Parkman’s histories were hailed as classics by Henry Adams, James Russell Lowell, Herman Melville, and Henry James, and at his death at age seventy on November 8, 1893, he was hailed as “the Herodotus of American history.”
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Of all his books, only The Oregon Trail3 reached a popular audience and would remain in print, to date, for 150 years. The author’s youthful grit and ingenuousness, his being “haunted by wilderness images night and day,” and the magic of his eye for detail contributed to its endurance. Above all, his first book was the only book he wrote from a firsthand, participatory viewpoint. The sense he had that what he was seeing had long-lasting historical importance was vastly different from the books he wrote about events whose historical importance had long been established.
“The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time,” he wrote in an era when history was literature and not yet as dismal a science as economics. “He must study events in their bearings, near and remote; in the character, habits, and manners of those who took part in them. He must himself be, as it were, a sharer or a spectator of the action he describes.”
Only in The Oregon Trail was Parkman a sharer and a spectator, accountable to no research sources, depending only upon his senses and his ability to assimilate what he experienced and to put on paper what Bernard De Voto called “one of the exuberant masterpieces of American literature.”
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Parkman returned west of the Mississippi but once, a visit to Saint Louis in 1867, where in the nearby town of Carondelet he was reunited with his noble old guide, Henry Chatillon. “Time hung heavy on his hands,” the Bostonian said of his “brave and truehearted” friend, “as usual with old mountain-men married and established.”
They met two years before the Union Pacific and Central Pacific rails linked up at Promontory Point, Utah, at a time when a government “peace commission” was concluding treaties at Medicine Lodge Creek in Kansas, with the Arapaho, Cheyenne, Comanche, and Kiowa. These papers were to establish reservations and provide the Indian with everything he abhorred: a fixed residence, farms, schools, allowances of food and clothing, restrictions on areas he could hunt.
Among the snippets of news Parkman learned from Chatillon was the fate of Old Smoke and his people, that “band of the hated Sioux” at Horse Creek, “with whom,” the Bostonian said, “I had been domesticated.” The guide told him “they had nearly all been killed in fights with the white men.”
Parkman kept abreast of western affairs and lamented the “Great changes” he had seen coming in ’46. In 1872, in the preface for a new edition of The Oregon Trail, he expressed gratitude that his book had not been allowed to fall into oblivion and ascribed its extended life to the interest attached “to the record of that which has passed away never to return.… the image of an irrevocable past.”
He recalled a time when he and Quincy Shaw rode together by the foot of Pike’s Peak on their return journey from Fort Laramie. Shaw said the time would come when the plains would be transformed to a grazing country, the buffalo giving place to cattle, farmhouses springing up along the watercourses, and wolves, bears, and Indians “numbered among the things that were.” He and his companion knew, Parkman wrote, that gold lurked in the seams of the pristine mountains before them, “but we did not foresee that it would build cities in the waste, and plant hotels and gambling-houses among the haunts of the grizzly bear.” They knew in 1846 that the Mormons—“a few fanatical outcasts”—were “groping their way across the plains seeking asylum from gentile persecution,” but did not imagine that “the polygamous hordes … would rear a swarming Jerusalem in the bosom of solitude itself.
“We knew that, more and more, year after year, the trains of emigrant wagons would creep in slow procession towards barbarous Oregon or wild and distant California,” he wrote, “but we did not dream how Commerce and Gold would breed nations along the Pacific, the disenchanting screech of the locomotive break the spell of weird, mysterious mountains.”
Even in ’46 Parkman wrote in a melancholy mood about the dwindling of the buffalo, the end of the Indian way of life as they became abased by liquor and harried by the military, and the disappearance of the west he saw in all “its dangers and charms.” Twenty-six years later he reflected on these inexorable changes. The Indian, whom he tried to depict honestly in his journal, and the mountain man, whom he saw somewhat more romantically, symbolized for Parkman the sad passage of the Old West he knew.
