Marguerite McKay and John McLoughlin formed their alliance in 1811. Their courtship probably occurred when he was on medical duty that summer at Fort William. No details of the courtship were ever recorded, but they may be imagined in the context of the summer rendezvous. The great annual gathering at Fort William was not only a time for renewing old friendships but also an opportunity to meet new people. White men and native women seldom were so free to mingle as they were during the rendezvous. They flirted with one another in idle moments during the work day, came together for the men’s football games in the long summer evenings, and joined in dancing—a very popular pastime among both sexes. The fur traders’ dances were truly a blend of cultures, the men high-stepping to the fiddle’s fast tempo, the native women shuffle-stepping to their own internal rhythm.
Marguerite and John each entered the marriage somewhat seasoned in the ways of love, loss, and parenting. When they took each other as common-law husband and wife, she was about thirty-six years of age and he was twenty-six. He became a father to her three young girls and she became a mother to his boy, who was barely more than an infant. She had long dark hair, strongly Indian features, and a petite figure, which must have appeared even more so when she stood with her towering new mate.5
By coincidence, the year that they married was also the year that Marguerite’s first husband, Alexander McKay, died in one of the deadliest acts of violence associated with the fur trade. Two years after retiring from the North West Company, McKay joined the Pacific Fur Company of John Jacob Astor and, with his son Thomas, boarded the Tonquin for a voyage around Cape Horn to the company’s faraway outpost of Astoria at the mouth of the Columbia River. Fortunately, he left the boy at Astoria before reboarding the Tonquin for its ill-fated first run up the Pacific Coast. A few weeks later, this three-masted, ten-gun trading vessel was anchored in Clayoquot Sound, on the outer coast of Vancouver Island, when Indians, intent on avenging an insult made to their chief the previous day, talked their way aboard ship under the guise of wanting to trade but then attacked the ship’s crew. After a bloody struggle, a wounded crew member, finding all his mates either slain or gone overboard, retreated to the powder magazine and blew up the ship. News of this incident could not have reached Marguerite until several months after she and John McLoughlin married, but whatever grief she felt at the death of her former husband must have been mixed with relief over the fact that her son was not among the victims. Young Thomas remained in Astoria until 1813, when the failing Pacific Fur Company sold out to the North West Company. Thomas then joined the Nor’ Westers and returned to the Canadian prairie. And so John McLoughlin acquired a stepson.6
McLoughlin was not yet thirty years old and already he was responsible for five children. His situation was not uncommon. By the time McLoughlin entered the fur trade, children were as numerous as adults at many North West Company forts. Fort Vermilion on the Saskatchewan River in 1809, for example, had a resident population of thirty-six men, twenty-nine women, and sixty-seven children. Unlike the Hudson’s Bay Company, the North West Company showed no interest in providing schools or teachers for this growing population of mixed-blood children. The company assumed that any traders who wanted to give their country-born offspring a formal education could send them down to Montreal. Few did, in part because of the great expense but also out of concern that they would not flourish in civilized society. In the absence of schools, parents were solely responsible for educating their children. Consequently, the influence of the mother’s native culture featured strongly in the children’s upbringing. Fathers generally hoped for their daughters to marry traders and for their sons to find employment as guides, interpreters, or clerks in the fur trade. John McLoughlin was no different, for at this point in his life he could not even think of financing a formal education for his children. He had no other choice than to contemplate their growing to maturity on the frontier.7
Based on the few surviving observations left by family, friends, and associates, it seems that McLoughlin and Marguerite were loving and tender companions. Both partners were noted for their moral rectitude, each adhering to the tenets of their own cultural traditions. People praised Marguerite for her generous spirit and sweet, mild temper. One man who was close to the McLoughlins later in life lauded Marguerite for “her numerous charities and many excellent qualities of heart.” Her children would later remember the remarkable calming effect she had on her husband’s stormy moods.8
McLoughlin, for his part, took a growing pride in providing Marguerite with what was, for a fur trader’s family, an exceptionally stable domestic arrangement. Each fall, after the rendezvous, the McLoughlins packed their things and shipped out on the North West Company’s main-trunk canoe route, crossing over the Height of Land (the divide between the Lake Superior and Hudson Bay watersheds) to McLoughlin’s winter post at Rainy Lake. There they made their home either at the main trading house on the Rainy River just below the outlet of Rainy Lake or at a small, auxiliary outpost located at Vermilion Lake.9 Each June or July, the family packed their things again and returned to Fort William, where McLoughlin saw to the health of hundreds of voyageurs and the few dozen partners attending that year’s rendezvous. Eventually the McLoughlins were given their own private residence at Fort William, so valued were his medical services. Located just inside the large fort’s main gate, it doubled as the apothecary.10
