The Bastard of Fort Stikine Read online

  As Dr. McLoughlin struggled to secure a brighter future, his employer was hitting hard times. The competition for control over the North American fur grounds had driven both the HBC and the NWC to the brink of bankruptcy. Although the HBC was larger and better funded, the NWC had two significant advantages: “sheer manpower,” and the “ability to make decisions on the spot,” rather than waiting for dictates from London. To save both organizations from fiscal destruction, a merger was proposed, and in 1821 both companies sent representatives to London to negotiate the terms. McLoughlin (then an NWC wintering partner at Fort William) agreed to serve as his company’s delegate at the conference. He quickly learned he was to be a decorative placeholder; he contributed nothing to the final negotiations, and the meeting ended with the Hudson’s Bay Company in full control of the Canadian fur trade. Disgusted, McLoughlin elected to spend the winter with his brother David in France. The siblings’ bond was “one of real affection,” the only truly equitable relationship in McLoughlin’s life, and he used the time to re-evaluate his priorities.

  McLoughlin Sr. returned to Canada in January 1822, uncertain what the future held. When the Company restructured post-amalgamation, it allocated forty percent of the profits to its field traders, namely former HBC field officers and NWC wintering partners. McLoughlin was made an HBC chief factor, transforming him overnight from a salaried employee into a wealthy shareholder, and his first assignment under the new umbrella corporation was at Lac La Pluie.

  The posting did not last long. The region was quickly trapped clean and, as the Company expanded westward, Dr. McLoughlin was transferred to Fort George on November 8, 1824. The change of scenery was not to the doctor’s liking. The local tribes were extremely hostile to Company operatives encroaching on their lands, and he was certain “the country was not worth a war.”

  Despite the hardships, Dr. McLoughlin ruled over Fort George “with unorthodox methods and astounding results.” His love of innovation and refusal to toe the party line won him admirers and critics alike, and many of his underlings were convinced the doctor believed “too firmly in his own incorruptibility.” Governor Simpson argued both sides when he described McLoughlin Sr. as “very Zealous in the discharge of his public duties and a man of strict honour and integrity but a great stickler for rights and privileges [who] sets himself up for a righter of Wrongs.” Daughter Eloisa was equally conflicted: “I always heard that my Father had a good head. He was quick in trading with the Indians and could get on well with them.” Of course, it was to his benefit that his aboriginal colleagues “were afraid of him.…He was very large and strong, a straight and fine looking man and they were afraid of him.”

  The Governor continued to have strong reservations, viewing McLoughlin as “a very bustling active man who can go through a great deal of business but is wanting in system and regularity, and has not the talent of managing the few associates & clerks under his authority.” Simpson also vacillated on the man’s character, as he found Dr. McLoughlin to be “a disagreeable man to do business with, as it is impossible to go with him in all things and a difference of opinion almost amounts to a declaration of hostilities, yet a good hearted man and a pleasant companion.”

  Meanwhile, the seasons came and went as Dr. McLoughlin completed work on an outpost of his own design, later christened Fort Vancouver. It was a formidable presence, “an island of luxury in the wilderness,” dominating the north bank of the Columbia River. When she first laid eyes on the fort’s towering palisades, missionary Narcissa Whitman dubbed it “the New York of the Pacific.”

  Dr. McLoughlin governed his creation with a mirthless, inflexible fist: “There was no society. The clerks just came in when the bell rung. After that they went right away to their business. And so with the men in the field. The bell was rung at twelve for dinner and at one o’clock for work; and they all kept regular hours, like clock-work.” According to fort inhabitant George Roberts, Dr. McLoughlin did what the politicians in London could not: “One thing occurs to me that has been little noticed & that was the good order & discipline that was maintained by the Company. No organized govt could have maintained better order.”

  Despite his legendary inflexibility, McLoughlin’s views on business were surprisingly progressive. HBC policy held “that this country should not be inhabited by an agricultural population; they wished to keep it for hunting & trapping purposes. They were influenced purely by a mercantile spirit.” Despite his employer’s singular focus on the bottom line, the doctor knew beaver skins were a finite resource, and he kept one eye on the horizon. He set about making the fort self-sufficient, ordering the construction of grist and lumber mills, the large-scale cultivation of all arable lands, and the tending of livestock. Dr. McLoughlin also encouraged the clerks to fish and harvest the region’s plentiful natural resources, and the result was the Company’s only truly autonomous outpost, offering comforts and amenities rarely found in such remote locations.

