The Bastard of Fort Stikine Read online

  Fraser then cast dire predictions as to John’s future in the workforce: “You must know that you are illiterate to the degree that if, by any favour, you should pass an examination for a Physician you would infallibly disgrace the Profession…your invincible indolence and perverse disposition have marred your good qualities.…Your relatives would have no cause to blush for you since your head, thru want of education, is so lamentably deficient. You have nothing left besides being a day labourer in civilized society or a hunter among savages.” And with that, Simon Fraser slammed the door shut on young John McLoughlin.

  Dr. McLoughlin soon joined Fraser in berating his useless son, for if sides must be chosen, he did not hesitate to pick his uncle over John. Tirades about money and John’s flagrant misuse of it became recurring themes in Dr. McLoughlin’s subsequent letters to Simon Fraser. His missives grew lumpy with complaints of his son “spending freely for a man who is Dependent on another.…Is he such a fool as to suppose that people will Engage a person…does he think that I undergo privations to Earn Money for him to spend in the Way he seems determined to do.”

  Money was a major point of contention between father and son, but it soon became a bargaining chip. The first gambit was laid by John, who declared he would “go to Montreal to resume his studies if a hundred and fifty pounds [we]re given him.” Dr. McLoughlin was mortified, telling his uncle that “when he made this most impudent demand, I should have sent him at once about his Business and cast him off for ever.” Two years later, McLoughlin capitulated and tried to buy his son’s compliance. He stipulated that if John “Conducts himself as a Gentleman and if he Endeavours to the Utmost to make up for his past misconduct by applying as Zealously as he possibly can to his Studies,” he would reward him by granting him “any sum…under a hundred and fifty pounds” to complete his schooling. John, with no leverage to negotiate, accepted his father’s condition-laden offer.

  Newly flush, John fully intended to resume his medical training at Montreal’s prestigious McGill University, but he needed his transcripts from Paris to secure his enrolment. He wrote to his uncle David, begging for the necessary paperwork, but John had yet to be forgiven. Time and again, David McLoughlin failed to provide the transcripts, and the delays proved costly for John, who lamented that “for my Uncle’s negligence, I have lost one year more” of study.

  With no coursework to occupy him, and a false sense of financial stability courtesy of his father, John reverted to his prior lavish ways. The fool and his father’s money were soon parted, and within months his entire year’s allowance was gone. In a letter to his cousin, John admitted to having “squandered” his money and pleaded poverty. On June 15, 1835, he wrote to Simon Fraser, asking for some boots, as “It is certainly very strange that I must go barefoot. Surely you are not without any feeling of humanity. Although I have lost your friendship, it is not the reason why you should leave me go without shoes. Get the boots made in your village, if you will not trust me with the money.” Fraser’s answer was absolute silence.

  John then tried his luck with his cousin John, a historically soft touch. McLoughlin asked his cousin for four or five pounds, begging, “Do not disappoint me, if you cannot send all, send at least half of it.” John Fraser acquiesced and John was soon back, looking for another handout. This time, John Fraser was not so easily shaken down. A rebuffed McLoughlin demanded to know “Who is then to pay my washing woman bill?” McLoughlin also tried guilt, telling his cousin, “I think my father himself would not have acted so. I am certain he would have clothed me.” John Fraser reluctantly agreed to forward some money for essentials.

  He would soon regret his decision. Demands for expenses, all of them “essential,” poured in from his destitute cousin. August of that year saw a most peculiar request: “Will you be so kind as to purchase for me a Davier et un deschapain [tooth forceps and gum lancet] in fact a complete set of Instruments for extracting teeth.” McLoughlin justified the expenditure by saying it would allow him to “make a little money from my profession so as to enable me to continue my classes.”

  By the spring of 1836, John had accumulated “such heavy debts that he was arrested by his creditors.” In his hour of need, he reached out to his father with a heartfelt plea, but the answer was not what he hoped: “John has written me a Very contrite letter But as he is spending so much More Money…I do not write him.” John McLoughlin Jr. had learned a painful lesson: the opposite of love was not hate but indifference. His father’s love was conditional, measured in pounds and pence, and doled out as sparingly.

  Physically, John was the mirror image of his father, a towering man who commanded attention through sheer mass, but when it came to character, he was a paltry imitation of the great Dr. John. Unable to fill his father’s shoes, he had little choice but to follow in his footsteps. The Hudson’s Bay Company held no appeal for John and, more importantly, the elder McLoughlin had strong opposition to his son entering the fur trade. Dr. McLoughlin was “concerned about the increasingly limited prospects for men of mixed blood.” His fears were well founded and could be traced to a single source: the Company’s governor, Sir George Simpson.

  As the Scottish-born head of a British monopoly, George Simpson was the quintessential colonial, believing he had been sent by God to “civilize” the indigenous population. No one, least of all Simpson, paused to consider whether those invaded needed civilization. More to the point, he abhorred change and all things foreign, but mostly he despised the people he professed to be helping.

