(c. 1767-28 June 1828), emigration leader, administrator. (identified, like his father, also by the family designation of Scotus or Scothouse) Born in Scotland. He accompanied his father John Macdonell (called “Spanish John”) to the new world in 1773 as one of the Macdonell emigrants on the Pearl. Like his father, in the American Revolutionary War he supported the Crown, and served in the King's Royal Regiment of New York. There he had the rank of ensign. As a U E Loyalist, he settled in Osnabruck Township, Stormont County, west of GC. In 1790, having revisited Scotland, he was the leader in organizing the emigration of a further group of Highlanders to GC, some if not all of them passengers on the ship British Queen. He thereafter returned to farming in Osnabruck Township. He rose to the rank of captain in the Royal Canadian Volunteer Regiment. He unsuccessfully stood for election once or twice to be MLA for GC. In 1807, he was named sheriff of the Home District. He was involved in early, and at that stage abortive, attempts to raise a military unit similar to what soon took shape as the 2nd Glengarry Fencibles.

     He attracted the favourable attention of Lord Selkirk, who put him in charge, as the governor of Assiniboia (1811), of Selkirk’s colony in what is now the Province of Manitoba. There, Macdonell’s career proved stormy, as he was caught in the conflict, sometimes violent, between the NWC and HBC. On one occasion, he was arrested and taken to Montreal for trial. When his Manitoba adventure was over about 1817, he returned to Osnabruck Township. He evidently spent his later life there and at the home of his brother John Macdonell at Pointe-Fortune on the Ottawa River. He died at his brother John’s home at Point-Fortune. (children: at least six) Roman Catholic. He was buried at Rigaud, Que.

     He was married to (1) Isabella Macdonell or Macdonald, of Morar, Scotland, (2) Catherine Macdonell, daughter of Allan Macdonell of Collachie, and (3) Anne Macdonell, daughter of Alexander Macdonell of Greenfield. He was the father of the penitentiary warden Donald Aeneas Macdonell. Miles appears prominently as a character in Frederick Niven’s novel, Mine Inheritance (1940). For another man of GC connections who was a top administrator in Lord Selkirk’s ill-fated settlement projects, see Alexander Macdonell of Collachie.

Life by Herbert J. Mays, Dictionary of Canadian Biography, VI, 440-444 * life in Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Vol. IV (interesting mainly as an early biog. notice), Wallace, MDict, Hurtig, Bumsted, Wikipedia * Morice, as in notes to life of “Spanish John” * J. G. Harkness, “Miles Macdonell,” Ontario History, 40 (1948) 77-83 * Fr Vincent Jensen, “The Macdonell Family in the West,” The Canadian Catholic Historical Association, Report 1949 pp. 71-82: on the brothers John and Miles * McLean: index & 182-183: main source on the 1790 emigration * MacGillivray & Ross 11, 681 * Heather Devine in New Faces of the Fur Trade: Selected Papers of the Seventh North American Fur Trade Conference, Halifax… 1995 (1998) * UE List 223 * Fryer & Smy, 23 * Cruikshank King's Royal Regiment of New York 235 * genealogy, family connections: see entry for his father * further family connection: Judge Ranald D. Gunn, Miles mentioned: Morgan (1912) 482 * Mgr Ewen J. Macdonald to donate to SDG Highlanders’ museum an Indian war club once owned by Macdonell, Glengarry News 6 June 1957