(born c. 1869; died 20 Nov. 1923, aged 53), mining man, figure of legend. (Neil R. Macdonald, Neil Macdonald, known as “Foghorn Macdonald”) (age at death taken from family gravestone at Glen Nevis; age and date of birth vary much in sources) Born at Glen Nevis, GC. Parents: Archie Neil Ban MacDonald and his wife Mary McLachlan. The immense reputation he acquired, is indicated by the following obituary statement,

     “‘Foghorn’ Macdonald, known from coast to coast and from the Arctic Circle to the Gulf of Mexico on this continent, died after a brief illness in Montreal, on Tuesday night. Neil MacDonald, who was born near Glen Nevis, was a mining man by profession, probably because the pursuit of mining enabled him to gratify his instincts as a rover. He had followed the lure of gold in the Yukon and in Porcupine, hunted for silver in Cobalt and Nevada, prospected for a couple of months in Ontario and in Mexico. Wherever mining men gathered there would be a story told of ‘Foghorn.’ During the war Neil Macdonald went overseas with the ‘Little Black Devils’ from Winnipeg, but the life of an infantry private was too tame for him. He was transferred to the Engineers, and used his knowledge of mining to good advantage in several daring exploits. Subsequently he was attached to the Canadian Forestry Corps and attained the rank of Major, and was entrusted with the work of cutting down part of the Royal Forest at Windsor.”

     A report on his funeral remembered “his compelling personality. All felt that something splendid and virile and generous and vivid in character had gone,…” At Windsor Station, Montreal, just before his body was sent by train to GC for the funeral services and burial at Glen Nevis, his friends took “a parting look at the strong features that had faced life with such Viking courage.”

     Substantially, the narrative of his life as related in these quotations is true. There is a tradition that in early life he considered becoming a priest. He followed instead a colourful career in mining over many years throughout North America, being variously a prospector, businessman, and various kinds of technician, expert, engineer, and entrepreneur. He had some involvement, of a more limited kind, in railway work–presumably railway building. He is said to have enlisted in a Montana cavalry troop for service in the Spanish-American War, but it has not been possible on documentary grounds either to confirm or to reject this report. In 1911, he was publicly honoured with the gift of a watch for his aid at the time of the Porcupine fire. (Glengarry News 28 July 1911) He acquired at a relatively early date (reportedly in his Cobalt days) the name Foghorn, from his loud, penetrating voice. Mgr Ewen J. Macdonald is said to have joked that he could be heard right across the English Channel. (For this story, cf GN 28 Sept. 1917).

     On enlisting as a private at Quebec City on 28 Sept. 1914 in the Fort Garry Horse, he gave his occupation as “Mining Engineer” and his date of birth as 1 Jan. 1875, thus understating his age by some years as was so often done at the time by men anxious not to be excluded from the army for being too old. He served in a number of military units, and took part in some of the hard fighting on the Western Front. In his later period of service, he was transferred to the formidable Canadian Forestry Corps, which brought Canadian expertise in lumbering to the supply of timber for the British home front and the Western Front, and he had the rank of major.

     He was granted leave from 13 Sept. to 13 Dec. 1917 in order to return to Canada. During the final days of Sept., he reached Halifax. (GN 28 Sept. 1917) In mid-Oct., he was at the Chateau Laurier in Ottawa, and preparing to go to Washington. (Cornwall Freeholder 18 Oct. 1917 from Ottawa Citizen) Soon afterwards, he was being welcomed back at Glen Nevis, with a splendid display of traditional Highland hospitality. (GN 23 Nov. 1917, CF 29 Nov. 1917) His military career was now, however, in effect over, for during this period of leave he was struck off strength on 14 Dec. 1917 as “surplus to requirements.”

