II Commandant RMC: 1886 – 1888
(Researched by E3161 Victoria Edwards)
Major General Donald Roderick Cameron C.M.G. was born in Scotland. He was a retired officer of the Royal Artillery who had served in India during the Chutan campaign. Donald Cameron married Emma, the daughter of Sir Charles Tupper. Cameron came to Red River with William McDougall in1869, hoping to command a mounted police force and to command the militia. When Cameron met with Metis leaders against McDougall’s orders and ordered the Metis to remove a barricade, Cameron and his wife Emma were detained, until they were rescued by Sir Charles Tupper. Cameron translated Bishop Taché’s book on the Nor thwest (Sketch of the North West) into English in 1870. He was mentioned in despatches three times. Upon the recommendation of Sir John A. Macdonald, Donald was appointed British Boundary Commissioner by the British Foreign Office; he held this position for most of the 1870s, overseeing the International Boundary Survey from 1872 to 1876. He received the bronze medal of the Royal Humane Society in 1878, for saving a boy who had capsized a canoe in the Rideau Canal at Ottawa. Cameron was secretary of the Canadian delegation at the Paris Conference on Submarine Cables in 1883, and secretary to the Canadian Commission on Fisheries in Washington in 1887-88. Donald Cameron became a Major-General and a Commandant of the Royal Military College in Kingston from 1888 until 1896. He was also made a Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of St. Michael and St. George by Queen Victoria for his service to the British Commission. Cameron Falls and Cameron Lake in the vicinity of Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta, Canada are named after him. The Donald Roderick Cameron fonds at the Provincial Archives of Alberta consist of a diary, a photograph of Captain Donald Roderick Cameron and photographs of the International Boundary Commission. Ruth and Leo Hamson donated the records to the Provincial Archives of Alberta in 1992 and 1993. The Hamsons likely received the records from Chris Cameron, great-grandson of Donald Roderick Cameron.
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