  It was not all work at Fort Vancouver. A portion of every man’s salary was paid in liquor, although the doctor never drank anything stronger than wine. McLoughlin’s temperance was born of a teetotal mother and a religious indoctrination that left no room for sinning and little tolerance for sinners.

  Dr. McLoughlin was “a convert to Catholicism, with all the zeal that this involved,” and at his bidding “they kept Sundays” at Fort Vancouver. No trade was permitted on the Sabbath; instead, the chief factor and his clerks read the Bible. His campaign of forced spiritual conversion also included the aboriginal tribes of the Columbia region. McLoughlin was a brilliant man of two minds. He was, first and foremost, “a British subject with British prejudices & British Characteristics,” predisposed to believe in the absolute superiority of the English and, by extension, the inferiority of those they sought to colonize. But McLoughlin was also “a gentleman of large heart & catholic spirit, benevolent in his feeling.” He fervently believed the road to civilization ran straight through the Catholic Church, and he was supported in his thinking by a much higher power.

  The HBC’s charter mandates included a call to bring Christianity to the country’s aboriginal masses, yet many perceived the Company’s efforts in this regard to be a resounding failure. One trader claimed the natives were “neither more enlightened, nor more civilized, by our endeavours than if we had never appeared among them.” Even First Nation members employed by the HBC remained “as ignorant of Christianity as the rudest savages who have never seen the face of a white man.”

  Dr. McLoughlin used the lure of trade to impose his own moral code on everyone within the sound of his voice. He broke with HBC custom and allowed aboriginal hunters to enter Fort Vancouver. Eloisa believed the aboriginals welcomed her father’s brand of frontier justice: “The Indians came and asked what is right to be done, and my father told them what was right and what was not right — whether they should kill such a man for doing so and so. My father said ‘No, you must not do it, it is wrong’ and it would all stop.”

  In a land without police or courts, the Hudson’s Bay Company appointed itself as judge, jury, and (if need be) executioner in all criminal matters relating to trade or employees. The genesis of such notions was legitimate — in the rural outposts, there were no social structures in place to administer justice — but the HBC leadership took this lack of regulation to lengths that were often extreme and sometimes downright illegal. In clashes between the First Nations and traders, “the HBC settled such incidents by the adoption of a ‘blood for blood’ policy against the immediate wrongdoers.” Things grew far more ruthless when events involved traders alone, for the Company viewed such transgressions “as matters of corporate discipline,” to be handled entirely in-house. That unwavering sense of judicial entitlement sprang from the head of George Simpson and trickled down to senior management, including the chief factor for Columbia District. West of the Rockies, Dr. McLoughlin’s word was gospel and his rule was absolute.

  Dr. McLoughlin kept the peace through
a volatile mix of civility, sobriety, incarceration, despotism, and unflinching brutality. Many of the men under his command marvelled at the results: “It is strange that without police or military the good order we had could be maintained. It is perhaps owing partly to the diverse people…& partly to there being no liquor & partly to the good management of the Company’s officers. They never used bad or ribald language.”

  Dr. McLoughlin also refused to hear dissenting views from his subordinates. “You see the Co.’s chiefs in my mind were not at all influenced by any passions or prejudices entertained by men less capable than themselves,” one underling later recalled, “they were very independent in that way, no government from below.”

  John McLoughlin Sr.’s disregard for his subordinates came back to haunt him when he was posted in the Red River valley in 1824. One day, an aboriginal boy approached him with a disturbing story. He said some white men from the fort had tried to convince him to kill McLoughlin with his own gun. The doctor was outraged and summoned the men immediately. He dragged the boy before the company and demanded he repeat his accusation. The terrified youngster stammered out his account, but the allegation met with vehement denials. The boy insisted the men were lying, but again they denied it. At a stalemate, McLoughlin told the boy to go home. Eloisa McLoughlin, an eyewitness to the strange event, picked up the tale: “My father’s method in such cases was to iron the men and keep them in a private room and separate them. The men finally admitted that they said so, but they said they were joking with the boy.” McLoughlin was not amused. The treacherous conspirators were shackled — “the punishment was always putting them in irons” — and thrown in a cell indefinitely, without due process or appeal. Dr. John was the first McLoughlin to have his life threatened by his own men, but he would not be the last.

