The Bastard of Fort Stikine Page 12

  In this, as in all things, George Simpson set the tone. The Governor’s attitudes toward women “were not enlightened, even by the standards of his age.” To his way of thinking, women were merely a perfumed, pillowy means to a pleasurable end. During his footloose bachelor days, Simpson told a friend that “the White Fish diet of the district seems favourable to procreation, and had I a good pimp in my suite I might have been inclined to deposit a little of my spawn.”

  He was clearly so inclined, and his indiscriminate deposits resulted in a handful of illegitimate children by aboriginal women, although such dalliances caused him no end of grief. In 1822, Simpson ordered his fixer, John George McTavish, to clean up the mess he’d made with Betsey Sinclair, his current country wife who had just borne him a child. With typical indifference, Simpson declared, “She is an unnecessary and expensive appendage. I see no fun in keeping a Woman, without enjoying her charms.” Although the Governor no longer had any use for her, he did not relish the idea of sharing his plaything with the lower ranks. He told McTavish to either find her another officer or else make some rather medieval arrangements: “If she is unmarketable I have no wish that she should be a general accommodation shop to all the young bucks at the Factory and in addition to her own chastity, a padlock may be helpful; Andrew is a neat handed Fellow and having been in China may perhaps know the pattern of those used in that part of the world.”

  Simpson often projected his own distorted issues with les femmes onto his colleagues. One such target was John Stuart, whom Simpson dismissed as “disgustingly indecent in regards to women.” The Governor once took an interpreter to task for his “over intimacy” and “indiscreet amours” with native women. He also created a corporate culture in which it was entirely acceptable for one of his employees to cut “off the Ears of an Indian who had had an intrigue with his Woman.” Simpson swore he wouldn’t have minded so much had the ears been cut off “in the heat of passion or as a punishment for Horse Stealing,” but to get that upset over a woman was simply a waste of energy.

  Sir George was a master of the mixed message, and his words and deeds seldom matched. Blind to his own transgressions, he announced, “Almost every difficulty we have had with Indians throughout the Country may be traced to our interference with their Women.” Accordingly, Simpson forbade employees from taking part in “short-term, potentially exploitive sorties in search of Indian women.” Ever the hypocrite, his own sorties were exempt. Of course, the rule against fraternization was impossible to enforce, and Simpson sometimes looked the other way when it came to more formal long-term relationships, especially in remote areas.

  One such exemption was Fort Stikine. Despite his recent edict, the Governor gave permission for a number of Stikine men to marry when he visited in 1841. “Fourteen or fifteen of the men of the establishment asked permission to take native wives,” Simpson later wrote, “and leave to accept the worthless bargains was granted to all such as had the means of supporting a family.” One of those lucky men was John McLoughlin Jr., who immediately began sharing his bed with the daughter of the local chief.

  Simpson then argued both sides against the middle, drawing one breath to declare “these matrimonial connections are a heavy tax on a post, in consequence of increased demand for provisions,” and then using the exhale to contend such unions formed “a useful link between the traders and the savages.” Upon further reflection, he decided that link was not as mutually advantageous as he had hoped. Moving the aboriginal women into the fort “afforded the Stikine Tlingit much more information about HBC society and its foibles than the Company wanted them to know, and certainly much more than the Company knew about the Tlingit.”

  Simpson changed his tune yet again, denouncing country wives as meddlesome in Company affairs and branding them “petty coat politicians.” Hypocritical to the bitter end, he issued a final mandate to the men of Stikine: “I must beg that good order be restored…and no worthless women be allowed to harbor within the stockades.” Other arbitrary regulations soon followed. At one point, HBC officers were required to sign marriage contracts, and if a man abandoned his family, he was obligated to find the woman another provider. Legal scholar Hamar Foster summed up Simpson’s endless flip-flopping with unwarranted diplomacy: “The Company’s practice in such matters was never the model of consistency.”