“The wild cavalcade that defiled with me down the gorges of the Black Hills, with its paint and war-plumes, fluttering trophies and savage embroidery, bows, arrows, lances, and shields, will never be seen again,” he said. “Those who formed it have found bloody graves, or a ghastlier burial in the maws of wolves. The Indian of to-day, armed with a revolver and crowned with an old hat, cased, possibly, in trousers or muffled in a tawdry shirt, is an Indian still, but an Indian shorn of the picturesqueness which was his most conspicuous merit.”
Of the Henry Chatillons he had known, he said, “The mountain trapper is no more, and the grim romance of his wild, hard life is a memory of the past.”
He said he had gone out to Fort Laramie in 1846 “in great measure as a student,” without a fixed purpose and with somewhat of a youthful rashness. “My business was observation,” he said, “and I was willing to pay dearly for the opportunity of exercising it.”
4
After twenty-two years as chief factor at Fort Vancouver, John McLoughlin took his leave of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s service on January 6, 1846. The Company provided him a generous £500 salary for the first year of his retirement, to be followed by a two-year “leave of absence” at full pay, then full retirement at “half-pay,” similar to the British army custom for unemployed officers waiting for a war and an active service assignment. Only in McLoughlin’s case there would be no more wars, and his services were no longer sought.
He had been forced out and it disturbed him, even though he was quite aware that he had assisted significantly in his own downfall.
He had been at loggerheads with Governor Sir George Simpson almost from the beginning of their relationship, when the two came down from Canada to old Fort George in 1824. They had quarreled frequently, often rancorously, and often about the factor’s tendency to bend or break Company regulations and orders or twist them to meet what he believed were immediate needs. One such episode was the time Simpson sent HMS Beaver to the Columbia, the first steam-powered vessel on the northwest coast. It did not impress the factor and he ordered the removal of its engine to run a Company sawmill.
But the worst moment in their stormy relationship, and the one McLoughlin could never forgive, was Simpson’s officious and abrupt announcement of John McLoughlin, Jr.’s murder at Stikine in ’42 and his willingness to accuse young John of drunkenness and cruelty, and of creating the mood of violence that ended his life.
There were other rankling matters as well: Simpson’s imperious orders closing certain of the Company’s trading posts that McLoughlin had labored to open and which had not been given time to show a profit; Simpson’s overbearing anti-American pronouncements; the accusations, both intimated and bald, that the White Eagle not only disobeyed Company policy and the policies of Whitehall, but that he aided and abetted the American takeover of the Oregon Country.
Then there was the matter of the spies Simpson sent to Fort Vancouver: Peel and Gordon, Warre and Vavasour, the latter a pair of layabouts who had accused him of encouraging American settlement. They had revealed that he had extended credit to the immigrants over the years in the amount of about $32,000 American, a sum that Simpson said horrified him and which he reported somewhat too gleefully to London.
McLoughlin’s generosity had yielded a cruel irony. For all the help and hospitality he had extended to the Americans, from rescuing Jedediah Smith in ’28 and Hall Kelley in ’32, down through the arrival of the Protestant missionaries, the Whitmans, the Spaldings,
and others, and the starving, desperate settlers thereafter—for succoring them all he had been rewarded with was betrayal. The Americans had wickedly short memories: So many of those he befriended, took into his home, loaned or gave necessities from the Company’s stores—so many of them had turned their backs on him. They lied to the British spies, and even to their own spies (of whom there had been many, Kelley, Bonneville, Slacum, Wilkes, and Farnham among them), and besmirched the Company’s name, and thereby his name.
McLoughlin had property, and that too had been used against him. In 1829 he had claimed land at a place he called the Falls, a considerable tract south of Fort Vancouver at the falls of the Willamette River, and built a sawmill there and some log houses. Eventually he hired a surveyor to lay out the town that became Oregon City, sold some lots, donated others for churches and schools, built a gristmill and a two-story clapboard house on the property. The house was almost ready for occupancy when McLoughlin departed Fort Vancouver for the last time. He and his beloved Marguérite, his widowed daughter Louisa and her children, would all enjoy the place, and his freedom, together.
