Merchant Kings

by Stephen R. Bown

  But though Simpson’s headquarters were in Montreal, Simpson himself was rarely to be found there. His great passion was for near-continuous overland adventure, touring the far-flung regions of his domain. He was always on the move, showing his presence, issuing decrees and keeping a tight control over outposts across the continent. In 1828 he boarded his giant touring canoe and embarked on another of his famous epic cross-continental voyages, over 11,000 kilometres from York Factory to Fort Vancouver via Fort Chipewyan on Lake Athabasca, across the Rocky Mountains, down the Fraser River to the coast, south into Puget Sound and then finally overland to the Columbia River. He issued hundreds of decrees, chastised lenient traders, caught chief factors off guard and generally absorbed the adulation and subservience that he demanded; one of the surest ways to ingratiate oneself with Simpson and secure a promotion was to show humility and deference—near-grovelling coupled with incredibly long work hours. In the spring he returned east, meeting his councils and then reaching Lachine by the fall of 1829. After this tour, Simpson crossed the Atlantic to London, ostensibly to recuperate from his taxing journeys in the northwest: “Exertions which were formerly but exercise for me,” wrote the aging emperor, “are now fatiguing, indeed my snow shoe walk across the Mountains and overland journey from Saskatchawaine have wrought me a good deal.”

  The following spring, he was not recuperating but rather searching for a bride. He settled on his cousin, Frances Simpson. The daughter of the uncle that gave George his start in life in London, Frances was, at eighteen years old, less than half his age. While wife-hunting he had abandoned one of his North American mistresses, who was then pregnant with one of his many unofficial offspring. Simpson already had plenty of children to his credit, including two in Scotland and five or more in Rupert’s Land. He procreated so often that some Canadian writers have referred to him as “the father of the fur trade.” Many of his mistresses were the daughters of his chief factors and their native wives at forts throughout his territory. His pattern was to discard his mistresses when he had had enough of the liaison; on one occasion, he informed a subordinate to cast off his “unnecessary and expensive appendage.” Historian of the fur trade Irene Spry finds Simpson’s womanizing not at all humorous, observing: “His sex-object attitude to women was largely responsible for the breakdown of marriage à la façon du pays, which was a humanly decent type of relationship. He created a total dislocation in what had been a perfectly valid type of society.” Intermarriage between the native peoples and the white fur traders was one of the social structures that had smoothed relations between people in the trade for decades; Simpson took advantage of this “smoothing” while declining to assume responsibility for his liaisons.

  He considered his native and mixed-race mistresses to be beneath consideration as marriage partners. To bolster his social standing, he wanted a white English wife who would be accepted in the salons of London and Montreal, not a hardy native woman from the fur frontier. After his own marriage to Frances, Simpson began to discourage marriage à la façon du pays between his officers and native women, preferring that they engage in unattached sexual liaisons. He and his wife refused to host the native wives of his officers as guests in their home.

  When Frances first crossed the Atlantic with him in 1830, he took her on a grand tour of the fur regions in a giant canoe.

  She had never before left England and was not prepared either for the Canadian wilderness or for the imperious and kingly role her husband assumed when touring his domain. Never of strong constitution, she did not thrive in this new environment.

  Despite Simpson commissioning a substantial stone fort at Red River in 1830—the expense of which he tried to delay and conceal from his governing council in London—after three years she returned to England, ostensibly to regain her health, and did not return to North America until 1838. Simpson promptly relocated his headquarters to Lachine from Red River and continued his restless roving about his territories. Meanwhile, political events beyond Simpson’s control were conspiring to carve off a large chunk of his hard-won domain.