  Sir George changed the game completely when he informed his superiors of his plan to return to London to seek a wife. It was entirely out of character for the Governor, who had always decried marriage and offspring as socially mandated fetters designed to impede a man’s happiness and liberty. But it had recently been brought to his attention that he was long past that certain age when a man of status needed to tie the knot, and he had little hope of finding an appropriate match in the wilds of the New World. The board implored him to wait, and his one-time benefactor, Andrew Colvile, whispered in Simpson’s ear, “A wife I fear would be an embarrassment to you until the business gets into a more complete order.” The Governor, a devoted company servant, acquiesced, but he kept his eyes open. Over the next five years, he scanned the horizon for a suitable mate during his sojourns to the Continent, and just as hope soured, he found her.

  Her name was Frances Ramsey. Twenty years his junior, she was his first cousin, daughter to the uncle who gave Simpson his start in the sugar trade. Simpson wrote to John McTavish with his usual blend of effusion and indiscretion: “Would you believe it? I am in love — how may I get rid of it.” Lest you think the Governor had gone soft, he closed the letter: “I shall settle my Bullocks in her.” Simpson married his great white hope on February 24, 1830, in a ceremony long on pomp but short on sentiment. With their union consecrated, the couple immediately set sail for Simpson’s old stomping grounds at Red River. Laden with her trousseau, Frances was thrust onto the first of an endless procession of canoes bound for her new home. She was beryl-eyed and cupid-lipped, pink of cheek and boneless, pale, and uninteresting in the way of all cloistered teens. Beauty had been one of Simpson’s bridal requirements, of course, as was height or, rather, a lack of it. It simply would not do to have a woman tower over the pint-sized emperor, a constant visual reminder of his limitations. There was little fear of that with Frances, who stood barely five feet. Unburdened by intellect, and bred for domesticity, Frances curled inward, cowed, contrite, and overly dutiful, a living testament to the negligible difference between “bridal” and “bridle.”

  Theirs was a strange and loveless union. In her private diary, Frances frequently referred to her husband as “Mr. Simpson.” Despite being chronically “affection-starved,” she somehow managed to produce four children who survived infancy: Webster, Augusta D’Este, Margaret MacKenzie, and, in a shameless act of brown-nosing, a son named John Henry Pelly. It did not bode well that the couple had nothing in common aside from the children. The Governor was never physically abusive, but neither was he kind. Frances existed in a gilded cage, surrounded by the trappings of great wealth, but starved for simple human touch, “a prized but almost inanimate possession.”

  Frances Ramsey Simpson, Sir George’s only lawfully wedded wife.

  She was not alone in her frigid pen. Simpson was unable to love anyone, and “there is no direct evidence of any kind of emotional attachment to anyone or anything beyond himself and the HBC. He could muster illusions of warmth and friendship, could give his family endearing nicknames, but beyond that it appears that at his core the Governor was not sustained by matters of the heart.” He was dead inside, an empty and withered husk of a man, even with those he professed to hold dear. Heaven help those he hated.

  §

  Everything changed for the country wives when Simpson married Frances, as, “overnight, she created a fashion for white, church-wed wives.” Class distinctions long ignored in the HBC suddenly surfaced, and James Douglas mapped the resulting evolution: “Indian wives were at one time the vogue, the half breed supplanted these, and now we have the lovely tender exotic torn from its parent be
d.”

  Country wives became passé, and Simpson vociferously expressed “his disapproval of officers who continued in the old ways.” It was yet more hypocrisy from a man who “had fathered at least five children by four different women.” The Governor led by toxic example, and he demanded no less from his right-hand man, John McTavish. During their years at Red River, Simpson insulted his men when he “refused to accept mixed-bloods as suitable company for Frances.” McTavish followed suit when he transferred to Moose Factory and soon had the rank and file in an uproar when he forbade his Scottish-born wife, Catherine, to “mix with their country wives.”