Twice in his seventeen years with the North West Company, McLoughlin maneuvered his way out of assignments that would have ended this happy arrangement and taken the family much farther afield. The first time, in 1811, he declined an offer to go to the Columbia River in Oregon. Then, in 1815, he refused a request by the partners to take over administration of the company’s most valuable asset, the Athabaska Department. If McLoughlin gave his reasons for refusing the appointments, they are not known, as the minutes of council for those years have not survived. It seems clear, however, that his primary motivation was to maintain a stable home for his large family.11
McLoughlin’s marriage à la façon du pays brought him the additional advantage of more direct links to native people. With his wife’s help, he became fairly proficient in the Ojibwa language, and as the years passed he became an increasingly sensitive observer of Ojibwa culture, too. This was, of course, one of the main reasons the fur companies supported cross-cultural marriage, because these alliances were generally beneficial for the business. Marguerite had no kinship ties to the local Indian bands; by some accounts her own kin lived farther east around Sault Ste. Marie. Still, in the interactions between white and Indian that so permeated the fur trade, Marguerite’s native background must have aided her husband in countless small ways. When Indians came to their winter post to barter, McLoughlin made it his business to learn a little about each one. By the time the McLoughlins left for the Columbia in 1824, he was acquainted with hundreds of Indians throughout the region stretching from Fort William to Lake of the Woods.
15
Bad Birds
Once, when McLoughlin was at his post on Vermilion Lake near Rainy Lake, an old Ojibwa chief and two young men came to see him with nothing to trade, bearing only a message. It was early April; the winter’s snow lay in patches on the forest floor, and the ice had just begun to melt around the edges of the lake. The three visitors shared a pipe of tobacco with the young McLoughlin as they went through the customary ritual of exchanging compliments. At length, the old chief made a speech. He began by saying that his people were long acquainted with the white men, that he himself had been very young when they first came to winter on their lands, and that long before he was born his ancestors had encountered other white men in the East. In all this time the white men never caused his people any harm. But times had changed, and now his people were poor. And they had seen bad birds fly. McLoughlin interjected, what did he mean by “bad birds”? The Indian paused in his speech, sat on the ground and hung his head between his knees, apparently absorbed in thought. Finally, he lifted his h
ead and said beseechingly, “Don’t poison the waters of the lake!” McLoughlin was astonished that the Indian thought he would do such a thing, much less that he had the power, considering the enormous extent of the lake. As he tried to understand, he concluded that the Indians believed he was capable of sorcery and that their bizarre request had come in response to a stern warning he had given to a younger man of the Vermilion Lake band several months earlier. After this fellow had threatened the life of a trader, McLoughlin told him that if he repeated the offense he would be punished for it. But the Indian, it seemed, had misinterpreted his words, alerting the other members of his band that McLoughlin intended to punish the whole band. And so the chief had come to him, begging forgiveness.1
This kind of misunderstanding was becoming more common all the time, McLoughlin observed. The Indians were sunk in superstition, he wrote. If an Indian was unsuccessful in the hunt, or somehow injured himself, or if his child fell sick, he would attribute his misfortune to sorcery. And if his sick child should die, the Indian felt justified in seeking revenge on whomever might have cast the evil spell. Recently a prophet had come among the Ojibwa claiming that he was in direct communication with the Supreme Being. Such was the Indians’ state of mind that they traveled in large numbers over long distances to see this prophet, to hear his stories, and to be forewarned of their collective fate.2
If McLoughlin disparaged the Indians for believing in sorcery and perceiving a spirit world in which bad birds flew, he shared the Indians’ growing sense of unease over how their world was changing. All kinds of animals were becoming scarce, and most marked was the decline of beaver. Beaver, of course, was the “soft gold” that had lured him to this wild corner of the globe in the first place. It was the object of all his endeavors, his means to a better life, and they were hunting it to oblivion. Other furbearers—marten, mink, muskrat, otter—were becoming scarce as well. Year by year more traders and hunters came in pursuit of a diminishing supply of furs, and year by year the company’s profits shrank.3 While the promise of being promoted to partner in the North West Company was still McLoughlin’s guiding star, he saw his prospects for becoming wealthy in the fur trade fading.
