Historical take over

Bert Winterburn has taken Fort William Historical Park by force for more than 30 years.

The 62-year-old volunteer has reenacted Fort Under Siege since it first started in the 1980s. As Cpl. Euler, he led a small company of armed soldiers into the Fort on Saturday and arrested the partners of the Northwest Company.

“It’s been quite interesting depicting a De Meuron soldier,” Winterburn said. “History is my hobby. For reenactors sharing your knowledge is what it is all about. It is particularly pleasing when visitors are interested in what you are doing and ask pertinent questions.”

To help make the event as historically accurate as possible, Winterburn helped train the soldiers made up of volunteers and Fort William staff in historical military procedure.
He said they were using the British drills that were used during the Napoleonic wars and the war of 1812.

The events depicted in Fort Under Siege started at the battle of Seven Oaks. A Northwest Company employee, who happened to be the company’s chief director’s god son, lead a tribe of Métis on an assault on Hudson Bay sponsored settlers, which left 20 dead, one of them being the governor of the settlement.

Lord Selkirk, the chief shareholder in the Hudson Bay Company, led a band of De Meuron soldiers into Fort William and charged the Northwest Company partners with murder and theft in 1816. The Northwest Company with never recovered from the disruption and was forced to merge with the Hudson Bay Company in 1821.

Marty Mascarin, communications officer for the Fort, said while Lord Selkirk helped to start the demise of the Northwest Company he also insured it would never be forgotten. During his stay at Fort William, Selkirk took detailed notes and made drawings of all the buildings and stock.

The reconstructed Fort William was heavily based off those journal writings.

“In advertently, an enemy of the Northwest Company was responsible for reviving its memory,”Mascarin said. “Lord Selkirk was here from 1816 to the following spring of 1817. He took extensive drawings of the place and inventories of everything to find out how this operation was happening and if there were truly stolen furs here or other incriminating evidence. A lot of that information was recorded and survived.”

Fort Under Siege wraps up on Sunday.