The Bastard of Fort Stikine

by Debra Komar

  Thursday, April 21, 1842 — Dawn

  fort stikine

  The fort’s journal entry paints a sterile, detached scene: “Daylight, fine weather and no wind.” It would have been a lovely morning were it not for the murdered man on the platform.

  If the Iroquois had their way, Stikine would have a captain soon enough. The first to seize the reins of command was Antoine Kawannassé, a man with half a mind and little to lose. He returned from his whispered plotting with Heroux and Kannaquassé to find the scene unchanged. He rolled the body face up, casting McLoughlin’s rigored eyes toward the heavens, although many of the onlookers felt that was as close to the pearly gates as Mr. John would ever get. Kawannassé began to bark orders with surprising ease. He told the Kanakas to fetch some boards, and the corpse was “carried on a plank to McPherson’s room.” Two chairs were recruited as biers, a flimsy yet serviceable arrangement that kept McLoughlin off the floor, the only small measure of dignity on offer.

  There were other practical matters to be attended to, and the most distasteful of them fell to the lowest ranks. The inescapable issue of blood demanded immediate attention, for “the body bled profusely, there being a deep pool of blood found around it.” At Kawannassé’s command, it “was washed away afterwards by the Kanakas.” Bucket upon bucket was hauled from the well, and the pool was diluted and smeared until the platform was stained a uniform crimson.

  The blood was everywhere, on everything. At one point, Kawannassé glanced down and saw that his “hands and front of [his] clothing were soiled with blood.” The less said about how the blood got there, the better. The blood ritual, witnessed by all, would soon be stricken from the official record, replaced by Kawannassé’s claim that his hands were bloodied from carrying the body. When no one was looking, he “washed them in [his] own room,” erasing the stigmata of his crime.

  The mournful task of preparing McLoughlin for burial also fell to the Sandwich Islanders. Okaia, aided by two of his brethren, ensured that the body was “stripped, washed clean, decently dressed and laid out.” Charles Belanger, seemingly struck by divine inspiration, ran to his room and returned with a straight razor. He did what he could to groom McLoughlin’s ragged beard, steering well clear of the gaping exit wound on the dead man’s neck.

  The stopgap morticians had just finished their ablutions when Kannaquassé burst into the room, hawkish and crazed. He lunged at the body and, without warning or cause, “tore the shirt open on the breast” and “attempted to tear off the vest.” The men watched in horror as Kannaquassé “threw the body on the floor and stamp[ed] on the face with his foot.” A volley of insults soon followed, and the Kanakas “saw Pierre strike the body in the face with his fist” and “strike it on the face with a towel which he had in his hand.”

  For a moment, an eerie calm descended. Kakepé stepped forward, intent on returning McLoughlin to his makeshift catafalque, when Kannaquassé pushed him aside and again seized “the head by the hair and knock[ed] it against the floor several times, saying something very bad which [Kakepé] did not understand.” Those who knew the tongue heard Kannaquassé scream, “While you were living you gave me many a blow but you cannot do so now.” Kannaquassé then released John’s hair and ended his siege. His assault left the traders shaken, and they “were all crying and told him not to use the body in that way.” Kanakanui asked Kannaquassé to go downstairs and leave him to deal with the body, but the Iroquois refused to go. Reasoning with a madman rarely ends well, but the Kanakas were inherently deferential to any man possessing more “white blood” than they, and their respectful tone seemed to calm him. Kannaquassé then tried to recruit people to pray over the body, telling the Kanakas it “was customary in Canada.” The request was so disingenuous, no one could bring himself to do it.

  Outside, commotion drew forth the last remaining holdouts. Oliver Martineau emerged into the breaking dawn, gormless and slack-jawed, of no tangible use to anyone. He told his colleagues he had spent the night sleeping in the southeast bastion, but the Metis trader was not just slow, he was inconsistent. When questioned further, Martineau admitted he had fired twice at the deceased. When Kannaquassé asked if Martineau had killed Mr. John, he replied, “I do not know if it was me or not.” Martineau would later change his story, saying he had fired into the air, not really aiming at McLoughlin. When asked a third time, he changed again, claiming he’d slept through the entire event, only to reverse his tale for a fourth time, telling anyone still listening he’d spent the night in hiding, too terrified to move “till daylight.”

