Rainy Lake House

by Theodore Catton

  McLoughlin was completely torn about his options. To his business associates, he displayed a somewhat outsized devotion to his mixed-blood family. He fought stubbornly to give his family a stable home at Fort William, and he declared his intentions to give his sons a formal education. Woe be to anyone who brought any insult or injury to Marguerite or the children. Stern, righteous, and hot-tempered, the doctor did not shy from using his towering frame and brute strength to browbeat or inflict corporal punishment on any “damned rascal” who deserved it.2 Many years later, in Oregon, he would give a clergyman a severe caning for making racial slurs against his wife.

  But in letters home, McLoughlin gave full play to his desire to return to civilization. The Northwest was a dreary wasteland, he insisted, and the fur trade was a rough and dirty business from which he would retire at the earliest possible moment. He never wrote a word about his wife and children to his family in Quebec. Just days before his trial in York began, McLoughlin wrote to his uncle Simon in Terrebonne: “Between you and me I have an offer to enter into Business in the civilized world. If I do not accept the proposal it will be from want of capital. This is between us—no one else must know it.”3 Was McLoughlin privately contemplating a break with his mixed-blood family? His insistence on secrecy may have been purely to protect his position in the North West Company. One wonders, though, if it related in some way to his domestic affairs.

  Nothing further came of the business offer McLoughlin confided to his uncle. Possibly a “want of capital” was, as he claimed, the primary reason it never materialized. After a decade and a half in the fur trade, he still did not possess the nest egg he had long sought. If he had made partner a few years earlier, he might have expected an annual income of around £400, plus another £1,000 or more upon retirement when he tendered his share to the other partners. But as the Nor’ Westers entered into economic warfare with the Hudson’s Bay Company at the very time that McLoughlin acquired his single share, profits disappeared and McLoughlin received not a penny in annual dividends from 1815 onwards. A surviving ledger book of the North West Company, in which McLoughlin’s account takes up a single page, seems to indicate that he received nothing more by way of compensation than to be reimbursed year after year for living expenses. These expenses were paid to his account by McTavish, McGillivrays and Company. One historian, in examining this account, concluded that McLoughlin “would probably have been better off financially if he had remained on a salary with the North West Company, and refused to become a wintering partner.”4 No doubt the doctor himself was tormented by that prospect.

  Yet there was more to McLoughlin’s decision to stick with the fur trade than mere impecuniousness. It would seem he had come to that fork in the road that many fur traders found so agonizing. His actions over the next two years suggest that his mind was in just such a dark place and that he was appealing to his better angels to keep his commitment to Marguerite and accept a lifelong career and retirement on the frontier.

  Moreover, loyalty to Marguerite was not the only issue weighing on him. Maybe it was no coincidence that McLoughlin leaned into his marriage at the same time that he prepared to break with the arrogant William McGillivray and his ham-fisted leadership of the North West Company. To McLoughlin and a growing number of wintering partners, McGillivray appeared more and more reckless and vain in his desire to vanquish the Hudson’s Bay Company. Increasingly, the others looked to the doctor as the one man in their group with the courage to stand up to McGillivray. In February 1819, a close observer of the situation wrote that there was none among the wintering partners “possessing firmness of character” except McLoughlin and perhaps one or two others. “A good dinner, a few fair promises would waltz the remainder about, to any tune the McGillivrays chose to strike up.”5 Sometime during that year, McLoughlin began to conceive a plan for how to accomplish a radical break with McGillivray and the Montreal agents.

  In the spring of 1819, the doctor returned to Fort William, rejoining his family after another long absence. Marguerite had somehow managed to care for the children through the period of Selkirk’s occupation of the fort. Their youngest child, Eloisa, was now two years old. Marguerite’s three daughters by her first husband were in various stages of becoming independent. One of these daughters, Nancy McKay, had married the captain of the North West Company’s schooner that ferried goods and men up and down Lake Superior. Another daughter, whose name has been lost, had probably married by this time as well. By one account, she married a lieutenant in the British army and went to India.6

