As they marched deeper into enemy country, the danger of interception grew. Two days west of Lake Traverse, when they knew they were just shy of the enemy’s village, they halted in the cover of woods and waited for darkness. After nightfall, they crept forward to the crest of a hill. But when they charged the village at dawn, their blood-curdling war-whoops did no more than frighten a few wolves out of a rubbish heap, for the village lay deserted.11
With the men losing heart, voicing their discouragement, the chiefs held a council. In spite of the fear, fatigue, and dashed hopes that had marked the expedition, they wanted to proceed; the rule of vengeance required it. To restore morale, they formed the men in a circle and held an equipment swap. Taking turns, each man made one pass around the circle, displaying whatever item he needed—powder, balls, medicines—until someone offered to give up a portion of his own supply. If no one offered, a chief repeated the entreaty on the warrior’s behalf. If still no one offered, then as a last resort the chief requisitioned the item from whomever in the circle he chose. In this way, everyone’s critical needs were satisfied. Tanner stood in need of moccasins, for he had brought only seven pairs on the assumption that he would be riding horseback. Since the Assiniboine had stolen his horses, he had quickly run through his small supply. Although he was grateful to receive a new pair, his feet were already in bad shape.12
Continuing on the trail of the Sioux, the war party gradually pieced together where the enemy had gone. The Sioux had gathered everyone from the village; then, doubling back by another route so as to evade their pursuers, they had fled to the trader’s fort on Lake Traverse. This independent trader was one Robert Dickson, a red-headed Scot who had lived among the Sioux for more than a decade and a half. Married to the sister of a prominent chief of the Yanktonai Sioux, he held considerable sway over his wife’s people. The fort was Dickson’s main residence. When the Ojibwas and their allies realized that they would have to attack their enemy in this stronghold, they lost heart. The war party finally disbanded. Together with Pe-shau-ba and ten remaining Ottawa warriors, Tanner returned to Pembina, having been absent from his family through the entire fall.13
As a military endeavor the war had been utterly fruitless: the war party had killed not one Sioux. But as a cultural endeavor the war succeeded, for it taught young men like Tanner the warrior ethic. It was one of the most important socializing experiences of his life. Emulating the veterans, he learned how to be brave, daring, tough, cunning, and resolute. The warrior’s resolute defense of principle inspired Tanner above all else. Henceforth, when standing on principle, he often struck a warrior’s pose.
His first opportunity to act in the warrior mold came the following spring, when he learned that the Assiniboines were boasting of having stolen his horses. Taking his brother with him, he embarked on a long and dangerous quest to recover his favorite black horse. In the course of this adventure he defied death threats, fought hand to hand with his antagonists, stole three different horses, and made three separate hair-breadth escapes. Wa-me-gon-a-biew, fearing for his own life after one of these close scrapes, finally deserted him. For this, Tanner branded his brother a coward. When it was all over with, Tanner arrived back home without a single horse. The first one that he stole he returned to its rightful owner. The second he rode so hard it burst a blood vessel and died. And the third—his favorite, the black—he gave to a passing friend in need. In the end, his warrior’s quest was not so much about recovering his horse as it was about defending his honor.14
IV McLOUGHLIN
13
Fort William
At the age of eighteen, Dr. John McLoughlin set out for his new post. His destination was the North West Company’s new headquarters near the mouth of the Kaministiquia River on the north shore of Lake Superior. When McLoughlin arrived there in the summer of 1803, the impressive complex was in its third year of construction. Exploring his new home in the wilderness, he found a considerable area cleared of trees and enclosed within a large stockade. Several brick kilns were rapidly turning out bricks, and new buildings were going up in every area of the fort. Glass windows, cast iron stoves, and other furnishings of all kinds were being unloaded from the North West Company’s new sailing ship, the Invincible. A handful of nearly completed buildings stood in a cluster around a central square: fur stores, dry goods and outfitting shops, a meeting hall for the partners, and a temporary kitchen. As no living quarters had yet been constructed, the partners and clerks were living in tents. The engagés had a separate encampment outside the stockade.1
Known simply as the New Fort or Kaministiquia in 1803, this grand post was eventually renamed Fort William in honor of William McGillivray, the head of the North West Company. In time it would grow to encompass about three dozen buildings including livestock barns, canoe sheds, a granary, and a powder magazine. The main council house was called the Great Hall. An imposing structure, it included living quarters for the partners on one side, quarters for clerks and apprentice clerks on the other, and a grand meeting room in the center.