  Simpson fancied himself an anthropologist who “made it my study to examine the nature and character of Indians.” He did not like what he saw and, true to his colonial bent, he considered it his duty to impose his will upon them: “I am convinced they must be ruled with a rod of Iron to bring and keep them in a proper state of subordination, and the most certain way to effect this is by letting them feel their dependence upon us.”

  The Governor’s “racist attitude toward non-whites” was as sweeping as it was pointed. He believed aboriginal education to be a complete waste of time, because “an enlightened Indian is good for nothing.” His contemporaries thought Simpson was a man “a little too much addicted to prejudices” and a little too “prone to act on them,” and his bigoted views wormed their way into the Company’s hiring policies. Sir George declared all half-breeds to be “thoughtless, dissipated and depraved.” Desperation alone necessitated the hiring of mixed-race traders for lowly posts, but it was a practice Simpson detested.

  Simpson was blind to his own racist tendencies. He often flattered himself for his handling of the aboriginal peoples, saying, “They look upon me as the greatest man who ever came into the Country.” He was convinced the First Nations were stupid and gullible, easy pickings for those white men “qualified to cheat an Indian,” and he often bragged of his ability to swindle them.

  Simpson’s disdain for the First Nations only increased when it came to aboriginal women. He was notoriously libidinous, engaging in a series of dalliances with women he coarsely termed his “bits of brown,” “his bit of circulating copper,” or his “Japan helpmate.”

  Simpson’s pathological contempt for “half-breeds” was entirely at odds with his fervour for making them. He was a prolific sire; during his first foray into Rupert’s Land he fathered a daughter named Maria by his “washerwoman” Betsey at Fort Wedderburn, and a son named Jordie by a woman in Red River. Historian Peter C. Newman once quipped that Simpson’s title “Father of the Fur Trade” had more to do with his loins than his legacy.

  Bigotry was not Simpson’s only vice, as his vanity also knew no bounds. He hired an official chronicler of his journeys into the wild, clear evidence of an ego run amok. Archibald McDonald accompanied Simpson on his earliest voyages, and Simpson got his money’s worth when the scribe immortalized him as a man of “rather imposing mien; stout, well knit frame, and of great expanse and fullness of chest, with an eye brightly blue and ever ablaze in peace or war.”
/>   Those whose noses were not permanently imbedded in the Governor’s backside had an entirely different perspective. In his youth, Simpson was a perpetually hot-faced man, a “red-headed magpie with quivering beak and glittery eye,” but he had grown doughy as the years rolled by. His hair was once so orange it caused retinal burns, but age and neglect had reduced the remnants to a greying fringe. Sun-stroked and windswept, he bore the perennially queasy look of an ill-prepared tourist.

  His clothes were equally out of step. George Simpson was a zealous adherent to the notion that clothes made the man, and so he dressed for the job he wanted: sovereign monarch. The appearance of wealth and respectability was difficult to amass and expensive to maintain, but by 1833 Simpson’s salary had climbed to a staggering £1,800 per annum (excluding expenses). He received a number of exorbitant pay raises throughout his career, and the bulk went to the care and feeding of his wardrobe. He favoured ostentation, including the requisite beaver hats (ferried about in monogrammed carrying cases) and “a gorgeous cloak of red Scottish plaid with a scarlet lining.” He was a peacock among seagulls, a preening diva strutting against a ragtag backdrop of “unsung, unlettered and uncouth” voyageurs.

  As his annual tour wended through Rupert’s Land, the sight of Simpson being carried ashore by rough-and-ready Metis undoubtedly met with awe (and some laughter) at his ports of call. The mocking did not last long. The Governor’s greatest weapon was the element of surprise, and no one at the forts knew when he was coming, giving them little opportunity to put their house in order.

  The unfortunates who encountered Simpson during his grand tours did what they could to warn those farther afield. It was no easy task, as the Governor had a “penchant for speed” and demanded an unholy pace, forcing his crewmen to begin rowing in the middle of the night and setting records for canoe travel that stand today. Still, the seasoned traders had their ways; news travelled quickly between forts via the “moccasin telegraph,” an informal but highly effective aboriginal gossip network.

  The Governor was notoriously difficult to please and always found “little to commend and much to reform” at every outpost he visited. He never hesitated to make his displeasure known, nor did he restrict his disdain to infrastructure, for he “had the exact same complaints of many of the HBC employees he met.” His contempt for his fellows was matched only by “his caprice, his favouritism, [and] his disregard of merit,” leaving the less-favoured in his employ scrambling to keep their jobs.

  From day one, Simpson made it known that the HBC was not a democracy and his edicts were final. John McLean, in his bridge-burning treatise detailing twenty-five years of servitude in the Company, claimed that Simpson wrote the minutes of his meetings before they actually took place, as the Governor’s lackeys “know better than to offer advice where none would be accepted,” and “their assent is all that is expected of them.”

  Governor Simpson’s tyranny, vainglory, and irrational hatred for those of mixed race were cause enough for John McLoughlin Jr. to steer clear of the Hudson’s Bay Company, but they were far from the only reasons.

