Rainy Lake House

by Theodore Catton

  7. Galbraith, “British-American Competition in the Border Fur Trade of the 1820s,” 245.

  8. Quoted in Galbraith, “British-American Competition in the Border Fur Trade of the 1820s,” 244.

  9. John McLoughlin, Lac La Pluie District Report for 1822–1823, HBCA, B.105/e/2; John McLoughlin, Lac La Pluie Post Journal for 1822–1823, HBCA, B.105/a/8.

  10. John McLoughlin, Lac La Pluie Post Journal for 1822–1823, HBCA, B.105/a/8 (entry for April 17, 1823).

  11. John McLoughlin, Lac La Pluie District Report for 1822–1823, HBCA, B.105/e/3; John McLoughlin, Lac La Pluie Post Journal for 1823–1824, HBCA, B.105/a/9 (entry for September 15, 1823).

  CHAPTER 39. WORKING FOR WAGES

  1. John McLoughlin, Lac La Pluie Post Journal for 1822–1823, HBCA, B.105/a/8 (entry for October 5, 1822).

  2. Tanner, Narrative, 261; Frederick Jackson Turner, Character and Influence of the Indian Trade in Wisconsin: A Study of the Trading Post as an Institution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1891), 64–65. Employing French Canadians was a touchy matter, because American traders had long sought legislation to bar the British from trading with Indians on US soil. Congress finally passed such a law in 1816, prohibiting all foreigners from engaging in the Indian trade. But traders in the Great Lakes region, particularly John Jacob Astor, found the measure too stringent, for it deprived them of the French Canadian labor pool. Largely at Astor’s urging, the policy was relaxed to allow American companies to hire French Canadians as voyageurs and interpreters.

  3. Tanner, Narrative, 261–62; Donald MacPherson, Lac La Pluie Post Journal for 1817–1818, HBCA, B.105/a/5 (entry for October 10, 1817); Roderick McKenzie, Lac La Pluie Post Journal for 1819–1820, HBCA, B.105/a/7 (entry for October 8, 1819); Podruchny, Making the Voyageur World, 238–39.

  4. Tanner, Narrative, 262; Podruchny, Making the Voyageur World, 201–3, 220–25; American State Papers: Indian Affairs, 2:67; Gates, ed., Five Fur Traders of the Northwest, 144.

  5. Tanner, Narrative, 262.

  6. Ibid., 262–63.

  7. Ibid., 263.

  8. Ibid., 263–64. The quantity of furs may be off the mark. According to Tanner’s account, he was directly involved in trading for 600 pounds of furs the first time and more than 1,200 pounds the second time, and these figures do not include furs traded at the post. John McLoughlin reported that Cȏté’s outfit departed at the end of the season with just twelve packs weighing a little more than 1,000 pounds. John McLoughlin, Lac La Pluie District Report for 1822–1823, HBCA, B.105/e/2. How McLoughlin came by his figure is not clear. The return for Rainy Lake House that year was closer to what Tanner indicated for his outfit.

  9. Lewis Cass to Henry R. Schoolcraft, June 10, 1823, printed in Wisconsin Historical Collections 20 (1911), 306–7. Also see Cass’s speeches and letters at 248–53.

  10. Tanner, Narrative, 264.

  11. Ibid., 264–65.

  CHAPTER 40. CHILDREN OF THE FUR TRADE

  1. Brown, Strangers in Blood, 177, 199–204; quotation on 200. See also Tina Loo, Making Law, Order, and Authority in British Columbia, 1821–1871 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994).

  2. John E. Foster, “Program for the Red River Mission: The Anglican Clergy 1820–1826,” Histoire Social/Social History 2, no. 4 (November 1969), 49–50.

  3. Foster, “Program for the Red River Mission,” 62–68; J. R. Miller, Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens: A History of Indian-White Relations in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 130–31.