  The sun’s rays also roused Benoni Fleury, who was nursing a hangover. He had no recollection of the night gone by, saying, “I was told by the men that they found me in the morning under my bed, where I had hid myself the previous evening.” When informed of his master’s untimely death, Fleury broke down and cried.

  As for Mrs. McLoughlin, she had heard the shouts regarding her husband’s cruel fate but was too frightened “to move out of [her] room,” and she refused to “go down stairs till the next Morning.” Only then did she see what remained of the man who had shared her bed. She had no rights, and her input into the funeral arrangements was neither solicited nor tolerated. There was no longer a place for her at Fort Stikine.

  As the day stumbled on, the Iroquois and the Kanakas “quarrelled about who was going to obey whom.” Orders were given and quickly ignored, and nothing of note was accomplished. Thomas McPherson, having remained “up all night with the body,” simply assumed he was the new camp commander, and he barked orders that no one followed. During a quiet moment, he surreptitiously paced out McLoughlin’s quarters with an eye to taking them over. McPherson spent the morning writing the day’s entry in the fort’s journal and then completed his missives to the Hudson’s Bay commanders. In a letter to John Work, McPherson staked his claim as the outpost’s leader by adopting McLoughlin’s paranoia: “I am afraid that they will do to me the way they did to him.”

  Pierre Kannaquassé made his own plans. As the Canadians gathered in the dining hall, he announced, “Now Mr. John is dead, I shall go out of the fort and spend the day with my wife.” Surprisingly, it was Urbain Heroux who stopped him, declaring that no one was to leave the fort. Kannaquassé told Kawannassé that Heroux was as bad as McLoughlin, treating the men as if they were prisoners. It was the first fissure in the Iroquois alliance. Kannaquassé’s voice dripped with bile as he laid bare his threat: “I see we must raise the devil again with these Canadians before we can get our liberty.”

  As the day dragged on, whispers continued to circulate as to the killer’s identity.

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  Casus Belli

  Confronted with Kannaquassé’s explosive account, John McLoughlin Sr. cushioned the blow with denial. Like Simpson before him, he embraced a narrative that suited his psyche better than it catered to the facts. He convinced himself his son’s death was neither accidental nor justifiable — it was nothing short of cold-blooded mutiny. His son had been an innocent victim twice over: once to the villainous deeds of his subordinates, and now to the slanderous accusations of George Simpson.

  It never occurred to Dr. McLoughlin that Kannaquassé’s version of events was no more credible than Thomas McPherson’s, or that both stories were stitched together from self-serving fictions. He was certain the Iroquois had told the truth, even at the risk of incriminating himself, and in the decades since, historians have agreed. W. Kaye Lamb believed Kannaquassé’s account “to be much the best account extant of what actually happened at Stikine.” Hamar Foster thought Kannaquassé was simply “bored by his captivity and not in the least intimidated by the Company or anyone else,” and so he decided to tell the panel everything he knew.

  Dr. McLoughlin bought into Kannaquassé’s tale for the same reason Simpson was so enamoured of McPherson’s: it reinforced the vision he already held of his son and, more importantly, it mirrored his own experiences with the Hudson’s Bay Company. And, like Simpson, McLoughlin wa
s prepared to defend his version to the death, if not for his son’s sake, then for his own.

  As McLoughlin reviewed the new evidence, he itemized the ways in which the two accounts conflicted. Contrary to McPherson, Kannaquassé could think of no instance in which anyone was beaten or punished without cause. Furthermore, he had seen John Jr. “elevated” on rare occasion, but he had never seen his boss drunk. Of all the disclosures Kannaquassé made, however, the ugliest was that McLoughlin’s death was premeditated. According to Kannaquassé, Thomas McPherson had drawn up a contract “agreeing to murder…Mr. McLoughlin if he was not removed from the charge of Stikine,” and forced all the men sign it. Killing the chief trader became the lone topic of conversation around the dining hall, and the co-conspirators kept their guns loaded and at the ready should the opportunity arise. Kannaquassé heard Phillip Smith coolly boast he did not “care for killing him more than a Dog,” and Kannaquassé even admitted “that he had himself tried to shoot McLoughlin on three separate occasions.” Dr. McLoughlin also learned his son knew he would die that night, and Kannaquassé felt certain that knowledge was what led to John Jr.’s “dejection of mind and his having shed tears in presence of his wife.”

