RAINY LAKE HOUSE
RAINY LAKE HOUSE
Twilight of Empire on the Northern Frontier
Theodore Catton
© 2017 Theodore Catton
All rights reserved. Published 2017
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
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Johns Hopkins University Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Catton, Theodore, author.
Title: Rainy Lake House : Twilight of Empire on the Northern Frontier / Theodore Catton.
Description: Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016046989| ISBN 9781421422923 (hardcover : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781421422930 (electronic) | ISBN 1421422921 (hardcover : acid-free paper) | ISBN 142142293X (electronic)
Subjects: LCSH: Tanner, John, 1780?–1847. | McLoughlin, John, 1784–1857. | Long, Stephen H. (Stephen Harriman), 1784–1864. | Frontier and pioneer life—Rainy River Region (Minn. and Ont.) | Pioneers—Family relationships—Rainy River Region (Minn. and Ont.)—History—19th century. | Missing children—Rainy River Region (Minn. and Ont.)—History—19th century. | Indians of North America—Rainy River Region (Minn. and Ont.)—History—19th century. | Fur trade—Rainy River Region (Minn. and Ont.)—History—19th century. | Hudson’s Bay Company—History—19th century. | Rainy River Region (Minn. and Ont.)—Ethnic relations—History—19th century.
Classification: LCC F612.R18 C37 2017 | DDC 977.6/79—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016046989
A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
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To the memory of
ROBERT M. BASSETT,
1940–2016
CONTENTS
Maps
Timeline
INTRODUCTION: Rainy Lake House, 1823
PART ONE: LEAVE-TAKINGS
1. The Explorer
2. The Hunter
3. The Trader
PART TWO: LONG
4. “The English Make Them More Presents”
5. Encounters with the Sioux
6. Race and History
7. To Civilize the Osages
PART THREE: TANNER
8. Westward Migration
9. Six Beaver Skins for a Quart of Mixed Rum
10. The Test of Winter
11. Red Sky of the Morning
12. Warrior
PART FOUR: MCLOUGHLIN
13. Fort William
14. Marriage à la façon du pays
15. Bad Birds
16. The Restive Partnership
17. The Pemmican War
18. The Battle of Seven Oaks
19. The Surrender of Fort William
20. Lord Selkirk’s Prisoner
21. Time of Reckoning
22. London
PART FIVE: LONG
23. The Wonder of the Steamboat
24. A Christian Marriage
25. Up the Missouri
26. To the Rocky Mountains
27. Mapmaker
28. The Northern Expedition
PART SIX: TANNER
29. The Coming of the Prophet
30. A Loathsome Man
31. Sorcery and Sickness
32. Taking Fort Douglas
33. Rough Justice
34. In Search of Kin
35. Between Two Worlds
PART SEVEN: MCLOUGHLIN
36. Chief Factor
37. Providence
38. Opposing the Americans
PART EIGHT: COLLISION
39. Working for Wages
40. Children of the Fur Trade
41. The Ambush
42. The Pardon
43. “We Met with an American”
44. The Onus of Revenge
45. Journeys Home
EPILOGUE: Mackinac, 1824—and After
POSTSCRIPT: John Tanner as a Source
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
TIMELINE
1790
John Tanner is taken captive by a Shawnee-Ottawa war party.
1794–95
Tanner accompanies his Ottawa family on its migration to the Red River.
1803
Louisiana Purchase.
John McLoughlin joins the North West Company.
1804–6
Lewis and Clark expedition.
Tanner marries Red Sky of the Morning.
Stephen H. Long enters Dartmouth College.
1806–8
The Shawnee Prophet Tenskwatawa sends messengers to the Northwest.
1809
Tanner parts with Red Sky of the Morning and marries Therezia.
1811
Lord Selkirk launches the Red River colony.
McLoughlin marries Marguerite McKay.
Tanner’s troubles with the medicine man Ais-kaw-ba-wis commence.
1812–14
The United States and Britain are at war.
1814
Pemmican Proclamation.
McLoughlin becomes a partner in the North West Company.
1815
North West Company routs the Red River colony in the Pemmican War.
1816
Battle of Seven Oaks (June).
North West Company surrenders Fort William to Selkirk (August).
Tanner guides Selkirk’s men from Rainy Lake to Red River (December).
Long explores the Illinois country.
1817
Long visits the Sioux (summer) and the Osage (fall).
1818
Tanner journeys to Kentucky and reunites with his white family.
McLoughlin is tried on charges of conspiracy in the Seven Oaks affair.
1819
Long marries Martha Hodgkis, leads expedition to the Rocky Mountains.
Tanner returns to his Ottawa-Ojibwa family.
1820
Long completes expedition to the Rocky Mountains.
Tanner journeys to Kentucky again, this time with Therezia and children.
McLoughlin goes to London to bargain with the Hudson’s Bay Company.
1821
Union of the Hudson’s Bay and North West companies (March).
1822
McLoughlin is appointed chief factor for the Rainy Lake district.
Tanner works for the American Fur Company post across the river.
1823
Tanner goes to Red River to claim daughters by first marriage (May–June).
Tanner is ambushed and shot, then found and taken to Rainy Lake (July).
Long, on the northern expedition, arrives at Rainy Lake (August 31).