  Though the partners’ trials were now over, the war between the two great fur companies went on. The main theater of conflict moved from the Red River valley to the rich Athabaska district, the ultimate prize of the Canadian fur trade. Reports from that remote country told of more false arrests, more illegal imprisonments, more forts seized. Meanwhile, the rivals continued to do battle in the courts and in the public sphere, hammering one another with pamphlets and book-length tirades. The costly and embarrassing litigation bled both companies of their financial reserves and led politicians and governing officials in Canada and Britain to consider the need for a union of the two antagonists to end the strife.7

  When all the North West partners convened at Fort William in the sum­mer of 1819, the company’s acute financial problems were laid bare. The wintering partners found the Montreal agents hard-pressed to keep them in supply for the coming year. For once, McGillivray was not so cocky. He could sense the old partnership coming apart. Most of the partners were signatories to a twenty-year agreement that was set to expire in three more years. Day after day McGillivray tried to talk the partners into renewing their commitments, but many of them balked. McLoughlin encouraged dissension. Speaking to the partners privately, he intimated that they might do better, when the time came, to negotiate with the Hudson’s Bay Company instead. According to intelligence passed between agents of the Hudson’s Bay Company, McGillivray went home from Fort William that summer in a terrible funk, convinced that if he could not get the agreement with the wintering partners renewed by the following year, then “the whole North West Company concern would be annihilated.”8

  After the rendezvous McLoughlin made his opening move toward leading a revolt among the wintering partners. He wrote confidentially to George Moffatt, a prominent Montreal merchant and partner in a supply house with ties to the Hudson’s Bay Company. He asked Moffatt to inquire discreetly whether the wintering partners, if they stood together in refusing to renew their agreement with McTavish, McGillivrays and Company, would then be able to forge an alternative arrangement with the Hudson’s Bay Company. Moffatt communicated this question to Samuel Gale, a Montreal attorney, who conveyed its substance in a letter to Lady Jean Selkirk, the wife of the earl. Lady Selkirk forwarded Gale’s letter to Andrew Colvile, attorney for the Hudson’s Bay Company and a leading member of its governing London Committee. Gale’s letter kept McLoughlin’s identity a secret, describing him only as “a wintering partner now in the Indian Country.” Gale stated that this anonymous individual possessed “influence to withdraw almost every useful member of the North West Association” who was fearful of being cheated or abandoned by his Montreal suppliers.9 In other words, he thought McLoughlin could lead a revolt against Mc­Gillivray and end the conflict if only the Hudson’s Bay Company responded with the right overtures.

  Gale’s letter was explosive, for it arrived in London at the very time when William McGillivray and his brother Simon were pursuing back-channel negotiations with the Hudson’s Bay Company to resolve the conflict in their own way. With the help of their London contacts, the McGillivrays offered to buy Selkirk’s controlling interest in the Hudson’s Bay Company. They reasoned that if Selkirk were removed from the equation, the Nor’ Westers would be rid of their enemy while the London-based company would be unburdened of the distraction of Selkirk’s colonization scheme. More important, the Nor’ Westers would at last gain access to the Hudson Bay supply route,
and the competitors could join as one. Unbeknownst to McLoughlin and the other wintering partners, several members of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s governing committee had mutinous designs of their own as they looked for a way to throw over Lord Selkirk and accomplish a union of the two companies. But when they received Gale’s letter, they suddenly dropped all talk of conveying Selkirk’s controlling interest to the Nor’ Westers. Why negotiate with the enemy when the enemy was itself on the verge of surrender? The Hudson’s Bay Company rejected its rival’s offer, adopting the policy that by standing firm for another year or two it could bring the North West Company to its knees. Selkirk died a few months later, in April 1820, but it made no difference for the negotiations; the governing committee retained its resolve.10

  McGillivray suspected McLoughlin of betrayal, for it was clear from the way the Hudson’s Bay Company officers had suddenly broken off negotiations that they had learned of the dissension among the wintering partners. Who else might have given them their intelligence but the nettlesome doctor? His suspicions grew when McLoughlin hosted George Simpson, a rising officer in the Hudson’s Bay Company, at Fort William the following spring. What really rankled McGillivray about this meeting was that the British government had tasked Simpson to deliver a communiqué to the North West Company and Simpson had handed the communiqué to McLoughlin as the company’s representative officer in the interior instead of bringing it to McGillivray as head of the company. Clearly, Simpson’s action was intended to build up McLoughlin and undermine McGillivray, and McLoughlin had played along with it. The junior partner and the powerful Montreal merchant had always been wary of each other; at last their antipathy was out in the open.11