  Dr. McLoughlin shared his list of inconsistencies in the dozens of letters he wrote to his closest allies pleading his case. He felt compelled to revisit the horrific details of his son’s final moments, particularly how Heroux “put his foot on the neck of his prostrate victim, writhing in the Agonies of death.”

  The doctor also shared his revelations with his youngest son, who was still stationed at Fort Vancouver, and David, in turn, passed this brutal awakening on to his inner circle. He called Urbain Heroux a “Cowardly wretch,” but he saved his harshest critique for Governor Simpson, who was “such a dunce as to have formed his opinion on the reports of the Murderers.” Given the disparity between McPherson’s and Kannaquassé’s accounts, David McLoughlin was not always certain what to believe, but he could not deny “there is a mystery in this affair.”

  Dr. McLoughlin unleashed his wrath from the relative safety of Fort Vancouver and his coterie of servile middlemen. With little regard for the irreparable damage it would do to his own career — and indeed his sanity — he drafted a letter to Sir George challenging every one of the Governor’s assumptions and conclusions, and in so doing, sealed his fate. He vented his spleen without censor, on occasion attacking Simpson personally. In a further act of self-immolation, McLoughlin copied his harangue, which ran in excess of fifty pages, and sent it to John Henry Pelly and the London Committee.

  Each letter began with a counterassault on the charge most easily refuted: Simpson’s accusation that Stikine’s books were in disarray. Dr. McLoughlin had ordered an exhaustive review of the accounts, which revealed a discrepancy of £10 — a piddling sum he declared to be the smallest ever seen during his entire career in the fur trade. History has since borne out McLoughlin on this point. Researchers have undertaken their own audits and concur with the doctor, noting that even the post’s journal was religiously maintained until one day before McLoughlin’s death.

  Dr. McLoughlin then broached the Governor’s other allegations. He had nothing but contempt for Simpson’s claim that John Jr. was a chronic drunk; it was, in his opinion, an aspersion without substance or merit. His son had his foibles, but “however badly McLoughlin may have behaved in Montreal and Paris, there was never any suggestion that he abused alcohol.” McLoughlin Sr. made much of the posthumous inventory of John Jr.’s possessions, noting his son’s personal liquor allowance was found to be “almost in the same state as when Mr. Finlayson left” months earlier. Dr. McLoughlin laid the blame for these spurious assertions at the feet of George Simpson, “whom the men Made Believe that my deceased Son was Given to Liquor and that when in that state he Used to Beat the Men most Unmercifully, as if one man could ill use when Intoxicated twenty two men so much as to make them murder him.”

  To prove the accusation was unfounded, Dr. McLoughlin pointed to the testimony of witnesses better suited to speak to his son’s behaviour. He began with long-time Simpson crony John Rowand, who swore, “I did not see the deceased take a Single Glass while I was at Stikine and, as for Beating his men, I saw nothing of the kind.” Roderick Finlayson also denied “having seen Mr. John McLoughlin intoxicated at any time during his residence at Stikine,” adding that “he never saw Mr. McLoughlin taste raw Spirits,” and that often a month or more would pass “without [Junior] tasting a drop of any kind of Spirits and [he] never exceeded one glass.” Dr. McLoughlin then offered up the most compelling witness: his son’s country wife. The doctor noted, “Indians do not view drunkenness as improper,” and said he had never known an aboriginal woman “to screen the drunkenness of her husband.”