  Simpson’s reactionary edict that Company men find suitable replacements for their displaced country wives came back to haunt him after his marriage. When Frances arrived to set up house in Red River, Simpson once again asked McTavish to deal with his “old concern” — his latest country wife, Margaret “Peggy” Taylor, who was pregnant with his child at the time. Simpson’s contempt was on full display as he told McTavish, “Pray keep an Eye on the commodity and if she bring forth anything in proper time and of the right colour, let them be taken care of but if anything be amiss, let the whole be bundled about their business.” The baby was decidedly the wrong colour, and mother and child were hastily bundled off. In accordance with his own regulation, Simpson was forced to pay Peggy £30 per year until she was “disposed of.” After handing out a few annuities, McTavish finally managed to marry her off to an agreeable striver in the Company with the whimsically appropriate name of Amiable Hogue. Simpson’s love life was by then an open secret, and a source of derision, within the Company. His snider colleagues mocked Taylor’s demotion, chiding, “The Govr’s little tit bit Peggy Taylor…what a downfall is here…from a Governess to Sow.”

  Simpson’s vacillating beliefs and randomly enforced policies regarding country wives caused no end of headaches for John McLoughlin Jr. after he assumed command of Fort Stikine. McLoughlin heeded the rules, but the men’s lust often trumped Simpson’s decrees, and “the unmarried men were in the habit of secretly going out of the Fort at night, contrary to order, to visit the Indian camp.” They even hung a rope for just such a purpose, gleefully “scaling the Picquets” to visit their “dusky maidens.”

  McLoughlin tried to curtail their midnight runs by locking down the fort and issuing curfews, actions that quickly became a source of discord. Kannaquassé swore it was his inability to bring his wife into the fort that was “the real cause of his enmity” toward the chief trader, and that “All the Ill Will the Servants of Stikine felt towards [McLoughlin] arose from his preventing them…going to the Indians as often as they wished.”

  McLoughlin’s curfews were not the only source of discontent. The chief trader once made quite a production of beating Oliver Martineau “for giving away his clothes to women.” According to one trader, “Mr. McLoughlin summoned all the men to witness the punishment, he told us that he was determined to enforce the regulations of the establishment in all cases, and punish all offenders without respect to colour or country.” McLoughlin kept tight rein on his own spouse and reportedly beat Martineau and Kakepé “for allowing his wife to go outside the fort.” The men resented having to keep tabs on the chief trader’s woman when they were not allowed to have one, and no one took greater umbrage than McLoughlin’s feeble-minded assistant, Thomas McPherson.

  McPherson loved the ladies, but they didn’t care for him. He wasn’t much to look at and was scrawny by HBC standards. A perpetually unkissed toad, McPherson was forced to do as countless other undesirables had done before him — he paid for it. Sampling a slattern’s charms did not come cheap, and McPherson was a clerk of very limited means, but he had one thing his ladies-on-loan wanted: the key to the HBC storeroom.

  McPherson used that key to buy himself a little companionship to ring in the new year of 1842. While the other men drank their good health, McPherson “brought a woman of bad reputation into the house at night and paid her with goods from the store.” Their rendezvous was fleeting and uninspired. For her efforts, McPherson “gave the woman 4 yards of white cotton…which [he] stole in the shop for the purpose.”

  McPherson coupled with other working girls over the next few weeks. Whenever the mood struck him, he “opened the Fort Gate about 3 o’clock in the morning and [took] a female into the Indian Shop, the key of which he had, and that after having kept her there about half an hour, he had put her out of the Fort,” locking the gate behind him. The clerk’s erotic sojourns worked to everyone’s benefit. Each time McPherson entertained “a loose woman,” Heroux, Kannaquassé, Heron, and others used the open gate “to spend the night in the Indian lodges.”

  John McLoughlin heard whispers of McPherson’s nighttime escapades and called his worthless assistant to account. He had long suspected McPherson “pilfered from the Store,” but after a quick check of the inventory, he finally had hard proof. Calling his subordinate into the office, “Mr. John turn[ed] McPherson out of the shop” for “running after loose women” and stealing “goods from the shop to pay them.” He seized McPherson’s storehouse key and suspended him for two weeks. Although the chief trader was livid, he dealt with his clerk’s transgressions quietly, as “McLoughlin did not wish to bring him to open shame.” McPherson was not publicly flogged, as any other man would have been.