* * *
A man named Samuel R. Thurston became McLoughlin’s final nemesis and deprived the White Eagle of the peaceful old age and family joys he sought.
Thurston was a lawyer, from Maine originally, a graduate of Bowdoin College, a Methodist, and a one-time editor of the Burlington, Iowa, Gazette. He emigrated to Oregon toward the end of 1847 and in the raw new territory aligned his political ambition and gift for hortatory on a single issue: the Hudson’s Bay Company’s continued “presence” in and possession of American lands. The perfect embodiment of the problem, in Thurston’s thinking, was John McLoughlin.
“Much has been said about the rude and violent manners of western men in pursuit of an object,” Bancroft said of the upstart, “but Thurston was not a western man; he was supposed to be something more elevated and refined, more cool and logical, more moral and Christian than the people beyond the Alleghenies … and yet in the canvass of 1849 he introduced into Oregon the vituperative and invective style of debate, and mingled with it a species of coarse blackguardism such as no Kentucky ox-driver or Missouri flat-boatman might hope to excel.”
Thurston’s career had a quick and high trajectory and as sudden a collapse.
After the first official meeting of the Territorial Legislature in July 1849, just eighteen months after his arrival in Oregon City, Samuel Thurston, age forty-three, was on his way to Washington as the territory’s first delegate to Congress. He fell ill when being escorted across the Columbia bar in a small boat and had not recovered during the sailing to San Francisco and on to Panama. On the Chagres River, in the crossing to the Atlantic side of the isthmus, his baggage was stolen. Despite these travails, in June 1850 he was able to propose a pioneer land bill in the House of Representatives that carried with it provisions to declare John McLoughlin’s claims to his Oregon City property null and void.
Thurston wrote other members of the House that McLoughlin had taken the land illegally, forced Methodist missionaries off the tract by threatening to have Indians attack them, and held the claim by threat of violence while making huge profits by selling lots and from other business enterprises. He also accused McLoughlin of refusing to take American citizenship and holding on to the property for the benefit of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Among his “infamous lies,” Bancroft wrote, was Thurston’s statement that the Company “has been warring against our government for forty years,” that “Dr. McLoughlin has been their chief fugleman, first to cheat our government out of the whole country, and next to prevent its settlement.” He stated that McLoughlin “has driven men from claims and from the country to stifle the efforts at settlement.”
Thurston’s work did not win the endorsement of all Oregonians or former Oregonians. Nathaniel Wyeth of Cambridge warned Senator Winthrop of Massachusetts to be cautious in reacting to the freshman congressman’s diatribes, and in Oregon, McLoughlin learned that many American settlers were indeed grateful for his efforts on their behalf when fifty-six pioneers put together a memorial defending the factor against Thurston’s charges.
Unfortunately the petition did not reach Washington until after the congressman’s land bill, and most of his charges against McLoughlin, were received and adopted in Congress.
Thurston next prepared a sixteen-page recounting of his services in Washington on behalf of the territory—careful “to leave no possible means by which the man who had founded and fostered Oregon City could retain an interest in it,” Bancroft said. He also submitted himself for reelection while the victim of his malice “began the painful and useless struggle to free himself from the toils by which his enemies had surrounded him, and from which he never escaped during the few remaining years of his life.”
But Thurston died first, in April 1851, aboard the steamer California off Acapulco en route to Oregon from Washington. His death was attributed to “natural causes from chronic ill health.” Bancroft said, “Thus while preparing boldly to vindicate his acts and do battle with his adversaries, he was forced to surrender the sword which was too sharp for its scabbard.”
In 1852, after McLoughlin had completed his application for United States citizenship, the territorial assembly passed an act accepting his Oregon City property as a gift for the purposes of endowing a university but, with Thurston and his democratic party out of power, there was no movement to evict the White Eagle and his family from the land and they remained at the big whitewashed house until his death.
