Two days after the fire, on July 6, another village alarm was raised when James Schoolcraft, the Indian agent’s younger brother and the sutler for Fort Brady, was found dead on his property with a bullet through his heart. Witnesses heard the gunshot but did not see the shooter. Dressed in a robe and house slippers, James Schoolcraft had been walking down a garden path that led away from the house and was evidently taken by surprise by someone hiding in the bushes. The killing occurred in the afternoon; it seemed he had risen late after sleeping off the effects of a hard night of drinking with army officers on July Fourth, one and a half days earlier.27
Suspicion fell immediately on Tanner. To most of the excited townspeople, it now seemed that Tanner had burned down his own house, committed the murder, and fled. His resentment of Henry Schoolcraft was well known. Presumably upon discovering that the Indian agent was out of town he had waited a day for him to return and had then killed the brother instead. The townspeople imagined that he was now lurking nearby, crazed and homeless and potentially still murderous. They promptly organized a manhunt. The men did not venture too far into the woods, however, as they knew Tanner was a good marksman. After a few days, they gave up the search.28
Cooler heads suggested another theory about the murder of James Schoolcraft. A one-ounce ball and three buckshot found in the victim’s body matched the contents of a government cartridge fired from an army musket. A young officer at Fort Brady by the name of Lieutenant Bryant Tilden was said to have a motive for the killing: he and James Schoolcraft had been vying for the attention of a young lady. At the officers’ party on the evening of July Fourth the two men had quarreled. Tilden was overheard to say “cold lead would fix it.” However, before he could be formally charged with murder the army whisked him away to fight in the Mexican-American War.29
Not long afterwards, Tilden was charged with another crime, court-martialed, convicted on counts of murder and burglary, and sentenced to be hanged. The sentence was commuted, and he resigned from the army. Though he was never formally charged in the Schoolcraft case, he felt the need to proclaim his innocence. He died in New York in 1859. After he died, rumors surfaced that on his deathbed he confessed to killing Schoolcraft. The most compelling story of the deathbed confession was offered by Gilbert, who recalled a conversation she had with Martha Tanner in Mackinac some forty years after the murder. Martha Tanner told her that she had had a letter from Tilden’s wife stating that her husband had confessed to shooting James Schoolcraft. Martha stated further that being a Roman Catholic she had shown Mrs. Tilden’s letter to her bishop, who had taken it from her saying that it must be destroyed.
Although the suspicion of Tilden lingered, the prevailing view was that Tanner killed Schoolcraft. Many worried that he might be hovering about, waiting to kill again. One Indian woman claimed she had seen him darting through the forest with dead grass and pine boughs tied to his arms and legs, dressed for hunting. Other Indians who came down the St. Mary’s River reported seeing his campfire through the trees and hearing him singing Indian songs. When, after a few weeks had passed, smoke was observed rising in a dozen places around the surrounding country, it was said he was setting fire to the woods. Nervous parents kept their children in at night. A guard was posted around Henry Schoolcraft’s house as well as around the Reverend Bingham’s house. The local authorities offered a reward for Tanner’s capture, while the governor of Michigan announced he would do all in his power to bring him to trial. The fear that he would return and commit more murders went on for weeks. The excitement would long be remembered as the “Tanner summer.”30
He was never heard from again.
In the spacious Far West, Dr. John McLoughlin had full rein to exercise his ambition and skill as an administrator. There he built an empire on a scale few nineteenth-century traders could have imagined. For twenty years he served as chief factor of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s sprawling Columbia District. From his headquarters at Fort Vancouver on the lower Columbia River, he oversaw a vast trade network that stretched up and down the Pacific Coast from Alaska to California, penetrated inland to the Great Salt Lake, and followed sea lanes to Hawaii, Tahiti, and the Far East. He managed a complex infrastructure of trading posts, trapper brigades, company ships, sawmills, and farms. He advised his superiors on how the company could best compete with its American and Russian rivals. He conducted diplomacy with Indian tribes. He forged his own policy for dealing with the arrival of American settlers. He was patriarch over the whole unorganized territory.