  §

  Although he ruled Fort Vancouver with impunity, Dr. McLoughlin had been on the wrong side of the law. His dust-up with the British soldier was a youthful indiscretion, but in 1816 the fur industry’s brand of justice collided head-on with the laws of the land, and McLoughlin found himself accused of a heinous crime: the murders of twenty-one men during the “Seven Oaks Massacre,” the horrifying climax of an ongoing campaign to settle the Red River valley.

  The campaign was waged by Thomas Douglas, the fifth Earl of Selkirk. In 1810, Selkirk received a land grant of 116,000 square miles of the Red River valley from the Hudson’s Bay Company, in which he was a major shareholder. The North West Company counted the valley among its holdings, and the slight was not soon forgotten.

  Selkirk paid only one visit to Red River, and he did not stay long. Upon his return to the British Isles, he began recruiting settlers from across Scotland with exorbitant promises of prosperity and transported them to Red River. They arrived in 1812 woefully ill-equipped, wielding hoes and spades against the granite-like soil of the prairies. During their first year in-country, the settlers endured extreme hardships: predators feasted on their livestock, floods washed away seedlings, and punishing weather and plagues of insects destroyed what few crops survived.

  When the end came for the settlement, it came from within. Miles Macdonell, the newly appointed governor of Selkirk’s lands, issued two fatal proclamations. The first prohibited the export of pemmican, a noisome blend of dried meat, berries, and fat that was a mainstay of Metis voyageurs. In his second declaration, Macdonell ordered the evacuation of all North West Company posts in the area. Both pronouncements caused resentment among the company’s traders, and they retaliated by marshalling the aboriginal and Metis people — who also laid prior claim to the land settled by Selkirk’s pioneers — to run out the homesteaders.

  So began the Pemmican War. The militia organized under the leadership of Cuthbert Grant, and they arrested Macdonell, charging him with illegally seizing their foodstuffs. He was dispatched to Montreal to stand trial, leaving Selkirk’s followers without a leader. Terrified and unprotected, many fled for their lives, and by the fall of 1815 only thirteen of the original settler families remained in Red River.

  A new governor was hastily appointed. Robert Semple was a steely-eyed, hawk-nosed Loyalist who had been a popular travel writer in his native England before making his way west with the second wave of Scottish emigrants. Semple, blessed with an “overburden of self-importance,” gathered up the last few survivors and his fresh recruits and returned to Red River in hopes of salvaging the harvest. Cursed with equal parts naivety and arrogance, Semple refused to learn from the mistakes of his predecessor. In June he ordered the destruction of the NWC outpost Fort Gibraltar, which was burned to the ground as its occupants looked on in disgust. The sacking of Gibraltar became the rallying cry for Grant and his ragtag band of Metis, who began targeting the region’s settlers, as well as the HBC’s five newly established but poorly fortified outposts.

  Hubris proved the undoing of Robert Semple. He believed his pen to be mightier than any sword, and he drafted “a stern proclamation forbidding Metis” from acts of violence. Governor Semple sent word to Cuthbert Grant demanding a meeting so he might recite his edict in person. Grant agreed, and Semple ordered two dozen men to accompany him to the rendezvous.

  Semple and his men rode to an area known as Seven Oaks, delivering themselves into a perfectly orchestrated ambush. Semple’s cohort was instantly surrounded, and they were told to lay down their weapons or be shot. Grant kept his own gun trained on Semple, who foolishly entered into a war of words with his enemies. One Metis, Francois Firmin Boucher, called Semple a “damned rascal” for burning Gibraltar. Semple took offence and grabbed for Boucher’s gun, at which point Cuthbert Grant shot Semple in the thigh, igniting the massacre.