McLoughlin’s newfound contentment in his domestic affairs was not enough to dispel his forebodings about this place he called Siberia. Outside the small circle of his new mixed-blood family, he saw his world in decline. The Indians were hungry and dispirited, the traders tired and cynical. When news reached Fort William in the summer of 1812 that Britain and the United States were at war, McLoughlin wrote dejectedly to his uncle Simon, “I have a promise of becoming a partner of the N W Co on the Outfit of the Year 1814—but I am Greatly afraid this war will injure this country if not ruin it entirely.”4 In fact, when the offer of partner was finally put to him two years later, he had to think hard on it, as the company’s fortunes were sinking fast.
McLoughlin, in common with other traders, traced the decline to one source: rising competition among the fur traders themselves. To the fur traders’ way of thinking, monopoly control of an area was an essential condition for a thriving trade. Competition, on the other hand, was an aberration and an evil. In the language of the fur trade, competition was called “opposition,” and a rival trader was an “opponent.” As the fur traders saw it, when Europeans first entered the wilderness they dealt with Indians in the absence of rivals, which gave them a free hand to develop favorable terms of exchange with their Indian trading partners. They needed that advantage in order to operate successfully so far from home. When a competitor came into the area and established a rival concern, evil consequences followed. First and foremost, Indians quickly took advantage of the situation by bargaining up the price of beaver. As traders found it necessary to give more yards of cloth, more iron pots, trinkets, and gifts of rum and tobacco for the same quantity of peltries, their profits diminished while their already high shipping costs rose. And as each separate trading post struggled for adequate returns relative to costs, overhunting of fur animals in the more marginal districts was the inevitable result.5 Overhunting of beaver was made worse by the introduction of steel traps and the practice of baiting traps with castoreum (a substance made from the beaver’s perineal glands). By 1800 fur traders began to recognize that beaver populations in the Northwest were in decline, and by 1812 the downward trend was conspicuous.6
Sadly, competition ultimately cost the Indians more than it did the traders. If Indians got any short-term benefit from the higher fur prices, it was soon cancelled out by the competition’s ill effects. The worst of these was an increase in liquor trafficking. McLoughlin hated giving liquor to the Indians when he knew perfectly well what powerful and demoralizing effects it had on them. “While under its deleterious Effects the father and Son the Mother and daughter will fight together and Brothers Murder Each other,” he wrote. “It is in my Opinion the Ruin of the trade.” But he resigned himself to it anyway. In that respect he was no different from most traders. The use of liquor was firmly embedded in the system of exchange, and it was beyond the power of a single individual to do anything about it. “The Custom of giving presents of Liquor to the Indians was introduced by our predecessors in trade and every Opposition courted popularity by giving a Greater quantity of liquor to the Indians,” he wrote dejectedly. “But now the country is poor. . . . If you take the Indians furs for liquor he will be destitute of the means of hunting and he and his family being naked will Starve—and make their way to the Fort. We cannot allow them [to] die of hunger alongside of the house and thus must support him.”7
As the North West and Hudson’s Bay companies squared off during the final years of their struggle for mastery of the fur trade, the volume of liquor shipped into Indian country threatened to reach all-time highs. In 1808, the North West Company shipped 9,000 gallons of rum and spirits. Most of this was “high wine,” a highly concentrated form of spirits that was subsequently diluted with about six parts water, so the actual number of gallons plied to Indians was considerably greater.8 The torrent of firewater was noted far beyond fur-trade society. That year, Britain’s Parliament considered a bill to end all trafficking of liquor to Indians in British America. The North West Company’s agents in London successfully petitioned against the bill, baldly stating that if the company were forced to submit to such a ban it would lose three-quarters of its trade on the upper Missouri to American traders.9