McLoughlin soon went to work in the hospital. At times he worked under the watchful eye of the North West Company’s only other physician, Dr. Munro. At other times he treated patients all on his own when Dr. Munro was away on other business. No letters written by McLoughlin during his first summer in the Northwest have survived, but an account book from the post contains numerous references to him dispensing “sundries” there.2
For the young apprentice, the rhythm of life at Fort William was highly seasonal. For most of the year, much of this forward base in the North West Company’s far-flung operations stood empty and boarded up as the wintering population dwindled to about thirty-five employees—few more than the number who resided at a dozen other trading posts in the Northwest. But during the summer rendezvous the fort thronged with as many as a thousand employees. Then the Great Hall bustled with activity as the partners conducted business. In their leisure hours the partners dined on fresh game, corn, peas, potatoes, and white bread; drank copiously; played cards and gambled; and held an occasional dance. The employees did not lack for pleasures, either. Each new arriving brigade was met by a great regalement on the riverbank. Between times they played games and had friendly brawls. A good-natured rivalry existed between the year-round employees, or “winterers,” and the seasonal hires who came up from Montreal. The former group condescendingly called the latter group “pork-eaters,” and fights sometimes broke out in the commons between their two camps.3
McLoughlin was a little detached from this boisterous social milieu. Between his doctoring, his bookishness, and his habitual scowl, people often took him to be older than his actual age. Certainly he was unusual in appearance. Standing six feet, four inches tall, he was almost a foot taller than most of the other men, broad shouldered, and lanky. His tall, thin frame contrasted with the stocky, bow-legged build of the typical voyageur. One way in which he adapted to frontier life was to waste little effort on his grooming. He patched his clothes in a haphazard manner with whatever color of cloth came to hand. He let his hair grow long. In the few portraits that were made of him in later life, his hair came down to his shoulders or even down his back, framing his head like a lion’s mane. His wild hair, along with his fierce stare, gave him a slightly mad appearance by middle age, and he may well have begun to acquire that intimidating look even as a young man.4
During the rendezvous McLoughlin kept up a busy medical practice. He was always on the lookout for cases to test his knowledge and skills. One such case involved a patient with scrofula. The ailment was also known as the king’s evil, or what might be described today as tuberculosis of the neck or an infection of the lymph nodes. After curing this man using the juice of the sorrel plant, he proudly described his method in a letter to his uncle Simon.
Pound [the sorrel] in a mortar till it is reduced to a kind of pulp, then put it into an unglas’d earthen pot and allow it to macerate in its own juice over a gentle fire until it becom
es of a proper consistency. [Apply it in a poultice] as warm as the patient can endure to the naked sore. The patient I had complain’d it hurt him much and on the very first application the sore assumed a red colour. I have adopted Dr. Darwin’s theory i.e. that ulcers of this nature are from deficiency of irritability, and I imagine that there is an assumption of oxigene [sic] from the sorrel that gives the sore the red colour and irritates the part to a discharge of matter, in short, gives it the irritability it want’d before.
McLoughlin added that scrofula was common among the Indians and that he hoped to try his treatment on some of them as well.5 Here was a glimmer of the humanitarian concern for Indians for which he would one day be remembered.
