Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  The wives were treated royally at the fort during their husbands’ explorations; Narcissa became especially close to the half-breed Cree wives of McLoughlin and Douglas. Two other white women were residing at the fort, one married to a Hudson’s Bay agent, the other the wife of Reverend Herbert Beaver, the post’s recently arrived chaplain. A special attraction for the Americans was meeting Jason Lee, up from his Willamette mission to visit McLoughlin and welcome the newcomers to Oregon.

  Meantime, following Samuel Parker’s suggestions, Whitman found what he considered an ideal mission site on the north bank of the Walla Walla River, twenty-two miles east of Pambrun’s fort in a lush meadow the Indians called Waiilatpu. William Gray and some workers were left behind to bring in tools and supplies purchased at Fort Vancouver while Whitman, Spalding and their escort rode on 100 miles northeast of Waiilatpu to the juncture of the Clearwater and the Snake, a place Parker had recommended. There they met a party of Nez Percé who, when told of the mission plans, led the white men another ten miles east to Lapwai Creek. Spalding had found his site.

  While Whitman, Gray, and their workers began the labor of cutting timber for a cabin at Waiilatpu, Spalding returned to Fort Vancouver, arriving there on October 18, to fetch the wives, load two bateaux with a winter’s supply of provisions, and, with a Company escort, return upriver. Narcissa, now four months into her pregnancy, was landed at Fort Walla Walla to await completion of the Whitman cabin while Spalding and Eliza, with the help of a force of 100 Indians, loaded twenty horses with supplies and set out for Lapwai Creek. They would live in a tent until better shelter could be erected.

  The 110 miles separating the missions seemed a perfect distance. The men were frequently at odds; the wives, so different in temperament to begin with, were so wedded to their husbands’ views on their work among the natives that their own relations were strained. Spalding, trained and ordained, hoped to change the pattern of Indian lives to make them more susceptible to Christian teachings. He regarded Whitman as an upstart, not even a minister, who seemed to take his lead from Jason Lee’s approach, acting as a promoter more of settlement than of Christ and believing that the way to convert Indians was by submerging them among a large white, preferably white American, population.

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  With a few exceptions, John McLoughlin liked Americans and even broke some of the Hudson’s Bay regulations in assisting them. His brigade leaders helped Jason Lee, Nat Wyeth, the Whitmans and the Spaldings in their journeys from rendezvous to the Columbia, and he was always a generous host when such Americans, and such troublesome ones as Hall Kelley, reached his domain. His magnanimity extended to the missionaries, though he was wary of them and dubious of their chances of success in Christianizing the native tribes. He had, in fact, no great regard for churchmen, and even less after a particularly hateful episode involving one sent out to him to serve as chaplain at Fort Vancouver.

  Herbert Beaver—“an appropriate name for the fur trade,” Peter Ogden dryly observed—crossed the Columbia bar on the Nereid, out of England via Cape Horn and the Sandwich Islands, early in 1836. He stepped up on the landing below the fort, surveyed its primitive surroundings, shook hands with McLoughlin and his welcoming delegation, and thereafter fell afoul of almost all who came in contact with him. Reverend Beaver was a Church of England divine who had served as a regimental chaplain at Saint Lucia and must have viewed his new assignment as similarly beneath his station as the West Indies. He began his tenure by demanding better quarters and agonizing over the log cottage that was set aside to serve as his parsonage. Worse than the lodgings was his realization that here he was thrust among several hundred French-Canadian voyageurs who were Roman Catholics and surrounded by Indian tribes whose heathenish “religions” perplexed and angered him.

  Beaver fancied himself a great maker of humorous mots and a greater orator, but contemporaries at Fort Vancouver described him as a small, pale man with a high-pitched “feminine” voice, an air of pretension, and an undisguised disdain for all he saw and all he met. Bancroft said, “He was of the fox-hunting type of English clergyman, and had been much diverted by the manners of his fellow passenger from Honolulu, especially Mr. Jason Lee, whom he was constantly in the habit of quizzing.” As to the “inmates of the fort,” Bancroft said, these grave, dignified, disciplined men, “accustomed to respect, did not always escape the reverend gentleman’s sallies of wit.” Indeed, “his ideas of clerical dignity were such that he felt himself defiled by association with the gentlemen at Fort Vancouver. McLoughlin was uncivil, the clerks boors, the women savages. Here was a fine beginning of English missionary work!”