  During Simpson’s tenure, the Columbia District, on the Pacific coast, although theoretically jointly occupied by the United States and Britain since the Convention of 1818, remained the sole preserve of the Hudson’s Bay Company in practice. There simply was no competition between traders west of the Rocky Mountains. The strategy that Simpson and McLoughlin devised to keep it that way in Old Oregon revolved around the seemingly simple objective of keeping the territory in a perfect state for beaver hunting: preventing American trappers from entering, and restricting agricultural development by sending all the company’s voyageurs back east after their contracts were up, rather than letting them settle in the country, despite the promising agricultural potential of the area surrounding Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River. Simpson realized that settlement and agriculture were directly at odds with the commercial objective of the company, which was to extract furs from a sparsely populated wilderness using primarily native labourers and Métis and French coureurs de bois, with the only infrastructure being a loose network of primitive trading posts.

  Throughout the 1820s and 1830s, McLoughlin had the difficult task of ensuring that American trappers and settlers stayed east of the Snake River. Left to govern the Columbia District on his own, he took on a legendary stature with both the natives and the Europeans. He became the “White-Headed Eagle” to the natives and the “King of Oregon” to the five hundred company employees and the settlers who eventually trickled into his domain. He had turned Fort Vancouver into a small community, complete with a school, a library, a blacksmith, flour mills and sawmills, and a thriving twelve-square-kilometre farm.

  For almost twenty years, McLoughlin ruled like an old-time robber baron—he was shrewd, cunning, paternalistic and sometimes ruthless. He held court in the shadowy depths of a great timber hall behind the palisade of Fort Vancouver and dispensed justice throughout the region according to the dictates of his own conscience—alternately with vengeful wrath or surprising leniency, as the mood was upon him. McLoughlin’s justice could be quick. On one occasion, he flew into a murderous rage and publicly caned Herbert Beaver, a visiting British missionary who suggested that his native wife of twenty-five years, Marguerite, was “a female of notoriously loose character.”

  The terrified and bloody Beaver escaped with his life only by the intervention of onlookers. McLoughlin’s justice was equally meted out against natives who he felt had transgressed his rigid code. Although the common punishment was to be flogged while strapped to a brass cannon, on one occasion McLoughlin ordered armed company squads to level two encampments of the Clallam tribe on the coast, killing twenty-three natives in retribution for the death of five of his traders. He was known not for leniency, but for even-handed severity—an unusual sense of justice that earned him the respect of many of the tribes in his commercial domain, if not that of the non-natives.

  McLoughlin opened the gates of Fort Vancouver to all manner of travellers and wanderers, both native and white, so long as they did not undermine his authority or overtly threaten the fur trade. The nightly feasting of the officers and visiting dignitaries was legendary, and during ceremonial occasions the white-maned despot was flanked by bagpipers braying out the ancient songs of his father’s homeland in Scotland, while he pronounced volubly on politics, religion and the fur trade.

  During McLoughlin’s two-decade reign, he balanced the interests of the company against his own inclinations to generosity, lavish living and piety, and his sympathy for the slowly arriving settlers. He also attempted to counteract the ascetic Simpson, whose visits every few years were marked by quarrelling and acrimonious disagreements about company policy, particularly about what to do with retiring voyageurs. Simpson worked to prevent as many of his employees as possible from remaining in the region after their service with the company had expired, shipping them back to Montreal instead.

  Going even further, he dismantled the coa
stal trading forts that McLoughlin had built, in favour of a fleet of roving ships. It was in the best short-term interest of the company, he believed, to keep the territory as wild as possible for as long as possible—a situation that, if he ever chose to think of it, placed him as the unofficial representative of his country, the mercantile arm of his government, in a conflict of interest between the interests of his nation and the interests of his company.

  McLoughlin and Simpson constituted the de facto government of the vast territory, dispensing justice not according to the legal code of Britain or various native societies but in accordance with company business interests. On the one hand, Simpson was the head of the only legal commercial enterprise in the land; on the other hand, he was the sole source of civil authority as delegated by the British government, and McLoughlin reported directly to him. Together they were charged with maintaining law and order over all people of European descent within the territory of the company’s monopoly charter. Simpson also worked to keep settlers out of other parts of the company’s domain. Peter C. Newman writes in his popular history of the company, Caesars of the Wilderness, that “except for the traffic in and out of the Red River Settlement, during Simpson’s long reign few outsiders were allowed to visit his magic kingdom. Those who did receive permission were mostly artists bent on glorifying the Governor’s deeds, members of the British aristocracy engaging in a spot of buffalo hunting, botanists and other natural scientists sent out on behalf of the Royal Society, or land surveyors confirming the full extent of the hbc’s impressive holdings.”