  The doctor accused Simpson of exaggerating the accounts of John Jr.’s drinking for effect, adding: “When we Examine, we see they all must refer to the same Instance.” For argument’s sake, Dr. McLoughlin was equally guilty of hyperbole — when all the witness accounts are reviewed, John Jr. was visibly drunk on three separate occasions — but his underestimation seems less egregious than Simpson’s blatant inflation. The doctor drew this particular tirade to a close with a simple question, asking, “If it is fair, because a young man of twenty Eight years of age in a convivial moment has been known to have Been three times Intoxicated, to set him down as a man of Intemperate Habits. If such is the Standard there are many and many who will not be able to pass the Ordeal.”

  In a poignant historical footnote, McLoughlin’s murder did effect some positive change in the Company’s liquor policy, as his father noted in the postscript of a letter sent to John Fraser: “In consequence of this unfortunate affair We have been able to make an arrangement with the Russians by which no liquor is issued to Indians in that quarter and consequently no liquor is issued to Indians by the Hudson’s Bay Company.” Alcohol had not been the cause of his son’s downfall, and as a tribute to his temperance, Dr. McLoughlin ensured it would not be the ruin of others.

  Since Simpson’s conclusions linked McLoughlin’s drinking with his abusive nature, Dr. McLoughlin could have let the matter rest, but his grief (and his ego) would not allow it. Steaming full ahead, the chief factor then addressed the issue of abuse. He did not deny his son sometimes resorted to corporal punishment — every commander used his fists to maintain discipline — but he bristled at the notion his son was a sadistic tyrant who beat his underlings without cause. To refute allegations of excessive force, Dr. McLoughlin again turned to the observations of his son’s former second-in-command: “Finlayson saw Mr. McLoughlin flog one or two Sandwich Islanders for Sleeping on their watch, he beat Fleury with his fists for Stealing rum & getting drunk, Mr. McLoughlin being perfectly sober at the time, & that to his Mr. F’s knowledge, no other men were punished during his residence at Stikine.” After reviewing all the witness accounts, the list of beatings grew to include the time “Capt. Cole was flogged for his sleeping on his Watch, Joe Lamb for Giving away meat out of the Kitchen, Antoine Kawanassau [sic] for fighting with Heroux, Martineau for giving away his Blanket to an Indian Woman.” Yes, Dr. McLoughlin conceded, the men were struck, but always with cause. Such accounts might never find their way into the Company’s recruiting posters, but they were business as usual for the Honourable concern, even if Simpson was loath to admit it.

  In Dr. McLoughlin’s mind, the problem was not his son or Company policy or even the fort itself, but rather the people who inhabited it. The criminal element that made up the bulk of the HBC labour pool took “every advantage of insulting their Masters, especially when there is a favourable opportunity.” Their insubordination flew in the face of one of Simpson’s core beliefs: that hired hands “remote from civilization with no temptations from competitors would happily accept their lot.” The men were neither happy nor accepting, but those who refused to submit were sent to outlying forts or received “summary disciplinary action,” a Company euphemism for beatings. Given Stikin
e’s desolate location, it was policy that “all the troublesome characters in the Department were sent there.” In his letter to the Committee, McLoughlin posed a loaded question: “Is it surprising if such men are brought to the Country; that people are murdered in it?”

  The doctor also believed many within the Hudson’s Bay Company knew of the danger John Jr. faced before he was killed. For example, chief factor John Rowand had questioned Simpson’s decision to remove Roderick Finlayson from Fort Stikine. After “hearing what kind of Indians [Junior] had to deal with,” Rowand firmly believed “it was not safe for one Gentleman to be left alone.” Dr. McLoughlin had raised similar concerns with Simpson, protesting when his son was left alone in a hostile outpost, but Sir George had turned a deaf ear. He told the doctor he “had full confidence” in John Jr., and Simpson was certain “he would do well.” The Governor based this assessment on his recent trip to Stikine, where he “had found Everything in the highest order.” John Jr.’s direct supervisor, John Work, also tried to warn George Simpson when he “heard from the Natives of some irregularities at Stikeen [sic] and that two of the Iroquois, Peter and Antoine, had fired at [Mr. John],” but Simpson simply coupled his deaf ear with a blind eye. He rejected Work’s fears, saying his recent letter from McLoughlin made no mention of assassination attempts, nor had he heard such tales from Roderick Finlayson.