McLoughlin developed a reputation among the Pacific Northwest Indians as a just and powerful white chief. He was proud of the name that Indians gave him: “The White-headed Eagle.” He supposed the name alluded to his impressive authority over his men as much as it did to his giant physique and white mane of hair, or the eagle-like glower he wore when addressing a council. He delivered a stern message to his own people on how they must treat Indians. As Hudson’s Bay Company servants, they were obliged to cultivate good relations with their trading partners. Anyone under his charge who maliciously harmed an Indian would be punished the same as if the attack was made on a white person. Anyone who murdered an Indian would be subject “to the penalties of a capital indictment in the criminal courts of Canada.” He hoped for similar vigilance and restraint by the tribes. He expected them to punish their own bad men, and he wanted to leave them to their own affairs as much as possible. “In dealing with the Indians we ought to make allowance for their way of thinking,” he said.31
While McLoughlin talked of respecting natives’ way of thinking, he did so with the tribes’ political rather than cultural autonomy in view. When missionaries came to the Oregon country with the hope of converting Indians to Christianity, he applauded their efforts. Always a humanitarian, he believed the missionaries could benefit Indians most by introducing them to agriculture. He argued that teaching them how to read and write and instructing them in Scripture ought to be secondary concerns at best. In his view, if a few Indians gathered around the missions, learned how to farm, and took their new knowledge back to their people, then it would free them all from dependence on the hunt. “Teach them first to cultivate the ground and live more comfortably than they do by hunting, and as they do this, teach them religion,” he advised the missionaries. McLoughlin believed the Indians’ customary way of life could not last in Oregon any more than the fur trade could long endure there. Both would disappear under the approaching tide of white settlement.32
A man once asked the doctor if he thought Oregon would become a settled country. His response was that wherever men could raise wheat the land would become settled. As McLoughlin found Oregon’s fertile soil and mild climate to be much more favorable for farming than any other place he had known, he expected the land to fill with farms relatively quickly. As early as 1829, he started a claim at the falls of the Willamette River twenty-five miles south of Fort Vancouver. He erected mills next to the falls. Eventually he moved to his valuable claim after retiring from the company. He always anticipated that Oregon would grow and prosper. He naïvely expected to have more influence on the new state than the way it played out. While he was chief factor he encouraged freemen (retired company servants) and Métis to immigrate to the Willamette valley from Red River and elsewhere in the Hudson’s Bay Company’s territories. He told them that Oregon would be a good place to raise their mixed-blood children “as white and Christians.” Furthermore, he thought that a strong Métis presence would tend to promote peace between settlers and Indians. In looking to Oregon’s future, he vainly hoped that Indians would be well treated by whites when the latter came to outnumber them.33
Two of McLoughlin’s own Métis children were among the few hundred Canadians who answered his call and took up farms in the Willamette valley. His oldest son, Joseph, served as a trapper on expeditions to California for a number of years and then retired from the company and established a farm about forty miles south of Fort Vancouver. His stepson, Thomas McKay
, also settled in the valley, where he married a woman of the Chinook tribe, made a farm, and continued to serve the company as an occasional guide and trapper. McLoughlin’s younger daughter, Eloisa, grew up in the “big house” at Fort Vancouver, married a company clerk, and eventually settled in the area as well.34
