his leadership, the company pushed the invaders out of the Baby farm and pursued them through the town. After Rankin captured the Patriot flag, the enemy returned to the steamer and released the eighteen prisoners they had taken before retreating back across the river. When Colonel John Prince arrived with the regulars around 9:30 A.M., the Americans had already been routed. But although Rankin had done the fighting, Prince won the laurels. Prince's glory-hogging sowed the seeds of a bitter rivalry that would last decades.

After the Queen's Light disbanded in 1843, the adventurer had to find another way to support himself. When the local Ojibway chief expressed his desire to meet the British monarch, his tribe having served the Crown during the American Revolution and the War of 1812, Rankin got an idea. Having always been attracted to theatrics, he contacted George Catlin, an American painter who specialized in portraits of Native peoples, to pitch his idea. Rankin and Catlin then brought nine residents from the Ojibway reserve settlement along the St. Clair River to Egyptian Hall in London, where they put on a "Wild West" show. Night after night the performance sold out, becoming so popular that Queen Victoria requested it be played for her private audience at Windsor Castle. His coffers swollen, Rankin left the troupe after several months of touring to return home to his family, his wife having given birth to their second son while he was away.

Rankin's return to Sandwich rekindled his quarrel with Colonel John Prince. He began attacking the colonel in editorials for the Sandwich Canadian Emigrant and Western District General Advertiser, and found himself slapped with a libel suit. Although the jury found Rankin not guilty, he thought it might be best to slip away again. He and his brother-in-law, Alexander McKee, he obtained their surveying licenses and went out west to Lake Superior in 1846 with Rankin's brother Charles, a long-established surveyor. The team discovered a small fortune's worth of copper deposits in the Bruce Mines, and Rankin sold his interests the next year to the Montreal Mining Company for an enormous sum £30,000.

With adventuring out of his system and his pockets brimming with money, Rankin returned to Sandwich to settle into the political life. He and his wife of eight years, Mary McKee, their seven-year-old son George Cameron, and their four-year-old boy Arthur McKee moved into the W. R. Wood residence on the riverfront Lot 68 between Sandwich and Windsor in 1848. But Colonel John Prince was so powerful in Essex that Rankin was compelled to run for the 1851 election to the Legislative Assembly in Kent. Forsaking his former Tory views, he stood as a Reformer; most Reformers, however, didn't buy his conversion, and he lost to George Brown. By the next election (1854), Rankin was ready to challenge Prince in Essex, but the colonel withdrew at the last moment in favour of his son. Rankin's support of separate Catholic schools swung the French Catholic vote his way, and his parliamentary career was launched.

Rankin and Prince finally confronted one another in the 1856 election for the Western divisional seat in the Legislative Council, and Rankin's campaigning strategy proved to voters that to him, politics was personal. He ignored the issues and hurled what the Windsor Herald termed "abuse of the lowest description" at Prince; suck vitriolic attacks backfired, and Prince was elected by a large majority. Rankin, however, did not take the lesson to heart: later that year, a name-calling dispute with Attorney General John A. MacDonald almost ended in a duel. Although the men settled the matter peacefully, Rankin soon became embroiled in more serious scandals. In 1857 he became involved in the conflict between Isaac Buchanan and Samuel Zimmerman for control of the newly-proposed southwestern railway line. Rankin lobbied for the charter, bribed Buchanan, and made a deal with Zimmerman to get a quarter of the profits if his company won the construction charter. When he disclosed this arrangement to an investigating committee, he exposed himself to corruption charges. The Toronto Globe blasted the seedy "Rankin Job" and called for his expulsion from the legislature. Tainted by this scandal, Rankin was defeated in the general election of 1857 by Amherstburg businessman John McLeod. Although his supporters did not take the defeat lightly, a humiliated Rankin returned to the one activity in which he had always succeeded: surveying.

Proposed Lancers Regiment

In 1861 he returned to Essex to regain his parliamentary seat. But before the session opened, he embarked upon another bizarre international adventure: In July of that year he volunteered to raise a lancer regiment to serve in the Union army in the American Civil War. After discussing the issue with President Lincoln, he was commissioned with a warrant to raise the regiment, with the understanding that most of the men would be Canadians. Canadians, however, were aghast that a militia colonel - he had been promoted commander of the 9th Military District in 1856 - and a Member of Parliament would serve in the American army, and, moreover, would recruit Canadians for enlistment in a foreign army. In October Rankin was arrested in Toronto for breaching the Foreign Enlistment Act, and although he was never convicted, he was forced to resign his American commission. His lancer regiment never saw action and was disbanded in 1862.