  Beaver found many of the Hudson’s Bay “practices” among the Indians reprehensible and dutifully reported these to the Aborigines Protection Society in London, saying that his work among the savages and his attempts to introduce civilization and Christianity to them were constantly thwarted by the Company. He found a special abomination in the practice among “the gentlemen of the fort” of consorting with native women, and in this discovery he made a terrible mistake.

  To his horror, Beaver learned that many of the traders at Fort Vancouver were married to Indians without the blessing of clergy, and then he discovered, through some species of moccasin telegraph never disclosed, that John McLoughlin and his half-Cree wife Marguérite had cohabited before the death of her first husband, Alexander McKay, in 1811. In a letter home, Beaver referred to Marguerite as “a female of notoriously loose character … the kept Mistress of the highest personage in your service at this station.”

  In his moral certitude and God-given abstruseness, Herbert Beaver did not count on the chief factor having so many Hudson’s Bay friends in England and at the York Factory, and thus had no concern that the contents of his letter might come back to McLoughlin. But they did, and, predictably, the chief factor exploded. It was dangerous enough to spread rumors about McLoughlin, but it was positively suicidal to involve his beloved Marguérite in them.

  When the White Eagle got the news, he marched out into the fort’s courtyard, found Beaver, and braced him. The scene must have been delectable for any onlooker: Here stood the man whom Governor George Simpson said was “such a figure as I should not like to meet in a dark Night,” his formidable six-and-a-half-foot height looming and rigid as an old oak, his great expanse of chest working like a bellows, his white mane of hair flowing, his face suffused with wrath, his icy eyes narrowed, one fist clenched at his side, the other strangling a stout cane. And here stood poor, cringing Herbert Beaver, paler than usual, looking up, snared in a trap sprung by his own folly and from which there was no escape.

  McLoughlin demanded an explanation of the vile rumors contained in his worship’s letter.

  Beaver, nervously searching his mind for a mot by which he might wrench his foot from the snare, replied, “Sir, if you wish to know why a cow’s tail grows downward, I cannot tell you; I can only cite the fact.”

  At this astonishing response, Bancroft reports, “Up went the cane of its own volition, and before McLoughlin was aware of it, he had bestowed a good sound blow upon the shoulders of the impudent divine.”

  Beaver made a full, if quite preposterous, record of what ensued in his encounter with “this monster in human shape.” He wrote that McLoughlin “came behind me, kicked me several times, and struck me repeatedly with his fists on the back of the neck. Unable to cope with him from the immense disparity of our relative size and strength, I could not prevent him from wrenching out of my hand a stout stick with which I was walking, and which he … inflicted several severe blows on my shoulders.” Beaver reported that the factor then “seized me from behind, round my waist, attempted to dash me on the ground, exclaiming ‘You scoundrel, I will have your life.’ In the meantime, the stick had fallen to the ground; my wife, on impulse … picked it up; he took it … very viciously from her hands and again struck me with it severely. We were then separated by the intervention of other persons.”

  If McLou
ghlin was ever reprimanded for his conduct toward the chaplain, it was done verbally by Governor Simpson and, one imagines, quite diplomatically.

  Reverend Beaver, apparently concluding that his salary of £400 per annum was insufficient to include canings, decamped from the Columbia soon after the incident and in 1838 returned to England.

  The Hudson’s Bay Company sent no more chaplains to Fort Vancouver.

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  The trickle of American missionaries into Oregon did not go unnoticed by McLoughlin’s superiors, and in June 1836, three months before the arrival of the Whitmans and the Spaldings and about the time Samuel Parker was sailing home, the factor received a warning from the Company’s headquarters at York. “Were we satisfied that the sole object of those Missionaries were the civilization of the Natives and the diffusion of moral and religious instruction, we should be happy to render them our most cordial support and assistance,” the minute read, “but we have all along foreseen that … the formation of a Colony of United States citizens on the banks of the Columbia was the main or fundamental part of their plan, which, if successful, might be attended with material injury, not only to the fur trade, but in a national point of view.”