  Monday, April 25, 1842 — Nightfall

  fort stikine

  Under a canopy of stars hung solely for his amusement, Sir George Simpson stood aboard the deck of the trade steamer Cowlitz as it laboured from Tako to Fort Stikine. A surprise inspection was in the offing, and though he had paid a visit to the fort a few months prior, Simpson felt another cage rattling was in order. When the ship entered the mouth of the river, the Governor ordered his voyageurs to lower the canoes and proceed upstream. As they rounded the bend and were in sight of the outpost, Simpson’s impending arrival was announced with its usual modesty. His personal Highland bagpiper Colin Fraser (whose retainer was paid by the HBC) blasted the Governor’s melodic signature, a signal for the fort’s complement to roll out the appropriate welcome mat. Having issued fair warning, Simpson told his crewmen to stop the boat so that he too might prepare. Before setting foot on shore, he needed to “don his beaver topper and [give] his paddlers a moment to spruce up in their best shirts.” Only when every man cut his finest figure did the canoe dock and the procession begin, swept ashore with a full pipe and drum accompaniment.

  On this night, the cavalcade met with deafening silence. “The stillness that prevailed on shore” was the first indication something was terribly wrong. The Governor quelled his fanfare and hurried toward the fort, his mind “filled with apprehension that all was not right, by observing that both the English and Russian Flags on the Fort were half mast high, and that Mr. John McLoughlin, the Gentleman left in charge, did not appear on the platform.”

  Thomas McPherson, McLoughlin’s assistant, scrambled onto the dock to greet his distinguished guest, but Simpson was in no mood to be handled. He careened through the fort at full speed, and there he found “a scene which no pen can adequately describe.” McPherson had the unenviable task of informing the Governor that Mr. John had been “hurried into eternity by a gunshot wound from one of his own men.” Simpson demanded to know which man had pulled the trigger and soon found fingers pointed in every direction. In a private moment, McPherson whispered that his fellow Canadians tried “to make me believe that it was Indians that shot him,” a charge the fort’s indigenous population vehemently denied.

  The Governor wasted no time in launching what proved to be a “superficial investigation.” There were no police to be summoned, no courts to inform. As the HBC’s top designate in the Indian Territories, Simpson was within his rights — and fulfilling his obligations — when he convened a panel and deposed the eyewitnesses.

  To history’s eternal regret, he began with Thomas McPherson.

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  The Honourable Company

  John McLoughlin Jr. stumbled into manhood with no marketable skills, a poor reputation, and a bad attitude. As he contemplated his future with the HBC, his father was haunted by his own past. Fur held remarkably little interest for Dr. McLoughlin; true, it made him a very rich man, but the doctor seemed out of place in an industry devoid of diplomacy or fundamental decency. Medicine remained his first love, but his fateful run-in with an insolent British soldier had tied his fortunes to the North West Company (NWC), a Montreal-based fur trading concern that operated from 1779 to 1821 and “left behind a legacy of alcoholism, syphilis, [and] Mixed Blood babies.”

  From its inception, the NWC was the chief rival and existential bane of the Hudson’s Bay Company. The HBC was bigger and had been in the game longer; the Company was granted its charter by King Charles II in 1670. The royal decree gave the firm monopoly over all land drained by the waters flowing into Hudson Bay, a region dubbed Rupert’s Land after the Company’s first governor. Prince Rupert was “a man of intense loyalties but few friends,” a description which proved equally applicable to the post’s later occupant, George Simpson.

  From 1783 to 1820, the North West Company repeatedly challenged the supremacy of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Although the Nor’Westers initially concentrated their efforts in the United States, the War of 1812 forced the company north of the border, where it clashed with the HBC. The rivalry intensified as the years wore on, leading to some rather shady business practices. Both the HBC and NWC used liquor and trade goods to curry favour with the indigenous peoples in an effort to secure the choicest furs. When booze and baubles weren’t enough, NWC traders began telling the aboriginals the HBC planned to exterminate them, and a few scoundrels even whispered that the Company’s clerks mixed their trading tobacco with poison.

  Despite the NWC’s questionable policies, Dr. McLoughlin enjoyed a cordial relationship with the First Nations at Kaministikwia. Indeed, he was “proud of having so many Indians employed and always held out to the missionaries that that was the way to civilize them, to teach them to work.” Those interactions had dire consequences, however, as European-derived diseases “scourged the poor Indians dreadfully.” Dr. McLoughlin soon realized the timing of outbreaks coincided with the arrival of the a
nnual supply ships from London. Although the prophylactics available were limited and often suspect, he saw to it “all the Indians that could be got at were vaccinated.”

  Dr. McLoughlin had witnessed first-hand the devastation wrought by the fur trade, and he wanted no part of it. He quietly put out feelers and was soon being courted by banking and other less offensive industries. On October 5, 1818, he ended a letter to Simon Fraser with a cryptic postscript: “Between you and me I have an offer to enter into Business in the civilized world — if I do not accept the proposal — it will be from want of capital. This is between us — no one else must know it.” McLoughlin and Fraser held true to their oath of secrecy, for no record survives as to the source of the offer. Given that Dr. McLoughlin remained in the employ of the North West Company, it is safe to assume he never acquired the necessary capital to fund his return to civilization.