(25 Dec. 1838-22 Jan. 1898), publisher and author. Born in Gairloch, Scotland, the eldest child in a crofter’s family. He had only limited formal education. He was employed in farm work and railway construction work in Scotland in his early years. Afterwards he lived for some years in Ipswich, Eng., where he married. In 1869 he settled in Inverness, Scotland, his home for the remainder of his life. There he first operated a drapery business with his brother, and was afterwards a valuator and an auctioneer, before turning to publishing and writing. In 1875 he founded The Celtic Magazine, a monthly, and in 1885 he founded The Scottish Highlander, a weekly newspaper. Public affairs and the condition especially of the Scottish Highlands acutely interested him. He was a member of the Inverness Town Council and of the Invernessshire County Council, and was one of the founders of the Inverness Gaelic Society and of the Highland Land League. He wrote histories of the Macdonalds and Lords of the Isles (1881), the Mathesons (1882), Camerons (1884), Macleods (1989), Chisholms (1891), Mackenzies (1894), Frasers of Lovat (1896) and Munros of Fowlis (1898), as well as The History of the Highland Clearances (1883).
Between Sept. and Dec. 1879, Mackenzie visited the United States and Canada on a lecturing and fact-gathering tour. He published a diary-type narrative of the tour in his Celtic Magazine. The Ottawa Daily Citizen, 29 Oct. 1879, reported that Alexander Mackenzie, editor of the Celtic Magazine, left Ottawa yesterday by train “for Glengarry” (this was for the second part of his two-part visit to GC). The section in his narrative in which he describes his visit to GC (which he terms the “celebrated Highland settlement of Glengarry”) has the interest of being comparable to the early 19th-century travel writers’ reports on the county, and being, indeed, a kind of late continuation of these reports. He gave lectures at Lancaster and Alexandria, and at Alexandria some 45 of the local people entertained him at a dinner (with a bagpiper for the greater honour). At the dinner, “The oratorical ability displayed was really marvellous in such an out-of-the-way place as Alexandria, containing only about 1000 inhabitants, and such as would put many who would be considered orators in more pretentious places at home to shame.” Presumably the oratory was in both Gaelic and English. He met a great many of the eminent Glengarrians, whether in GC or elsewhere (he met the Hon D. A. Macdonald in Toronto). Cornwall he thought “depressing,” and he avoided the opportunity to revisit it. Altogether he liked the Glengarrians, and being interested in promoting Highland settlement in Canada, he delighted in every sign of their prosperity.
At Lancaster, he “saluted” Evander McRae of McRae’s hotel, “in my native Gaelic, to which he responded in pure Kintail vernacular; for one of the peculiarities you meet with throughout the whole Dominion, is to find the children and even the grandchildren of the original settlers speaking the dialect of their respective districts in Scotland; so that you meet with half-a-dozen or more different dialects in the same village or township. Any one acquainted with the various districts in the Scottish Highlands can therefore almost at once tell what part of the country the ancestors of the parties he is addressing originally came from.”
At the end his life, Mackenzie was in business as an antiquarian bookseller, having handed the management of his newspaper over to his son. He died at his home in Inverness.
See also Kenneth Macdonald, whose tour of 1882 (which included GC) was also described in the Celtic Magazine.
The Scottish Highlander (The Inverness Courier), 25 Jan. 1898 * his 9-part narrative of his tour, The Celtic Magazine, V (1880) (QF), with the GC passages on pp. 151-159, 183-184, 189, 235-236; he also published “sixteen long letters” in the Aberdeen Daily Free Press at this time appraising the suitabilty of Canada for Highland emigration