  Simpson and McLoughlin, however, had no control over the American settlers who began to enter the territory in the 1830s to settle along the Columbia River and the Willamette Valley. The flood of settlers increased dramatically after the Panic of 1837, when farm produce prices and land values plummeted in the eastern United States, leaving many farmers and land speculators without homes. The increasing numbers of American settlers arriving at Fort Vancouver, many of them suspicious and anglophobic after years of disharmony between Britain and the United States, began to erode the unchallenged authority of the Hudson’s Bay Company. McLoughlin was faced with a dilemma: the settlers heralded the end of his rule in Old Oregon and the end of fur trading (the land south of the Columbia was showing declining fur returns by the early 1840s), but to drive them off the land was not something he would do, even if it was in the best interests of the company. Nor did a policy of peaceful non-interference sit well with the aging McLoughlin, who began to view the Willamette settlements as the beginnings of a new society, of which he was a part, rather than pests who were ruining the fur trade.

  By the 1840s more than a thousand settlers a year were arriving at Fort Vancouver. They were often destitute, on the verge of starvation and ill-prepared for the winter. It was a great dilemma for McLoughlin: it was not company policy to extend credit, particularly not to settlers who undermined its livelihood, yet he felt a growing sympathy towards the hopeful, ragged bands of settlers. Resolving his inner conflict, he generously extended aid to all incoming pioneers and restrained natives and settlers alike from attacking each other. Company policy notwithstanding, McLoughlin had doled out over thirty thousand dollars in credit at the company store by 1845, thereby in no small part ensuring the survival of many of the settlers and their budding communities—and provoking the wrath of Simpson, who was taking an increasingly dark view of McLoughlin’s support of the foreign settlers who heralded the end of the company’s monopoly in Old Oregon.

  There was nothing the Hudson’s Bay Company could do to thwart the incoming settlers—politically, the entire region was under the joint occupancy of Britain and the United States and open to the commercial development of both nations.

  Undoubtedly Old Oregon would be divided, but where it would be divided was a question without an easy answer. McLoughlin still hoped to hold the Columbia River as the border, while Simpson, a more astute observer of the trends sweeping the continent, set his eyes on the Fraser River, just north of the 49th parallel. Simpson made his final visit to Fort Vancouver in 1841, with plans to relocate the company’s central depot from Fort Vancouver to a new site farther north. Incidentally, Simpson also visited the Russian American Company headquarters in Sitka, Alaska, as part of this tour and was unimpressed: “Of all the dirty and wretched places that I have ever seen, Sitka is preeminently the most wretched and the most dirty.”

  Simpson and McLoughlin masked their mutual animosity and agreed to send James Douglas, a massive Scottish mulatto of mysterious origin and McLoughlin’s right-hand man for almost fifteen years, on an expedition north to Vancouver Island “for the purpose of selecting a convenient situation for an Establishment on a large scale, possessing all the requisites for farming, rearing of Cattle, together with a good harbour and abundance of timber.” Douglas departed in 1843 and founded Fort Camosun, soon to be renamed Fort Victoria, on the southern extremity of “this sterile Rock bound Coast.” The new headquarters had a commanding view of the Juan de Fuca Strait (in case of future border disputes) and was situated in a deep, safe harbour surrounded by agricultural and pasture land to supply the new outpost.