McLoughlin urged his younger two sons, John Jr. and David, to get an education and make a life for themselves outside of farming and the fur trade. Both sons did a turn at medical school in Paris under the watchful eye of his brother David, while from the other side of the world McLoughlin paid their expenses. Both young men circled back to farming and the fur trade in the Pacific Northwest in spite of their education and their father’s wishes. McLoughlin’s son David later left Oregon for the California gold fields, then went to the mines in British Columbia, and finally settled on a farm in northern Idaho, where he married a Kutenai woman and lived on into old age in obscurity. John Jr. was less fortunate. After a troubled youth in Terrebonne living with his great uncle, followed by a restless passage through early manhood in Paris and Montreal, he started to show some promise as a Hudson’s Bay Company clerk in the Far West. Tragically, while superintending a remote post in coastal Alaska in 1842, his life was cut short when he was shot and killed by one of his own men in a drunken brawl.35
There was a curious parallel between McLoughlin’s older son’s unhappy life and John Tanner’s. Both were separated from their parents’ home and thrust into an alien culture while in the same early stage of life. McLoughlin took his son John Jr. from Fort William to Terrebonne to live with his uncle Simon when the boy was eight years old. Although McLoughlin’s aim was to get his son a formal education, he was at a tender age to be deposited so far from home. McLoughlin saw little more of him after that, and Marguerite had even less contact. John Jr. seems to have been psychologically damaged by the separation in much the same way Tanner was traumatized by his captivity. There is a chilling hint of it in a missive Simon Fraser wrote to his great nephew in 1836, when John Jr. was a troubled young man of twenty-three. “I have so bad an opinion of you that I think you equal to any species of meanness,” the letter began, and then it made oblique reference to John Jr.’s childhood uprooting:
When a boy of about eight years of age I was obliged to take you from the Reverend Mr Glen on account of the habit you had of soiling your breeches and remaining in that condition for days. . . . I blamed your mother for the filthy habit—I am now convinced I was wrong—the blame lay solely on your innate perversity at school in Terrebonne—Messrs Glen Walker and Gill repeatedly urged me to take you away alleging that you corrupted the morals of the other boys. . . . You appear to me born to disgrace every being who has the misfortune to be connected with you. . . . If you have any the least affection for your father mother or brothers you will retire to some distant far country that you may never more be heard of. . . . You have nothing left besides being a day labourer in civilized society or an hunter among savages.36
Dr. McLoughlin never learned of the circumstances of his boy’s early failing at school, nor did he know how his uncle abused the boy’s feelings toward his mother and Métis heritage. Though John Jr. begged to join his parents in Oregon, McLoughlin insisted that he stay in the East to get an education. Years later, when John Jr. was a young man adrift in Montreal running up debts, he joined with other disaffected Métis sons of the fur trade on an escapade to the Red River country to start a rebellion among the Métis and Indians. The adventure turned into a debacle, bringing John Jr. to one of the low points in his short, turbulent life. Clearly John Jr.’s psychological problems stemmed from feelings of abandonment as well as ambivalence over his Métis heritage. Yet father and son never discussed those matters between them in all of their pained correspondence over the years. Though McLoughlin was a doctor, he did not have the insight of modern psychology for comprehending his son’s problems. Indeed, McLoughlin never expressed doubts about having parted with his son at such a young age; he only admitted to regrets that he himself did not live “close to the Civilized World” so as to “superintendent the Education” of his children.37
McLoughlin came from a proud family in which heritage and higher education were esteemed above all else. As a fur trader and leader in the Hudson’s Bay Company, he held fast to the value of a good education while insisting that respect for heritage had to be liberalized to include the Métis culture that he had married into. He envisioned a future for his empire on the Columbia, as well as for his family, that would be inclusive of whites, Indians, and Métis. Historical forces far beyond his control overwhelmed his efforts both in the public arena and in what he attempted to do for his sons.