  The suspicion that these Americans were more interested in colonization than converts to Christianity came as no news to McLoughlin. Missionaries were historically precursors of colonizers, and he viewed all the Americans who came to Oregon as the vanguard of a settler invasion and held that belief even before the arrival of Hall Jackson Kelley, as blatant a stumper for American “occupation” of the Pacific Northwest as Fort Vancouver ever endured. He followed reports in the American press, knew of the congressional work of Dr. John Floyd of Virginia and his bills to claim Oregon for the United States; he knew of Hall Kelley and his agitations before that peculiar man ever reached the Columbia; he had talks with such Americans as Jedediah Smith, Ewing Young, Nat Wyeth, Jason Lee, and Samuel Parker.

  McLoughlin’s hospitable treatment of the Americans who came to Fort Vancouver was the product of his shrewdly realistic assessment of his and Hudson’s Bay’s presence in Oregon. By 1836 he had twelve years in the Pacific Northwest. He enjoyed a virtual monopoly in the fur trade and had expanded the Company’s enterprises to the north, south, and east, making good profits for his employer. But he knew that the British foothold was fragile, the 1827 joint occupancy treaty toothless, the fur business precarious and already showing signs of playing out. He was alert to the changes on the wind. The Americans were returning to the river they had discovered and never relinquished—the missionaries were harbingers of a great migration of them—and those who had arrived, the churchmen among them, were talking of farms, industry, settlements, and of pushing the British out.

  McLoughlin dealt with them cleverly. He had an honest affection for most Americans and assisted them, at times beyond the boundaries of Hudson’s Bay policies. He was hospitable and generous, at times to a fault; and would later reminisce woefully about how certain of the beneficiaries of his largesse thanked him by stabbing him in the back. He also did the best he could to protect the Company’s interests. When possible, he shunted the missionaries off to the Willamette valley and other locations remote from Fort Vancouver; he loaned and sold, but did not give, supplies and labor to those intending to stay; he was aggressive in keeping the Company paramount in the fur trade—this, after all, being his chief responsibility.

  An example of McLoughlin’s acumen toward the Americans who sought him out at Fort Vancouver was his use of a man named William A. Slacum.

  This gentleman arrived on the Columbia in the last week of December 1836, the single passenger on the American brig Loriot, which he had chartered for $700 a month at Honolulu. He identified himself as a “private merchant” who had traveled from Washington via Cape Horn, Guaymas in Baja California, and the Sandwich Islands, to investigate trade possibilities on the Pacific coast. McLoughlin, who learned that Slacum had been an obscure purser in the United States Navy, suspected from the moment he met his overly inquisitive guest that he was neither merchant nor gentleman traveler but an intelligence agent of some kind, and in this he was correct. The visitor had been commissioned by John A. Forsyth, President Andrew Jackson’s secretary of state, to visit Oregon to ascertain the truth of Hall Kelley’s vituperations that American settlers were being “oppressed” by Hudson’s Bay agents, and that the British were thus in flagrant violation of the Anglo-American agreement.

  Slacum expressed an interest in meeting Jason Lee and other Americans who had preceded him to Fort Vancouver, and in this request McLoughlin saw the opportunity to utilize the spy in his midst. He told Slacum of the case of the American Ewing Young, who had come to Oregon more than two years past with a horse herd said, by no less an authority than Governor José Figueroa of Alta California, to have been stolen in his province. McLoughlin had banished Young from the fort and refused him trade; then, a few months later, Governor Figueroa exculpated the trapper from the charges. McLoughlin had been instrumental in urging Young to seek redress from Figueroa, but Young had become an enemy, refusing to trade at the fort after McLoughlin lifted the ban, and with a partner had established a farm and sawmill in the Chehalem Valley north of the Columbia.