In his last, relatively calm, years McLoughlin was often seen walking the Oregon City streets in his brass-buttoned swallow-tail coat, ruffled shirt, and black cravat, baggy trousers stuffed into long-legged, beaded Indian moccasins, carrying the gold-headed cane he had once laid alongside the head of Reverend Herbert Beaver and tipping his tall beaver hat to the ladies. He still looked the Laird of the Pacific Northwest, but toward the end he became more house-bound, suffering from diabetes, and had developed a palsy in his hands that ended his ability to answer correspondence. As his granddaughter wrote for him from dictation, he checked each sheet of foolscap with his eagle’s eye. If any were blotted she knew she would have to make a clean copy.
In the summer of 1854, Peter Ogden fell ill and was forced to retire from Hudson’s Bay and take up residence with his wife, daughter, and son-in-law in Oregon City. McLoughlin visited him regularly and urged Ogden to legalize his marriage to his Indian wife. This idea did not appeal to the leathery brigade leader, who said their devotion to one another, and to their several children, was testimony enough to the sanctity of their relationship.
Ogden died in Oregon City on September 27, 1854, at age sixty.
In the summer of 1857, McLoughlin met an American lawyer named Lafayette F. Grover of Maine who, ironically, had come to Oregon at the suggestion of Samuel Thurston. The White Eagle told the young future district attorney, “I am an old man and just dying, and you are a young man and will live many years in this country. As for me, I might better have been shot like a bull; I might better have been shot forty years ago.” He asked Grover to “give your influence, after I am dead, to have this property go to my children. I have earned it, as other settlers have earned theirs, and it ought to be mine and my heirs’.”
Grover promised to do all he could.
On September 3, 1857, McLoughlin’s nephew, Dr. Henri de Chesne, came to look in on his patient and greeted the old man with his usual salutation, “Comment allez-vous?” This time McLoughlin answered “A Dieu,” and died at eleven that morning, from “gangrenous diabetes,” at the age of seventy-three.
He was buried in an enclosure in the Catholic church of Oregon City and on his tombstone was inscribed the legend, “The Pioneer and Friend of Oregon; also the Founder of this City.”
Marguérite McKay McLoughlin died on February 28, 1860, and was laid to rest beside her husband of forty-five years.
The Oregon legislature restored the McLoughl
in property to his heirs in 1862.
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Herbert Howe Bancroft, who admired McLoughlin above all the great figures in the 300-year Oregon journey, wrote the most eloquent tribute to him:
I think of him as if present; and so he is, though he were dead this quarter century and more. I never saw him, and yet I see him; I never heard him, and yet he speaks to me now; I never grasped his hand, but I feel his presence, and am the better for it. The good that a man does lives after him, saith the seer.
Epilogue
In 1844 the American Agriculturist of New York carried an editorial inspired by the success of the “Great Migration” the year before—the one that Horace Greeley said “wears an aspect of insanity.” The magazine writer, carried aloft by the spirit if not by the eloquence of Manifest Destiny, opined that “we might as well undertake to stay the sun and moon in their course over the peaks of the Rocky Mountains, as emigration to the west by the hardy nomadic population of our country.” He went further: “Who will not take the risk of being scalped by Indians, or devoured by grisley [sic] bears, to say nothing of sustaining innumerable hardships for a succession of years, and living free from all moral and civil restraints, to emigrate to the Ultima Thule … the El Dorado of the final borders of the great illimitable west!”
By Ultima Thule and El Dorado the writer meant Oregon, but within four years of the writing the words were being applied to California.
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The first book edition of Francis Parkman’s masterpiece appeared with the title The California and Oregon Trail: Being Sketches of Prairie and Rocky Mountain Life. The author had not authorized inserting “California” into the title since he had made no reference to the California Trail in the book, but the publisher clearly intended making the most of the public fixation on the road that led to the goldfields.
Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising Page 43