  4. West, The Substance of a Journal, 118–19.

  5. Fleming, ed., Minutes of Council Northern Department of Rupert Land, 1821–31, 314–15.

  6. Tanner, Narrative, 265. The quarrel between the factor and the governor was over the right of the settlers to trade furs. The colonists supplemented their meager farm produce by trading furs south of the border with the Americans. The factor insisted this was illegal and wanted the governor’s assistance in stopping it. On the quarrel, see Robert S. Allen and Carol M. Judd, “Bulger, Andrew H.,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online at www.biographi.ca . On the smuggling, see Pritchett, The Red River Valley, 250–71.

  7. Tanner, Narrative, 265.

  8. Keating, Narrative, 2:116; Tanner, Narrative, 265..

  9. Tanner, Narrative, 203–4, 265–66.

  10. Ibid., 266–67.

  11. Ibid., 267.

  12. Ibid., 267–68.

  13. For a generalized depiction of Indians’ changing racial attitudes in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country, 158–62.

  CHAPTER 41. THE AMBUSH

  1. John McLoughlin, Lac La Pluie Post Journal for 1823–1824, HBCA, B.105/a/9 (entry for April 26, 1824); John D. Cameron, Lac La Pluie Journal for 1825–1826, HBCA, B.105/a/11 (entry for October 2, 1825).

  2. Bigsby, The Shoe and the Canoe, 2:266.

  3. John McLoughlin, Lac La Pluie District Report for 1822–1823, HBCA, B.105/e/2; Hickerson, “Land Tenure of the Rainy Lake Chippewa at the Beginning of the 19th Century,” 53–54.

  4. John McLoughlin, Lac La Pluie District Report for 1822–1823, HBCA, B.105/e/2. For Wah-wish-e-gah-bo’s debt, see Robert Logan, Lac La Pluie Account Book for 1818–1819, HBCA, B.105/d/1.

  5. Tanner, Narrative, 268.

  6. Ibid.; Delafield, The Unfortified Boundary, 421.

  7. Tanner, Narrative, 268.

  8. Ibid., 268–70.

  9. Ibid., 270; Delafield, The Unfortified Boundary, 423.

  10. Tanner, Narrative, 270–71.

  11. Ibid., 271; Delafield, The Unfortified Boundary, 423.

  12. Tanner, Narrative, 271–72.

  13. Ibid., 272–74.

  14. Ibid., 275; Reid, Patterns of Vengeance, 42–45.

  15. Tanner, Narrative, 275.

  CHAPTER 42. THE PARDON

  1. Tanner, Narrative, 276.

  2. Ibid., 275–76; Delafield, The Unfortified Boundary, 423.

  3. Tanner, Narrative, 276.

  4. Ibid.

  5. Tanner, Narrative, 276–77; Delafield, The Unfortified Boundary, 424; Tom Thiessen research notes on Vincent Roy, Sr. shared with author, 1999; Christi Corbin, personal communication with author, August 15, 2004; Wayne A. Jones, personal communication with author, August 16, 2004; Wayne A. Jones, “Keeping Up with the Joneses” (2011) at http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=AHN& .

  6. Tanner, Narrative, 277.

  CHAPTER 43. “WE MET WITH AN AMERICAN”

  1. Long, The Northern Expeditions of Stephen H. Long, 213–14.

  2. Tanner, Narrative, 277.

  3. The relationship between captivity and rights of citizenship were hotly debated in two other important contexts in Long’s day: impressment by the British navy and hostage-taking by the Barbary pirates. See Lawrence A. Peskin, Captives and Country­men: Barbary Slavery and the American Public, 1785–1816 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).

  4. Long, The Northern Expeditions of Stephen H. Long, 215; Keating, Narrative, 2:115; Tanner, Narrative, 277; John McLoughlin, Lac La Pluie Post Journal, September 1, 1823, HBCA, B. 105/a/9, 1. For additional perspective on sexual relations between ­voyageurs and native women in the trading posts, see Podruchny, Making the Voyageur World, 260–67.