  The battle lasted fifteen minutes. When the smoke cleared, Semple and twenty of his men lay dead alongside the lone Metis who fell that day, but an even greater atrocity was yet to come. There, in the shade of the seven oaks, “the dead were stripped and dismembered in an orgy of mutilation.”

  Word of the slaughter soon reached Lord Selkirk, who was marching toward Red River, backed by his personal army. Selkirk pointed his cannons at the NWC stronghold of Fort William, and after a brief, lopsided battle he planted his flag and claimed his spoils. He also ordered the arrest of the fort’s senior officers.

  Among those charged with treason was William McGillivray, who refused to go quietly. He demanded a meeting with the earl, who had taken to strutting about the fort “like a kilted messiah.” McGillivray asked two other NWC officers — Dr. John McLoughlin and Kenneth McKenzie — to accompany him to the meeting, but it did not end well. McGillivray called Selkirk a “piddling lord,” and a foot-stamping Selkirk had the men arrested. The earl then decided anyone representing the NWC was guilty of murdering twenty-one of his men. The charges laid against Dr. McLoughlin included “receiving, relieving, comforting or assisting the felons to escape,” as well as the capital offence of accessory to murder.

  Dr. McLoughlin and his fellow Nor’Westers waited for their day in court in the outpost’s mess hall, mere feet from the quarters he shared with his wife and John Jr. The earl tried repeatedly to extract confessions from his hostages but they refused to yield, even burning incriminating documents in the kitchen stove. Selkirk then ordered them to be sent to Upper Canada to face trial.

  Selkirk had legal problems of his own, including countercharges stemming from his unlawful occupation of Fort William. He was also riddled with tuberculosis and had little fight left, having exhausted his fortune to sustain the settlement and his army. The earl was detained by NWC traders and soon found himself headed for Upper Canada to await justice beside his former prisoners.

  It was a fateful voyage to the courthouse. Dr. McLoughlin’s canoe tipped in rough seas near Sault Ste. Marie, and nine of the twenty-nine passengers onboard were drowned. McLoughlin Sr. “was taken lifeless to the shore, and it was long before he was restored.” From that day on, he was plagued by “a haunting fear of death.”

  Dr. McLoughlin eventually landed in Upper C
anada, only to spend months awaiting his turn to answer the indictment against him. McLoughlin had never set foot in Seven Oaks, yet he still faced the death penalty if convicted. The trial was a showcase for the chronic ineptitude of the legal system, lasting less than two days. McLoughlin and his co-defendants never testified, the jury deliberated a mere forty-five minutes, and on October 31, 1818, he was discharged as “not guilty.” Dr. McLoughlin, scarred by his near drowning, nervously took his place in the canoe and paddled home to Fort William, arriving just in time for John Jr.’s seventh birthday.

  The Seven Oaks debacle instilled a healthy respect for the rule of law in Dr. McLoughlin, but when the NWC joined the HBC, he immediately returned to the fur trade model of autonomous justice. In 1828, Clallam hunters in Puget Sound killed a young clerk named Alexander McKenzie. The senseless violence enraged Dr. McLoughlin, and he sent his men on a series of retaliatory raids. His henchmen killed twenty-three members of the local tribe before burning two of their camps to ashes, all with McLoughlin’s blessing. His message was clear: attack the Hudson’s Bay Company at your peril. The family of McKenzie’s killers took the warning to heart, and those responsible were executed by their own kin in a shocking effort to “placate the Company’s death squads.” In an eerie corollary to the Seven Oaks massacre, Dr. McLoughlin had not pulled the trigger, but his hands bore blood all the same.

  The HBC’s motto — Pro Pelle Cutem — translates to “a skin for a skin.” The slogan was meant to reflect their trading philosophy, but Dr. McLoughlin had recast it as the basis for a system of jurisprudence, in which the senseless deaths of twenty-three people was fair compensation for the murder of one clerk.

  John McLoughlin Sr. had been accused of a massacre he did not commit and saddled with the weight of a bloodbath executed on his command. It was not the life of peace and healing he had planned for himself, nor was it a life he wanted for his son.