There was tension within the North West Company itself on this issue. The wintering partners, seeing with their own eyes how liquor destroyed Indian lives, felt the moral burden of it. The Montreal agents, on the other hand, saw with crystal clarity how the liquor affected the company’s competitive position and profits and therefore tended to overlook the human cost. In 1810, the partners took up the difficult issue at their annual meeting at Fort William. McLoughlin, still a clerk at that time, was not allowed to take part in the discussion. The Montreal agents carried the debate. They decided that the quantity of liquor might be safely reduced from its then level of 10,000 gallons per year to half that much “should the Saints in Parliament, in their mistaken notions of Philanthropy, persist in the Intention of abolishing the use of that article.”10
From the traders’ standpoint, another evil of competition was the proliferation of Indian chiefs, or “trading captains” as they were sometimes called. The custom was to honor an exceptional hunter by giving him extra presents of liquor and tobacco and dressing him in a red coat and trousers with linen shirt, and perhaps a hat adorned with an ostrich feather. The idea was to increase these individuals’ prestige among their people, so that the next time they came to the trading house they would be accompanied by more hunters with more furs. As rival traders competed with one another to cultivate these relationships, they were less and less discriminating about whom they made captains. Traders, bemoaning the rising cost of “clothing the Indians,” muttered cynically among themselves that red-coated Indians in the forest became as thick as fleas on a dog.11 Some worried a
bout the social consequences of this practice as well, for it seemed to subvert the Indians’ tribal organization, undermining the authority of bona fide chiefs. “It is much to be lamented that the natives in general in this Country have lost that respect and obedience which they formerly had for their principal Chiefs,” wrote one Nor’ Wester. “The consequences are of a serious nature to us at present, as every vice has got among them.”12 McLoughlin wrote in a similar vein in his report on the Indians inhabiting the area from Fort William to Lake of the Woods. “Most of their vices have greatly Increas’d of late Years from the escalation of traders.” McLoughlin’s answer to the problem was not just to reinstate monopoly control over the trade but to institute a kind of paternalism over the Indians alongside it. If the Indians had just one trader to deal with instead of many, he reasoned, then each trader would have it in his power and interest “to correct the bad morals of the natives” in his purview.13
Indians and traders were engaged in what the traders defined as a system of credit. Each fall, the traders advanced individual Indians a quantity of supplies with the understanding that the Indians would pay off their debt in furs over the course of the winter. The traders recorded the name of each Indian hunter together with the items and their assigned value in the post’s ledger book. The supplies included powder and ball as well as cloth, ironware, trinkets, and other goods. All European goods together with all types of animal furs were valued according to a standard measure of “made beaver,” this being the equivalent of a single prime beaver pelt. The amount of credit that the trader was willing to advance each Indian varied according to how much stock he put in that individual’s hunting ability and trustworthiness. The markup on European goods was very high, and many debts did not get repaid in full, yet the credit system served to regulate a major portion of the trade. But this system, too, required monopoly control to function well. With multiple trading houses available to him, an Indian might take debt from one trader in the fall and then barter his entire winter’s hunt to a rival trader in the spring. Traders for their part did not feel at all averse to bartering furs from an Indian whom they knew had been supplied through the winter by a rival trader. In the face of such cutthroat practices, traders anxiously appraised each Indian hunter on the basis of whether he would be “loyal” in hunting exclusively for him or a “cheat” by taking his furs somewhere else.14
Rainy Lake House Page 14