  5. Long, The Northern Expeditions of Stephen H. Long, 215.

  6. Ibid., 216; Keating, Narrative, 2:115–16. As the chief factor was willing to make this offer without ever having met the teenage girls for himself, it would seem almost certain that Marguerite McLoughlin was behind it, and that she was the kindly mixed-blood woman in the fort whom the girls had gotten their father’s permission to go see shortly before they ran away.

  7. Long, The Northern Expeditions of Stephen H. Long, 216–17; Keating, Narrative, 2:117.

  8. Long, The Northern Expeditions of Stephen H. Long, 217; Keating, Narrative, 2:116, 123.

  CHAPTER 44. THE ONUS OF REVENGE

  1. Jo
hn McLoughlin, Lac La Pluie Post Journal for 1823–1824, HBCA, B.105/a/9 (entry for September 1, 1823); Tanner, Narrative, 204–5, 245.

  2. Long, The Northern Expeditions of Stephen H. Long, 215.

  3. John McLoughlin, Lac La Pluie Post Journal for 1823–1824, HBCA, B.105/a/9 (entry for September 1, 1823).

  4. John Phillip Reid, “Restraints on Vengeance: Retaliation-in-Kind and the Use of Indian Law in the Old Oregon Country,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 95, no. 1 (Spring 1994), 49–52.

  5. The best evidence of this is found in McLoughlin’s response to the slaying of one company officer and four employees in Oregon in 1825. McLoughlin sent an expedition to retaliate, and the result was one Indian killed and two villages burned. Justifying the expedition beforehand, he wrote, “To pass over such an outrage would lower us in the opinion of the Indians, induce them to act in the same way, and when the opportunity offered kill any of our people, & when it is considered the Natives are at least an hundred Men to one of us it will be conceived how absolutely necessary it is for our personal security that we should be respected by them, & nothing could make us more contemptible in their eyes than allowing such a cold blooded assassination of our People to pass unpunished.” Justifying it after the fact, he wrote, “It is certainly most unfortunate to be obliged to have recourse to hostile measures against our fellow beings but it is a duty we owed our murdered Countrymen & I may say we were forced by necessity, as had we passed over the atrocious conduct of their murderers, others by seeing them unpunished would have imitated their example.” John McLoughlin, The Letters of John McLoughlin from Fort Vancouver to the Governor and Committee, E. E. Rich, ed. (London: The Champlain Society for the Hudson’s Bay Record Society, 1941), 57–58, 65.

  6. Quoted in Morrison, Outpost, 174–75.

  7. McLoughlin, “Description of the Indians from Fort William to Lake of the Woods,” 15.

  8. Jane Lewis Chapin, ed., “Letters of Dr. John McLoughlin,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 37, no. 1 (March 1936), 255.

  9. Reid, “Restraints on Vengeance,” 50.

  10. Keating, Narrative, 2:115–16; Tanner, Narrative, 278; John McLoughlin, Lac La Pluie Post Journal for 1823–1824, HBCA, B.105/a/9 (entries for September 4 and 8, 1823).

  11. John McLoughlin, Lac La Pluie Post Journal for 1823–1824, HBCA, B.105/a/9 (entry for September 4, 1823); Tanner, Narrative, 278.

  12. John McLoughlin, Lac La Pluie Post Journal for 1823–1824, HBCA, B.105/a/9 (entry for October 2, 1823).

  13. Tanner, Narrative, 279.

  14. John McLoughlin, Lac La Pluie Post Journal for 1823–1824, HBCA, B.105/a/9 (entry for October 5, 1823); Tanner, Narrative, 279.

  CHAPTER 45. JOURNEYS HOME

  1. Livingston, Portraits of Eminent Americans, 487–88; Long, The Northern Expeditions of Stephen H. Long, 229.

  2. Livingston, Portraits of Eminent Americans, 487–88; “Major Long’s Expedition,” Daily National Intelligencer, November 3, 1823.