After the rendezvous, McLoughlin wintered at one of the smaller posts in the area as an apprentice clerk. This post may have been a mere cabin on a lake somewhere—a remote satellite to a larger post administered by a clerk or partner. Wherever he spent his first winter, he returned to Fort William the next summer for another season of doctoring the sick and injured. But again in the winter of 1804–5 the company sent him to a remote location. The rotation from doctor to apprentice clerk, from summer rendezvous to winter outpost, became the seasonal rhythm by which he marked his apprentice years. His winter posts cannot be identified with certainty, but probably all of them were in the region between Lake Superior and Rainy Lake. Certainly he acquired a familiarity with the country and a knowledge of the local tribes, for he later wrote a report titled “Description of the Indians from Fort William to Lake of the Woods.”6
In his role as apprentice clerk, McLoughlin probably had charge of two or three engagés, whom he sent out each day to hunt, fish, chop wood, and drum up business with Indians, while he minded the store. His own tasks were to conduct trade, maintain accounts of goods going out and furs coming in, and report to whomever he was working under. He and his men may have been several days’ march on snowshoes from the parent trading house.7
During the winter of 1807–8 McLoughlin was assigned to the outfit of fur trader Daniel Harmon—the same individual who encountered John Tanner at Fort Alexandria in 1801. McLoughlin and Harmon built their winter station on the shore of Sturgeon Lake, about 150 straight-line miles northwest of Fort William. The two clerks had one small cabin and the engagés another. Harmon was suffering from a stubborn ailment of some kind, an unspecified complaint, and it was hoped that McLoughlin could restore him to good health over the winter. Harmon was just a few years older than McLoughlin and in his seventh year in the Northwest. He proved to be a good companion through the wintry days and long, northern nights. The son of a Vermont innkeeper, he was better educated than most junior officers in the North West Company, and McLoughlin found his conversation pleasant. McLoughlin tried various medicines on him but could not find a cure. Yet Harmon bore himself well, accepting the inconclusive results with equanimity.8
McLoughlin shared the small living quarters with the Vermonter and his mixed-blood wife. It was not unusual for unmarried men and families to share the same quarters, especially at small outposts where cabins had been erected just in time for winter. In early December Harmon’s wife gave birth to the couple’s first child, a boy, and McLoughlin very likely helped deliver the baby. Such a compact living arrangement may have given McLoughlin his first close-up look at marriage between a white man and a mixed-blood woman. Harmon and his wife had been married for two years. As Harmon related, she had been offered to him one day at South Branch Fort on the Saskatchewan River, and after “mature consideration” he had decided to accept her. She was then fourteen, the daughter of a French Canadian, and far from her mother’s people, who lived in the Rocky Mountains. Traders who intended to remain in the country for any length of time often took “a daughter of the country” as a wife. Indeed, the North West Company encouraged these marriages, since many mixed-blood women and girls were abandoned at the forts by their husbands and fathers, and without another trader or engagé to provide for them, they had to be maintained at company expense. If he and his young wife made each other happy, Harmon piously explained, then it was his intention to keep her as long as he remained in Indian country. When the time came for him to return to New England, he would then make every effort to find her another caring husband in the fur trade. For he firmly believed she would not be content living in civilized society.9
It was probably the following year that McLoughlin entered a similar marital arrangement of his own. Little is known about this union other than that it was short-lived and produced just one child, a boy, whom the couple named Joseph. Some sources on McLoughlin say that the woman was a full-blood Ojibwa, but that is unlikely. Although fur traders often sought full-blood Indian women as marriage partners in the eighteenth century, there was a decided shift in preference toward mixed-blood women as their numbers increased around the forts in the next century.10 In 1806, the North West Company decreed that henceforth no employee could marry a full-blood Indian, the object being to encourage marriages with mixed-blood women, who would otherwise be a drag on company resources. The penalty for disobeying this decree was £100—as much as McLoughlin would earn in his entire apprenticeship—and surviving records indicate that the policy was enforced.11 So it is more likely that McLoughlin married a mixed-blood woman from around Fort William. It would only be natural if, on returning from Sturgeon Lake, he decided to seek the kind of companionship that Harmon and his young wife had modeled for him that winter. Being unavoidably aware of sexual activities within the small space of the cabin provided a strong impetus for a young man to find a bed partner of his own.12
The marriage apparently lasted just a year or two at most. Perhaps the woman died in childbirth. Or perhaps McLoughlin, in his eagerness, married someone whom he soon found incompatible. Judging by his correspondence with his uncle, his emotions were in a tumult that summer of 1808. Although his letters focused on his terms of employment and said nothing about a marriage, the silence means little, because fur traders seldom acknowledged their country wives to relatives back home. What is known for sure is that McLoughlin took responsibility for the child and raised him.13
Fortunately, he had much better luck in choosing a second marriage partner two or three years later. She was the daughter of one fur trader and the widow of another. Her name was Marguerite Wadin McKay.
