McGill entered the fur trade at exactly the right moment. The British Conquest of New France had thrown open Montreal's commercial doors, and ambitious young Scots poured through them. McGill started as a clerk for the Quebec merchant William Grant of St. Roch, but by 1767 his own firm, James McGill & Co., was trading independently. In 1773, he partnered with Isaac Todd -- a friendship that would last a lifetime -- and together they pushed deeper into the continental interior. The pivotal moment came in 1775, when McGill, Todd, Benjamin and Joseph Frobisher, and Maurice-Regis Blondeau dispatched 12 canoes to Grand Portage, near what is now Grand Portage, Minnesota. Historian Harold Adams Innis would later identify this shipment as the beginning of large-scale trade in the Canadian northwest and the effective origin of the North West Company. McGill himself traveled as far as Grand Portage in 1778, the farthest point west he likely ever reached.

Todd & McGill prospered through the 1770s and 1780s, supplied by the London commission merchant John Strettell. In 1782, McGill made the largest single investment in Lower Canada's fur trade at that time: 26,000 pounds sterling. The partnership withdrew from the North West Company after 1783 but continued the so-called Southwest trade in the Mississippi valley until Michilimackinac was handed to the Americans in 1796. McGill diversified relentlessly -- into land speculation, timber, real estate across Lower and Upper Canada, and investments in Britain. He became a founding member of the Beaver Club, the exclusive Montreal dining society of retired fur traders, and a prominent figure in the Chateau Clique, the colony's powerful political elite. He won election to the Legislative Assembly of Lower Canada for Montreal West in 1792, was appointed to the Executive Council that same year, and served as the first honorary lieutenant colonel of the 1st Battalion, Montreal Militia -- the unit that would evolve into the Canadian Grenadier Guards.

In 1776, McGill married Marie-Charlotte, the widow of Joseph-Amable Trottier Desrivieres, and stepped into a complex family web that connected him to some of New France's most established lineages. His wife was the daughter of Guillaume Guillimin, a member of the Sovereign Council of New France and Judge of the Courts of Admiralty. McGill purchased a townhouse on Notre-Dame Street next to the Chateau Ramezay, and around 1797 he acquired the farm he called Burnside as a summer retreat. A stream -- a burn, in the Scottish sense -- ran through the property and gave it its name. The land served as orchards, vegetable gardens, and cattle pasture. In 1787, an elm took root in Burnside's upper meadow. That tree, known as the Founder's Elm, survived on the grounds for nearly two centuries before it had to be felled in 1976, a living witness to the transformation of a gentleman's country estate into the campus of a world-class university.

McGill's will distributed his wealth with a mix of personal loyalty and public generosity. Old friends were remembered. So were the Montreal poor, the Hotel-Dieu de Montreal, the Grey Nuns, the Hopital-General de Quebec, and two Glasgow charities. His stepson's family received 60,000 pounds -- a sum that prompted the fur trader Alexander Henry to grumble that McGill's fortune had gone "to strangers." But the most consequential bequest was 10,000 pounds and the Burnside estate, left to the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning. That gift founded McGill University. Its ripple effects stretched far beyond Montreal: the University of British Columbia began as the McGill University College of British Columbia and operated under that name until 1915. The University of Victoria was an affiliated junior college of McGill until 1916. Dawson College started in 1945 as a McGill satellite campus. Today, James McGill's remains lie in front of the Arts Building on the campus that bears his name, reinterred there in 1875 after being exhumed from the old Dufferin Square Cemetery. Plaques mark his Glasgow birthplace, the University of Glasgow, and McGill Metro station in Montreal -- quiet monuments to a man whose restless ambition seeded institutions across an entire country.