  McPherson escaped a beating, but McLoughlin imposed one last sanction, the seemingly minor penalty of “turning Thomas McPherson from his table” and forcing him to “dine with the men for a month.” Demoted and humiliated, McPherson retreated to his room to ride out his involuntary celibacy.

  §

  McLoughlin had his difficulties with the men of Stikine, but he seemed to find solace and genuine friendship with its women. Glimpses of his warm regard for the fairer sex can be found throughout the fort’s records. McLoughlin’s daily journal entries were perfunctory, dull, and entirely focused on the business affairs of the outpost, except when he made reference to the women. Often such comments related to his duties as chief trader or his unofficial role as the fort’s surgeon, as in this entry from Thursday, February 24, 1842: “Early this morning I was called to attend Urbain’s wife [next part crossed out] who was [illegible]. As soon as I was arrive [sic] I began to examine her and found that she had been labouring for some time before my arrival. An hour after my arrival, she was delivered of a daughter.”

  But more common (and more compelling) were the curiously intimate marginalia regarding the traders’ wives that popped up, apropos of nothing, amidst the corporate details. For example, the diary shows that McLoughlin kept abreast of the outpost’s gossip, which he recorded for posterity along with the day’s activities: “Monday April 4, 1842, cloudy all day, with frequent showers of rain. Sent the men to get wood for wedges. Today one of the men’s wife went off without any excuse and says she will not return without conditions. No trade except previous.” McLoughlin was a veteran of such teacup tempests, and he knew better than to interfere in a lover’s quarrel, adding: “I did not listen to it nor to her husband.” The journal also served as a ledger of McLoughlin’s generosity toward the fort’s fairer inhabitants. On May 11, 1841, he noted that among the goods received that day were “a little fish,” which he gave “as a present” to his favourite of the officers’ wives.

  By all accounts that matter, McLoughlin treated his own country wife with care and respect. His parents had been excellent role models in that regard, and though his time with his father and mother had been limited, a few incidents clearly left a lasting impression. One indelible exchange involved a run-in between his father and an appropriately named HBC clergyman, Herbert Beaver. Despite his rampant piety, Dr. McLoughlin took an instant dislike to Reverend Beaver, and his animus was both personal and spiritual. Beaver “was of the fox-hunting type,” remarkable only for being “a short stout man with a high-pitched voice and fondness for long sermons.” Beaver hated everything on principle, disparaging his Company house as a “personal insult and
domestic annoyance,” cursed with floors “too filthy to step upon.” But what the reverend detested most of all was the practice, then condoned by the HBC, of taking country wives.

  One day Beaver made his displeasure known in a showpiece of passive aggression. Company policy dictated that Dr. McLoughlin review all of Beaver’s outgoing reports, and in a particularly long-winded letter to Governor Simpson, the cleric berated Dr. McLoughlin’s wife, Marguerite, as “a female of notoriously loose character.” The doctor did not take kindly to the slight, and he confronted Beaver in the fort’s compound, demanding an explanation. According to one eyewitness, Beaver replied, “If Dr. McLaughlin [sic] you require to know why a cow’s tail grows downward, I can simply cite the fact.” McLoughlin brandished his silver walking stick and swung it at Beaver’s head. “The parson bawled to Jane his wife for his pistols, old style affairs, flint locks, half as long as my arm,” but cooler heads intervened and the incident stopped just short of bloodshed. Dr. McLoughlin immediately sent the reverend packing, but he never got over the insult to his wife. From that day forward, Dr. McLoughlin insisted his “employees stand and remove their hats in her presence.” The image of those doffed caps was seared into John Jr.’s brain, and when he took command of Stikine, he implemented the practice with his own country wife. The men didn’t like it but obeyed. Failure to comply meant a beating, another on a growing list of reasons McLoughlin raised his hand to the men — or so it seemed.