Until the early 1840s, Oregon’s small settler population of under a thousand people was composed of roughly equal numbers of Americans and British subjects. The United States and Britain jointly occupied the Oregon country under an international convention. In the early 1840s, American immigration increased and the settlers’ numbers began to tip heavily in favor of the United States. When the new settlers arrived in the Willamette valley, they looked askance at the polyglot population of French Canadians, Scots, Métis, Hawaiians, and eastern Indians (mostly Iroquois and Delawares) who made up the British portion of the resident settler population. The Americans harbored racial attitudes that were not at all inclusive; most of them were anti-Indian, antiblack, and opposed to marriage between whites and Indians or blacks. They looked upon the many cross-cultural marriages and Métis offspring as a degenerate population.38
Far from becoming an inclusive society, Oregon trended the other way in the 1840s. Willamette valley residents met in the summer of 1843 to organize a provisional government. Some put forward a proposal to push out all settlers who had taken an Indian wife, and others suggested a constitutional provision to prohibit “half-breeds” from owning land. The constitution as adopted did not include either of those provisions, but it did come to exclude blacks from the territory. An unusual, racially integrated party of white and black Missourians on its way to the Willamette valley halted in dismay when it received the news and then made course for the future Washington Territory instead.39
McLoughlin refused to recognize the provisional government. Some of the American settlers countered him by threatening to confiscate the Hudson’s Bay Company’s property or deny certain British subjects rights of US citizenship when Oregon became American soil, which they presumed it would. Despite those tensions in the community, McLoughlin extended a helping hand to hundreds of American immigrants later that same year as they arrived in Oregon at the end of their exhausting overland journeys. By opening his stores and giving the Americans generous terms of credit (much of it never repaid) he was “simply converting necessity into virtue”—keeping the needy immigrants from starving so they would not resort to storming the fort and seizing the supplies for themselves. Those calculated moves earned him a huge debt of gratitude among the new populace and were long remembered as acts of humanity.40
As the settler population in Oregon swelled, Americans called for expanding the nation’s borders to the Pacific with the annexation of the Oregon country. Events rapidly moved beyond McLoughlin’s control and influence. By the Oregon Treaty of 1846, the United States and Britain agreed to partition the Oregon country along the forty-ninth parallel. The Hudson’s Bay Company vacated Fort Vancouver and moved its headquarters north to Vancouver Island in today’s British Columbia; meanwhile, McLoughlin left the company and moved from Fort Vancouver to his claim at the Willamette Falls. By an act of Congress in 1848, Oregon became an organized territory. Two years later, Congress enacted the Donation Land Claim Act, an early homestead law promoted by and for the white settlers of Oregon. The law authorized the survey of Oregon lands without regard to Indian title, and it provided for the distribution of land claims to eligible settlers. Eligibility requirements under the law affirmed white privilege over other racial groups. Thus, Indians were pushed out of the way, Métis thrust into the shadows, Ha
waiians persuaded to return to Hawaii, and blacks excluded. It was not the inclusive society McLoughlin had desired.
The Donation Land Claim Act also targeted McLoughlin’s valuable claim at the Willamette Falls, conveying what it called the “Oregon City claim” to the Oregon Territory for use as an educational endowment. This narrow provision in the law preempted McLoughlin’s just claim and was nothing but a vindictive blow against the former British patriarch now that his twenty-year reign over the Oregon country was ended. It did not dispossess him of his house, but it did deprive him of a considerable part of his rightful estate. Moreover, his foes did not stop with passing the law but also challenged his application for US citizenship, since US citizenship was a necessary condition for obtaining a land grant under the law. Although he did eventually achieve US citizenship, the holdup in his application kept him from pressing his claim before much of the land was parceled out to others. Ironically, McLoughlin’s declaration of intention to become a US citizen took away whatever recourse for protection of property he might have had as a British subject under the Oregon Treaty of 1846.
McLoughlin did not see the political knives come out against him until it was too late. Embittered by this perceived treachery on the part of a few bigoted politicians, he found it was not enough for the Americans to take the Indians’ land and establish a government of white men for the white man, they had to work out their anti-British fervor as well, and he was their victim. In an open letter to the citizens of Oregon, he protested that he was not even an Englishman. “I am a Canadian by birth, and an Irishman by descent,” he wrote. Their shady politics had left him “in the decline of life, and in the decrepitude of old age, to the companionship of adders.”41
McLoughlin died of natural causes at the age of seventy-two on September 3, 1857, at his home in Oregon City, his Marguerite and daughter Eloisa nearby. At the time of his death, the Oregon Constitutional Convention was in session in nearby Salem, preparing the territory for statehood. While McLoughlin lay dying, he summoned one of the convention delegates, a young man by the name of LaFayette Grover, a future governor of Oregon, to come into his chamber so he could make a last request: he wanted Grover to promise him that after he was gone the state of Oregon would return the land to its rightful owners, his family. The old trader had fire in his belly to the end. “You are a young man and will live many years in this country,” he rasped to his visitor. “As for me, I might have been better shot like a bull”—and he spit out the words, according to Grover’s account—“I might better have been shot forty years ago!” McLoughlin paused, looking for an acknowledgment that he had been wronged. Getting none, he went on, “than to have lived here and tried to build up a family and an estate in this government.” Then he concluded, almost in a whisper, “I planted all I had here.”42
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