  None of this bothered the factor; what did were the reports that Young had built a still on his farm and was brewing alcohol, using a huge copper salmon-pickling cauldron salvaged from Nat Wyeth’s Fort Hall. This was a disturbing development with a high potential for mischief, and McLoughlin asked Slacum to serve as an emissary to entreat Young to abandon the still in exchange for open privileges to trade at the fort stores. Slacum must have thought this a reasonable request and an appropriate assignment for one American to negotiate with another. He remained with McLoughlin until January 10, then, with six voyageurs as escort, began his tour by visiting the old Indian camp called Champoeg on the east side of the river, where McLoughlin had a warehouse. There he met with Jason Lee and several others eager to tell him, or any other visiting American, their problems, especially their complaints of subservience to the Company’s monopoly on foodstuffs, seeds, supplies, tools, building materials, and virtually everything else needed to build and settle.

  While spending two weeks with Lee at his Willamette valley station, Slacum learned that Lee’s temperance society had already visited Ewing Young on the whiskey issue. The Methodists had offered sixty dollars and twelve bushels of wheat to offset what Young had already invested in the still if he would tear it down. The trapper rejected the missionaries’ offer and that of McLoughlin as well, but he told Slacum he had abandoned the distillery for the present. He said he had turned his attention to a sawmill he had recently built.

  Bancroft’s assessment of the whiskey issue was that “Young’s distillery speculation had been like the labor of Cleanthes, who supported himself by drawing water at night in order that he might indulge in plucking the flowers of philosophy during the day; it was not appreciated by the Willamette Areopagus.”

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  The more-or-less secret agent William Slacum crammed as much travel and talk as he could into his brief visit to the Oregon Country. Probably before he reached Fort Vancouver, the Loriot had taken him as far north as Juan de Fuca Strait. He was awed by the great sound that connected to the Pacific, named in 1792 by its discoverer, Captain George Vancouver, for his aide, Peter Puget; he met with delegations of Canadians and assured them that they would not lose their farms when (not if) the United States took possession of Oregon, and cheered them further by saying that under American protection they would receive as much as three times more than the fifty cents a bushel Fort Vancouver was paying for their wheat.

  During Slacum’s visits with Jason Lee and Ewing Young, the Americans dwelled on beef cattle—their scarcity in Oregon, their importance for colonization—and Young, who had tramped Alta California from San Diego to Klamath Lake as a trapper, daydreamed about the abundance of cheap cattle there. The issue so impressed Slacum that he offered his c
hartered Loriot when Young said he wanted to mount an expedition to buy and bring a beef herd back to the Willamette.

  In a report he wrote later the agent said, “I found that nothing was wanting to insure comfort, wealth, and every happiness to the people of this most beautiful country, but the possession of neat-cattle, all of those in the country being owned by the Hudson’s Bay Company, who refused to sell them under any circumstances whatever.”1 The idea gained such momentum that even McLoughlin participated when the Willamette Cattle Company was organized in a meeting at Champoeg. In all, about $2,500 was gathered to float the enterprise. Slacum loaned Jason Lee $624 for the mission’s share and put in another $100 of his own; McLoughlin anted up $558 of his own money and $300 more in the name of two of his traders. (His contributions were never mentioned by the Americans.) Young gathered up thirteen men, two of them Indian guides; Slacum packed his kit, intending to return home after disembarking the cattle hunters, and they all boarded the Loriot on January 21, eager to reach California.

  However, from the first day to the last in what became a tortured nine-month expedition, nothing went smoothly. First, the Columbia threatened to scuttle them before they could cross the bar. In Baker’s Bay they found that two Hudson’s Bay fur vessels had been detained nearly a month by high seas, and the Loriot had to join them. Tossed and battered in the estuary, the brig’s mooring cables parted, its sails were shredded to rags, and its decks and bilges were awash before it could batter a path into the open sea on February 10. They reached Fort Ross, the Russian trading post fifty miles north of San Francisco Bay, nine days later, and on March 1, 1838, Young and some of his men were disembarked at Yerba Buena, after which Slacum sailed south toward the Horn and home.