  3. Keating, Narrative, 2:238–39.

  4. Ibid., 240–41.

  5. Ibid., 123.

  6. Ibid., 122–23.

  7. Long, The Northern Expeditions of Stephen H. Long, 219.

  8. Tanner, Narrative, 279; John McLoughlin, Lac La Pluie Post Journal for 1823–1824, HBCA, B.105/a/9 (entries for November 8, 10, 22, and 27).

  9. John McLoughlin, Lac La Pluie Post Journal for 1823–1824, HBCA, B.105/a/9.

  10. Tanner, Narrative, 279.

  11. John McLoughlin, Lac La Pluie District Report for 1823–1824, HBCA B.105/e/3.

  12. Interview with Eloisa Harvey, June 20, 1878, OSHC, MSS 927, Box 2.

  13. Elliott, “Marguerite Wadin McKay McLoughlin,” 339; Morrison, Outpost, 121–22.

  14. Tanner, Narrative, 279–80.

  EPILOGUE

  1. Edwin O. Wood, ed., Historic Mackinac: The Historical, Picturesque and Legendary Features of the Mackinac Country (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1918), 2:59, 67, 137, 142, 144.

  2. Elizabeth Thérèse Baird, “Indian Customs and Early Recollections,” Wisconsin Historical Collections 9 (1882; reprint, 1909), 316–17.

  3. Gurdon S. Hubbard, “Journey of Gurdon S. Hubbard,” Michigan Pioneer Historical Collections 3 (1881), 125.

  4. Quoted in Keith R. Widder, Battle for the Soul: Métis Children Encounter Evangelical Protestants at Mackinaw Mission, 1823–1837 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1999), 49, 54.

  5. Widder, Battle for the Soul, 56.

  6. Baird, “Reminiscences of Early Days on Mackinac Island,” 53; Jean B. Russo and J. Elliott Russo, “Responsive Justices: Court Treatment of Orphans and Illegitimate Children in Colonial Maryland,” in Ruth Wallis Herndon and John E. Murray, eds., Children Bound to Labor: The Pauper Apprentice System in Early America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 154–58.

  7. Tanner, Narrative, 280; John E. McDowell, “Therese Schindler of Mackinac: Upward Mobility in the Great Lakes Fur Trade,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 61, no. 2 (Winter 1977–78), 137. Possibly the French Canadians in Mackinac had some influence in this case. In Quebec, single mothers who were too poor to care for their children would take it upon themselves to bind them to another family, employing a notary public to draw up an indenture. Gillian Hamilton, “The Stateless and the Orphaned among Montreal’s Apprentices, 1791–1842,” in Herndon and Murray, eds., Children Bound to Labor, 166.

  8. John Tanner to Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, July 21, 1824, quoted in Maxine Benson, “Schoolcraft, James, and the ‘White Indian,’ ” Michigan History 54, no. 4 (1970), 314. See also Maxine Benson, “Edwin James: Scientist, Linguist, Humanitarian” (Phd dissertation, University of Colorado, 1968), 245.

  9. George Boyd to Lewis Cass, August 23, 1824, in “Fur-Trade in Wisconsin,” Wisconsin Historical Collections 20 (1911), 345; Richard B. Bremer, Indian Agent and Wilderness Scholar: The Life of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (Mount Pleasant, MI: Clarke Historical Library, Central Michigan University, 1987), 55–56; Widder, Battle for the Soul, 59.

  10. Edwin James, “Introductory Chapter,” in Tanner, Narrative, xvii.

  11. Governor Cass to Henry R. Schoolcraft, October 18, 1830, in Territorial Papers of the United States 12, Territory of Michigan 1829–1837, Clarence Edward Carter, comp. and ed. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1945), 210.

  12. Judge Joseph H. Steere, “Sketch of John Tanner, Known as the ‘White Indian,’ ” Michigan Pioneer and Historical Collections 22 (1894), 247; James V. Campbell, Outlines of the Political History of Michigan (Detroit: Schober & Co., 1876), 415.