  At the rendezvous that summer of 1820, McGillivray’s waning influence over the wintering partners was evident. He could only prevail upon a handful of them to renew their contracts with McTavish, McGillivrays and Company. Vindictively, and as a test of his remaining power, he called for a vote to remove McLoughlin from his longtime post as proprietor of Fort William. He knew how attached the doctor was to that place for the sake of his family. With his tight hold on the Montreal merchants’ shares in the company, McGillivray could just muster the votes to punish his rival. The vote was taken, and McLoughlin was removed from his post. But in taking that action, McGillivray pitted the doctor against him. And the rendezvous was not yet over.

  Now stripped of his post, McLoughlin called the wintering partners together in a separate meeting to discuss his idea that they collectively join the Hudson’s Bay Company. It was a mutiny against the Montreal merchants that he now incited. Although the Montreal house of McTavish, ­McGillivrays and Company owned a majority share in all of the company’s far-flung assets, everyone knew that the company’s real strength lay in the energy and experience of the men who dwelt in the interior. The wintering partners were ready. They elected McLoughlin and one other of their number, Angus Bethune, to go on a secret mission to London and represent them at the Hudson’s Bay House. Eighteen men assigned powers of attorney to those two, and handed the documents over to the doctor.12

  As the rendezvous broke up, McLoughlin made arrangements for his family. For the time being, Marguerite would remain at Fort William with their youngest, little Eloisa, while he would take the older two, John Jr. and Elizabeth, ages eight and six, to Montreal to begin their formal education. Each of the older children would be assigned to a separate guardian, and he would establish an account with his uncle Simon to cover their expenses. He and Marguerite prepared for their third long separation in four years.13

  Arriving in Montreal in September, McLoughlin and Bethune went to the trading house of George Moffatt. A former clerk in the North West Company, Moffatt now held a controlling interest in the firm of Gerrard, Gillespie, Moffatt, and Company. Eager to support the two North West partners’ scheme, he provided them with a generous expense account for their mission to London. He then introduced them to Samuel Gale, the Selkirks’ former attorney in Montreal, who gave them the necessary contacts in London. McLoughlin still insisted on the secrecy of their mission, but it was ever more apparent that he and Bethune were being treated as envoys to negotiate terms with the opposition. After their meeting, Gale wrote a letter to Andrew Colvile, the attorney on the Hudson’s Bay Company’s London Committee, to inform him about the nature of McLoughlin’s and Bethune’s forthcoming visit.14

  22

  London

  In November 1820, McLoughlin and Bethune set sail from New York aboard the American packet Albion, bound for Liverpool. As McLoughlin began roaming the deck to acquire his sea legs for the five-week voyage across the Atlantic, he discovered that among the ship’s other passengers, ironically, was their old rival, Colin Robertson. The tall, proud, bewhiskered Hudson’s Bay man stood out in a crowd quite as much as the lanky, white-haired doctor did, and in spite of their past enmity and present need for discretion, the two became good friends aboard ship. As the days and weeks went by, McLoughlin found himself calling more and more regularly at Robertson’s state room for convivial conversation.

  Like McLoughlin, Robertson was frustrated that he had not risen faster and higher in his company’s hierarchy. A onetime clerk in the North West Company, he had crossed to the opposition around 1810, just as Lord Selkirk began to increase his interest in the Hudson’s Bay Company. Together with Selkirk and Andrew Colvile, Robertson helped pull the company out of its century-old lethargy and seek primacy. Robertson was more bellicose than either Selkirk or Colvile. His strategy for defeating the North West Company was simple: hit the Nor’ Westers where it hurt them most—in the fur-rich Athabaska—and make them bleed. He once summed up his line of attack by quoting a Russian proverb, If you live among wolves you have to howl like a wolf. He had acquired a deserved reputation among the Nor’ Westers as a fighter, a schemer, and an amazing escape artist. In the past three years, the Nor’ Westers had taken him prisoner twice, and each time he had managed to make a bold getaway.