     The peak of Foghorn’s growing fame came with the spectacular publication of a long article on him in a major U. S. magazine, The American Magazine (July 1918), which included a full page portrait. The author of the article, Mary B. Mullett, was the managing editor of the magazine, 1917-1924, at a time when it was uncommon for a woman to hold such a position; she died 22 Nov. 1932 (her life in Who Was Who in America, Vol. I, p. 878). Ken McKenna is undoubtedly correct in believing that Foghorn’s reputation was being promoted in the United States as a way of showing that real frontier types supported the war. There was much continuing American opposition to involvement in the war, and a wifespread belief that involvement was particularly a project of the East Coast rich, and was against the interests of the westerners and the people from the more recent frontier regions. Foghorn, it is true, was not exactly an American. But he was said to be an American citizen, and probably few Americans of the time seriously thought of Canadians anyway as not being “Americans.” Much of the article is composed of transcripts or reconstructions of Foghorn’s own eloquent and witty conversation.

     Foghorn is most readily described in terminology from a later date: he was a celebrity, he was a man who invented himself, he was at home with the media, he was a man with an image. He provokes the question of who was the real Foghorn behind the persona. Though he produced a legend of himself as a rough, tough man of unsophisticated ways and blunt speech, we may guess that rough and unsophisticated he was not. Someone who was genuinely rough and unsophisticated would not have had the brilliant success he had with impressing others. In particular, he knew how to speak effectively with people of importance and authority and high rank. He was clearly a “natural” when it came to impressing top people. He had a quality almost theatrical, and a parallel that comes to mind is William Cody, “Buffalo Bill,” the greatest of all the showmen of the wild frontier (and in the resemblance to Buffalo Bill–who was very far from being a Canadian type–we can see that in some ways Foghorn was not, indeed, fully Canadian). As the war was ending, it was reported that Foghorn might run for MP as an Independent Soldier Candidate for the GC constituency. (Cornwall Freeholder 7 Nov. 1918, from Vankleek Hill Review)

     He died in a Montreal hotel. He was a Roman Catholic. He never married. He had made, over the years, many friends. In his war years, influential people he knew appear to have included the Duke of Connaught (Queen Victoria’s son and former governor general of Canada), and the Duchess of Connaught. He also knew Bishop M. F. Fallon, one of the best known Canadians of his day, and Bob Smith, governor of Montana. Most remarkably, it is reasonably well established that he struck up a friendship with Winston Churchill, when Churchill, then in disgrace following the disaster of the Dardanelles campaign, was serving as an officer on the Western Front in the winter of 1915-1916.

     After his death, Foghorn’s reputation, heavily based as it was on his personality, faded swiftly.

     He was the brother of John Angus Macdonald the Boer War veteran. It was from John Angus’ Montreal home that Foghorn was buried. Another brother, also named John, a pioneer Cobalt, Ont., miner, died at Cobalt in 1937, aged 74, and is buried at Glen Nevis. (obituaries of John, Standard Freeholder 14 July 1937, GN 16 July 1937)

     See also the entries for Angus Archibald Mcdonald and Ranald McLachlan. He was a cousin also of Angus J. Mcdonald the MP.

Cornwall Freeholder 22 & 29 Nov. 1923 (QF), Glengarry News 23 Nov. (from Montreal Star) & 30 Nov. 1923 * article of biography and tribute by “Sandy Fraser” (J. E. McIntosh) in Farmer's Advocate 7 Feb. 1924, repr. Ross, Lancaster, 304-308 * Robert Lewis Taylor, Winston Churchill: an Informal Study of Greatness (1952) 287-288 on Churchill and Foghorn * McKenna GN (28 June & 25 Oct. 2000, 14 & 28 Feb. & 21 & 28 March & 15 Aug. 2001) * his military file, Ottawa * hist. of Canadian Forestry Corps in WWI included in William C. Wonders, The ‘Sawdust Fusiliers’: the Canadian Forestry Corps in the Scottish Highlands in World War Two (1994?) * National Archives, Washington (re U. S. military service; report no record found) * Mary B. Mullett, “The Story of ‘Foghorn’ Macdonald,” The American Magazine (July 1918) 13-17, 78, 81 * various GC-area newspaper articles on, GN 3 Nov. 1916, 26 Jan. 1917 (with portrait), 14 & 28 Dec. 1923, CF 30 Dec. 1915, 9 Nov. 1916, 18 Jan. 1917 (with portrait), 11 July 1918