  13. Fierst, “Return to ‘Civilization’: John Tanner’s Troubled Years at Sault Ste. Marie,” 26–30.

  14. Keith R. Widder, “The Persistence of French-Canadian Ways at Mackinac after 1760,” Proceedings of the Meeting of the French Colonial Historical Society 16 (1990), 52; Baird, “Reminiscences of Early Days on Mackinac Island,” 46; “Sketch of the Life of Hon. Robert Stuart,” Michigan Pioneer and Historical Collections 3 (1881), 58–59.

  15. Baird, “Reminiscences of Early Days on Mackinac Island,” 53.

  16. Benson, “Schoolcraft, James, and the ‘White Indian,’ ” 324; Tanner, Narrative, 161–62.

  17. Henry R. Schoolcraft, “Sketches from Schoolcraft’s Diary at Mackinac—1835–1841,” in Wood, Historic Mackinac, 2:235.

  18. Angie Bingham Gilbert, “The Story of John Tanner,” Michigan Pioneer and Historical Collections 38 (1912), 198.

  19. Fierst, “Return to ‘Civilization’: John Tanner’s Troubled Years at Sault Ste. Marie,” 34–35.

  20. Gilbert, “The Story of John Tanner,” 197; “Sketch of the Life of the Rev. Abel Bingham,” Michigan Pioneer and Historical Collections 2 (1880), 155; Fierst, “Return to ‘Civilization’: John Tanner’s Troubled Years at Sault Ste. Marie,” 34–35.

  21. John Tanner to Martin Van Buren, November 10, 1837, reprinted in Fierst, “Return to ‘Civilization’: John Tanner’s Troubled Years at Sault Ste. Marie,” 25.

  22. P. G
. Downes, “John Tanner: Captive of the Wilderness,” Naturalist 9 (Fall 1958), 32.

  23. Gilbert, “The Story of John Tanner,” 197–99.

  24. Ibid.

  25. Quoted in Benson, “Schoolcraft, James, and the ‘White Indian,’ ” 324.

  26. Schoolcraft, “Sketches from Schoolcraft’s Diary,” 234.

  27. Gilbert, “The Story of John Tanner,” 200.

  28. Ibid. Fierst explores another possible motive for Tanner to kill James Schoolcraft. During his years of declining employment with the Sault Ste. Marie Agency, Tanner faced financial problems and incurred debts to James Schoolcraft. Tanner tried to recover back pay from the federal government and was finally denied. The paper trail may exaggerate Tanner’s attention to his financial woes. The breakup of his family mattered most to him, and those he thought responsible for it were his worst enemies. Local tradition held that he was often heard to say “as Henry R. was beyond his reach, James, the next of kin, must die in his stead.” If he did not actually make that threat, it would seem likely that that was his sentiment. “Sketch of the Life of the Rev. Abel Bingham,” 155.

  29. Steere, “Sketch of John Tanner,” 248–50; Gilbert, “The Story of John Tanner,” 200; Benson, “Schoolcraft, James, and the ‘White Indian,’ ” 326.

  30. Steere, “Sketch of John Tanner,” 250; William Cullen Bryant, “Letters of a Traveller,” in Edwin O. Wood, ed., Historic Mackinac, 2:395; Benson, “Schoolcraft, James, and the ‘White Indian,’ ” 325. Steere relates that a skeleton was discovered near the village many years later that some thought was Tanner’s remains. Fierst notes that Tanner was in poor health in 1846 and would have been hard put to return to the north country. Benson speculates that if Tilden shot Schoolcraft and wanted Tanner to be blamed for the murder, then he may have found and killed Tanner during the manhunt. Some sources say Tilden eagerly volunteered to lead the manhunt. All sources agree that there is no conclusive evidence who killed Schoolcraft or what finally happened to Tanner.