First Mayor of Vancouver, Canada. Educated locally, he taught school for three years in Victoria County, hoping to earn enough money to become a doctor. He abandoned his plans for a medical career when his brother’s lumber business failed. After helping his brother pay off his debts, he enrolled at Eastman’s National Business College in Poughkeepsie, New York. In the late 1860s he returned to Ontario and operated a general store in Oshawa. In 1878, he went to Winnipeg and set up a successful business as a commission-merchant. He went into real estate, making a large fortune during the boom of 1881 to 1882. In the depression that followed, however, he suffered and gave up his businesses in Winnipeg and moved with his family to the Laggan stock farm in the Qu’Appelle Valley near present-day Wolseley, Sask. In mid-1885, he set out for Honolulu intending to enter the sugar-beet industry. When he reached San Francisco, however, he decided to visit Granville, Canada in January 1886 and by June 1, 1886, he had formed his own real estate firm. Almost immediately upon arriving in Granville, he entered local politics. In January and February, he and a group of residents petitioned the provincial legislature for a change in the name of the town and for its incorporation. The city of Vancouver came into existence on April 6, 1886 and on May 3, 1886, he was elected its first mayor, defeating Richard Henry Alexander by 242 votes to 227. On May 28, 1886, ten of Alexander’s prominent supporters sent a petition to Victoria charging that at least 100 ballots had been cast by persons unqualified to vote. This charge was confirmed in interviews held 50 years later by James Skitt Matthews with three of MacLean’s backers, who recalled that illegal voters in the election had included everyone from houseboat tenants to itinerant hotel guests. The charges were forgotten in the aftermath of the great fire of June 13, 1886 when the burden of reconstruction fell on the mayor and his council. That December, he was re-elected on a platform of a more liberal franchise and the restriction of Chinese property rights. In September 1887, he presided over the inaugural meeting of the Vancouver Board of Trade. At the end of the year, he reflected proudly that during his two years in office, the city streets had been cleared of giant stumps and graded, bridges and sidewalks had been constructed, and a fire department, a waterworks system, electric light and gas service, and sewers had been put in place. On May 25, 1886, he was made justice of the peace at Vancouver, and at the end of his mayoralty, he was appointed police magistrate of the city, a position he held until 1890. In January 1893, the dominion appointed him a special commissioner of immigration in the United States. Fluent in Gaelic, he had organized the St Andrew’s and Caledonian Society of Vancouver in 1886. Known as “Squire MacLean” because of his “wise and smiling” countenance and prematurely white hair, Vancouver’s conscientious first mayor died in 1895 at the age of 50, just weeks after he had been appointed stipendiary magistrate for the district of Vancouver.