14
Marriage à la façon du pays
Marguerite Wadin McKay was the daughter of a Swiss Protestant man by the name of Jean Etienne Wadin and an Ojibwa or Cree woman whose name has been lost to history. Wadin probably came to North America with the British army during the French and Indian War. By 1772, he was trading with Indians west of Grand Portage, and seven years later he was among some two dozen traders who joined together to form the nucleus of the North West Company. He had a French Canadian wife and children back in Saint Laurent near Montreal. About 1775, his native wife gave birth to a baby girl, Marguerite. Some five years later, Wadin was shot to death at a remote trading post in the depths of winter, allegedly by another Nor’ Wester. His demise left Marguerite fatherless at a young age, and she seems to have been reared by her Indian people in the vicinity of North West Company forts.1
At about age nineteen or twenty Marguerite married her first husband, a North West Company trader named Alexander McKay. In Canadian fur-trade society, marriages between fur trader and Indian were described as à la façon du pays, or “after the custom of the country.” Marriage rites were a blend of Indian and European forms. When a trader wanted to marry an Indian woman, he was expected to approach her parents for permission. The parents then decided on a bride price for their daughter, such as a horse or a stock of blankets and kettles or other items of comparable value. After the required items were presented, a simple marriage ritual might conclude with the smoking of the calumet by the trader and the bride’s family together with other members of her clan. This sealed the alliance between the trader and his wife’s people. When the trader brought his new bride into the fo
rt, his first act was to deliver her into the hands of the native women there, who put her through a cleansing ritual, taking away her Indian clothes and scrubbing off her face paint to signify that she now lived among white men. Reattired in European fashion, she was then escorted by her husband to his quarters and henceforth they were considered man and wife.2
If marriage à la façon du pays lacked the Christian ideal of lifetime commitment, it still involved a high level of commitment by both partners. Fur traders generally shunned polygamy and assumed that sexual fidelity was part of the marriage contract. As with husbands in Christian marriages, they accepted the role of sole provider within the monogamous relationship. Indian women, for their part, took their husbands’ surnames and strove to adopt their husbands’ culture and raise their children according to the norms of fur-trade society. The fur companies treated these unions as bona fide marriages and accorded the wives certain privileges as well as duties. The women made their homes with their husbands inside the trading post, and sometimes (more often in the case of officers’ wives) they were allowed to travel with their husbands from post to post in the company’s canoes. The women contributed to the general provisioning of the forts by gathering berries, catching small game, making moccasins and snowshoes, and performing numerous other tasks.3
Marguerite gave birth to Thomas, her first child by McKay, reputedly in 1796 at Sault Ste. Marie. Three daughters followed in succession over the next ten years as her first husband rose from clerk to partner, assuming overall direction of the English River Department. In 1805, after they had been together for ten years, Alexander McKay received his first “rotation,” or twelve-month furlough, and went off to Montreal. For Marguerite, this was an anxious time, for among North West families the husband’s furlough often led to the wife’s abandonment. Although McKay returned to Fort William in 1806 for the rendezvous, he soon chose to retire from the business, tendering his shares in the company for £1,000. At that time he did abandon Marguerite and their three daughters in Indian country for good, taking twelve-year-old Thomas with him.4
Rainy Lake House Page 13