  During an altercation outside Fort Chipewyan in the summer of 1818, Robertson had discharged his pistol—by accident, he claimed—prompting the Nor’ Westers to arrest him and lock him inside a small shack next to the fort’s privy. In that confined space they had held him prisoner for eight months, awaiting such time as they could transport him to Lower Canada under guard. In an amusing story he undoubtedly shared with McLoughlin during their Atlantic crossing, Robertson told how he made the most of his long imprisonment by sending secret intelligence that he gleaned about the Nor’ Westers to his own people at nearby Fort Wedderburn. He sent his intelligence in coded messages, which he managed to stash in a rum keg that went back and forth semiregularly between the two forts. He was very proud of the clever hiding place he devised to hold his ciphers.1

  Robertson’s adventures continued when his captors attempted to transport him to Lower Canada in the spring. His canoe suspiciously capsized in rapids near Île-á-la-Crosse. Though two guards who were both capable swimmers drowned, Robertson in manacles somehow survived. Once ashore, he found refuge in the Hudson’s Bay Company’s nearby Cumberland House. In the following year, the Nor’ Westers ambushed him at the Grand Rapids on the lower Saskatchewan River and once again clapped him in irons for the long passage by canoe to Lower Canada. As their journey lengthened, Robertson studied his chances. During a meal break, he flung a dish of biscuits into his captors’ faces, grabbed a gun, and made his second escape from the Nor’ Westers. As there were warrants out for his arrest this time, he fled over the border into the United States. And that was how he came to be aboard the Albion, he explained to McLoughlin, for now he was on his way to London to make a report.2

  But that was not the whole truth. While in New York, Robertson had received the intelligence that the Nor’ Westers were looking for a way to make peace and merge the two companies. He had come aboard the Albion anxious to take part in the upcoming negotiations in London. He had a good idea why McLoughlin and Bethune were aboard ship, in spite of their secrec
y about it, though he was too sly to challenge them directly.

  McLoughlin, for his part, would not reveal his purpose in going to ­England. Once, at the risk of revealing his secret mission, he tried to steer their conversation to the character of the men on the London Committee, the very men with whom he would soon be sitting down to negotiate terms. What were they like? Were they affable and easy in their manners? Robertson saw right through the questions and could not resist taunting his new friend, who was still, after all, his rival. “You will see them Doctor, by and bye, and you will tell us all about it yourself,” Robertson said. “Me—me?” McLoughlin stammered back, his face flushing. “How, how am I going to see them?”3

  By the end of their sea voyage, all attempts at secrecy had become a mere pretense. On the last day aboard ship, McLoughlin, Robertson, and Bethune dined with John Caldwell, a public official in the government of Lower Canada and close friend of William McGillivray. Robertson baldly challenged Caldwell to name the purpose of the two Nor’ Westers business in London. “Come, come,” Caldwell replied, “you know very well, as you are going to introduce them to the Hudsons Bay Co.” Robertson denied it, but Caldwell would not be taken for a fool. “Oh, I believe so,” he insisted, “and William McGillivray himself sets no value upon them.” He paused, waiting for McLoughlin and Bethune to absorb this insulting remark. When they did not rise to it, he added, “Oh yes, I know they are radicals.”4

  The verbal sparring only made McLoughlin angry, but it was the sort of thing Robertson greatly enjoyed. As land came in sight, the ship’s stewards brought everyone a glass of wine followed by a subscription (collection) for the stewards and other servants. McLoughlin signed the subscription and passed the pen to Robertson. Robertson started to sign and then stopped, noting the fact that Bethune was next in line. He turned to a clergyman, one Monsieur Carriera, and quipped: “Come Abby put down your name. I don’t like to sign between two North Westers.” “Never mind,” the abby replied, without missing a beat, “remember our Saviour was crucified between two thieves.” McLoughlin reddened but held his temper.5