Big Lauchie MacIsaac (Eigg Mountain Settlement History)

 

As Kenton Teasdale tells it, Big Lauchie came from the Isle of Eigg, in the western highlands around 1818 to Creignish,[1] Cape Breton and stayed with a sister.  When he came over to Arisaig be a groomsman for a friend that was getting married he liked what he saw of the country.  He and his brother Malcolm squatted at the corner of the Main road and Trunk road to Arisaig.  He found the soil rocky and shallow so moved to a spot at a lower elevation on Maple Ridge, no longer on Eigg Mountain proper.  (Kenton Teasdale, Eigg Mountain, October 16, 2004)

 

Rev. Duncan Rankin claims Lauchie married in Scotland in 1818 and emigrated to Nova Scotia in 1823.[2]  Rev. Ronald MacGillivray, in 1890-92, describes him as a “quiet simple Christian man, …noted for his strength.”

On a spring day through slush and snow and up three miles of mountains he carried a barrel of mackerel in a sack on his back from John McEachern’s in Dunmaglass to his own shanty on the top of the mountain [at the Trunk Road site].  When he got home he lay down with the sack of fish as a cool pillow under his head and had a refreshing sleep.”[3]

[1] Consistent with MacGillivray cited in Raymond A. MacLean, History of Antigonish (Antigonish: Casket Printing & Publishing Co., 1976), 113.

[2] Rev. Duncan Joseph Rankin, A History of the County of Antigonish, Nova Scotia (Toronto: Macmillan Co. of Canada, 1929), 299.

[3] MacGillivray cited in MacLean, History of Antigonish, 113.