  The political crisis of Old Oregon could no longer be ignored. The death, in 1841, of one of the original American settlers intensified the need for some form of political authority. The man died without a will, leaving a homestead and a herd of six hundred cattle in the Willamette Valley, and the distribution of his estate required a set of laws. When McLoughlin informed Simpson and other officials in London of his inability to govern thousands of American citizens, he received no constructive reply and no instructions. He knew, however, that a private company could not long remain the only official authority in the region. Soon the unruly pioneers, most of them American citizens, would demand a more accountable government. McLoughlin knew that particularly without military help from London or the company, holding Old Oregon would be nearly impossible.

  In 1843 settlers along the Willamette united to form a provisional government (based on the legal code of the state of Iowa) that would recognize their land claims and stabilize their communities. Soon the provisional government was passing laws, levying taxes and vociferously pronouncing its affiliation with the United States. Initially, the Canadian settlers, most of them retired fur traders and former employees of the company, held aloof, but with an additional 1,400 American pioneers arriving in 184 4 and then 3 ,000 in 1845 , they were being swamped by the rising human tide. In 1845 the settlers elected George Abernethy as governor of a new provisional state and sent delegates to Washington to request entry into the American Union. McLoughlin, left on his own, agreed on August 15, 1845, to “support the Organic Laws of the Provisional Government of Oregon” and to co-operate with the new entity in order to, as he explained to London, “prevent disorders and maintain peace, until the settlement of the Boundary Question leaves that duty to the parent states.”

  The governing joint occupancy agreement between Britain and the United States had never been satisfactorily or fully resolved. In 1826 the British had proposed to hold all of Old Oregon but allow the Americans a port in Puget Sound, while the Americans countered with the offer of free British navigation of the Columbia River but a boundary at the 49th parallel. In 1828 the joint occupancy agreement was extended indefinitely, but by the mid-1840s the point was almost moot— American citizens were the primary inhabitants of the region (other than the natives, who, in the nineteenth century, were always overlooked), and they had made their wishes known. The weight of historical precedent, favouring Britain’s claim, was diminished by the great influx of American citizens entering the territory by way of the Oregon Trail. Partly owing to Simpson’s company policy, the number of British settlers in the territory never amounted to more than a few hundred, and they were greatly outnumbered as early as 1843.

  American political interest in Oregon reached a peak in 184 4 with the election of the ardently expansionist president James Knox Polk, who used th
e Democratic campaign slogans “Fifty-four Forty or Fight” and “The Re-annexation of Texas and the Re-occupation of Oregon”—phrases that boded ill for the company and for British sovereignty in the Oregon Territory. British diplomats were confused—the suggestion seemed preposterous, but could Polk really be demanding the entire Pacific coast for the United States? Polk persuaded Congress to end the joint occupancy accord in December 1845 and made rumblings of war, while a British Navy ship patrolled the Juan de Fuca Strait.

  British officials knew that a war over Oregon would not be limited to the distant Pacific, but would likely be fought as an invasion of Canada, and decided that the disputed territory— a partially depleted fur preserve already occupied by unruly American citizens—was not worth the risk. On the other side, facing an impending war with Mexico over Texas, Polk and his advisers were not eager to antagonize Britain any further. The international border would bisect North America along the 49th parallel to the coast, with the exception of Vancouver Island, all of which would remain British, as Simpson had foreseen. One final concession demanded by the British (to preserve national pride and to placate the company) was that all company property be recognized by the American government and that the Columbia River remain open to company ships as long as they were engaged in the fur trade.

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  SIMPSON’S MEDDLING IN INTER NATIONAL POLITICS was not, however, limited to his interest in Old Oregon. He was also a strong advocate for Hawaiian independence. He provided substantial company funds to promote this cause, and actively worked against the islands being recognized as a British protectorate because he believed the best interests of the company, which conducted substantial business with the islands, lay with an independent Hawaiian kingdom rather than with a branch of the British Empire. Ironically, in spite of Simpson’s longstanding policy of non-settlement that contributed to the loss of the Oregon Territory to the United States, and his funding and advocacy for the recognition of an independent Hawaiian kingdom against the interests of his own nation, he was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1846 for his, and the company’s, support and encouragement of exploration in the Arctic.