RAINY LAKE HOUSE
INTRODUCTION
Rainy Lake House, 1823
Under a brooding late-summer sky, two men made their way up a path toward the tall wooden gate of a Hudson’s Bay Company trading post. One of the men walked with difficulty, clutching his right arm to his chest. We will call him John Tanner. To the fur traders he was known as the white Indian, for he had been taken captive by Indians as a child and had lived with them for nearly thirty years. British traders referred to him as the American, since he had been born in th
at territory and had made two journeys back in recent years. The Ojibwas knew him as Shaw-shaw-wa ne-ba-se, the Swallow, and more lately as Gichi-mookomaan, the white man. Now he hobbled slowly up the path to the trading post, for every jostle of his arm made him shiver with pain. Until that afternoon, he had lain in bed for more than a month, since the day of the shooting, when his arm had been shattered by a musket ball fired at close range.
Despite the wracking pain, Tanner’s mind was focused on recovering his two young daughters. He believed the men in the fort were holding them against their will—bullying them, threatening them, and probably worse. He had heard the men’s taunts and seen them leer. Once, a few weeks earlier, the trader in charge had trapped the two teenage girls inside the stockade and ordered them to sleep in the men’s quarters. But the girls had slipped through the gate and fled to the nearby farmstead of Old Roy, a retired company servant and friend, with whom they found safety. Old Roy had brought the girls back to their father, even though Tanner, in his lame condition, was hardly able to come to their defense if they once again fell into the Hudson’s Bay men’s clutches. And now he perceived that just that had happened.
Tanner stood at the fort’s gate and called out to his missing daughters. His companion rang the bell and bellowed for the men to let them in. Someone opened the tiny aperture in the picket wall next to the gate, a hole barely big enough for a man’s hand, and peered through it. Other men’s faces appeared through a narrow crack in the gate. Tanner fixed them with his cold, blue eyes and stated his business in Ojibwa while his companion translated. He wanted to search the servants’ quarters for the two girls. If they were not there, then someone inside must know where they could be found.
The handful of French Canadian employees who gathered behind the gate insisted they had not seen the girls. Speaking through the narrow opening, they refused to let the two in. Tanner began to shout at them in a mix of French and Ojibwa, and they shot back a barrage of insults. Tanner’s daughters had probably grown weary of tending his stinking wound, they jeered. Most likely they had deserted him and run away to their mother. C’est la vie! The girls were old enough to choose for themselves.
Nearby on that same late-summer evening, Major Stephen H. Long sat at his field desk in his tent making notes by the light of a candle. An officer in the US Topographical Engineers, he was exploring the northern prairies from the upper Mississippi to the forty-ninth parallel as well as the wooded borderlands west of Lake Superior. The northern expedition was an encore to his famous expedition to the Rocky Mountains in 1820. He and his men had arrived at Rainy Lake House on the Rainy River, on the boundary between US and British territory, today’s border between Minnesota and western Ontario.
In the waning light of the evening, two men appeared at the door of his tent: the expedition interpreter, Charles Brousse, and the American, John Tanner. It was the fourth time the wounded American had visited him that day. Only a short time ago, Long had finally agreed to take Tanner and his daughters to Mackinac in the expedition’s canoes. He thought, Now what could the matter be?
Tanner began speaking to him in broken English, but he was so agitated his words came tumbling out, incomprehensible. Brousse broke in to explain that Tanner’s daughters were missing—perhaps being abused by the men in the fort. The Hudson’s Bay men had not only refused Tanner entry into the fort, they had provoked him with vile insults. Tanner wanted the American commander to intervene.
Long was skeptical. The girls had probably run off when Tanner told them they would be going with the American expedition. Still, with all the depravity Long had seen in other fur traders’ establishments, he could not be too certain. In any case, he had made his decision: the expedition was going to help Tanner search for his missing daughters.
Long summoned the expedition’s surgeon, Dr. Thomas Say, and the four men started back up the path to the fort. Night had fallen, and with low clouds hiding the moon and stars they fumbled along the path through inky darkness. Admitted through the gate, they made their way across the muddy courtyard to the officer’s house, where a faint light from oil lamps shone dimly through moose-skin windowpanes—the only source of light in an ocean of darkness.
That night, the proprietor of Rainy Lake House, Dr. John McLoughlin, arrived home at a late hour, having pushed his twenty canoemen to paddle the last few miles of their journey after dark. As a chief factor in the great Hudson’s Bay Company, McLoughlin was in charge of the whole area of borderlands west of Lake Superior, tasked with opposing the petty traders who operated out of US territory. He was returning from his summer-long trip to Hudson Bay, where he had delivered twenty packs of furs, attended the Northern Department’s annual meeting, and secured more trade goods for the resupply of his post. Now, leaving the men to unload the cargo, he hastened up the path to see his wife and children after a separation of more than ten weeks.
Going through the gate and approaching the house, he heard raised voices within the officers’ quarters. He wondered, What in the devil is all the commotion about? He stooped through the door—at six feet, four inches, he was a head taller than most men in the fur trade—and burst in on a heated conference. The room fell silent. The tall, broad-shouldered doctor, with his stern visage and wild mane of hair, often had that effect on men.
McLoughlin did not need introductions. He recognized Major Long, having been informed that the famous US army explorer was in the neighborhood. He also recognized the man with the wounded arm, the one they called the American. Years ago he had doctored him through some broken ribs. A good, honest, intelligent fellow, he once jotted in the post’s journal. McLoughlin made a mental note such as that for every Indian who ever traded at Rainy Lake House. But his interest in this man ran a bit deeper than it did for most Indians. Might have made a fair interpreter had he been willing to serve the company. But he kept to himself and the Indians, devoted to the old Ottawa woman who raised him. A few years ago, McLoughlin knew, the old Ottawa woman had died and the American had gone in search of his white kinfolk in the United States. Before leaving the country, Tanner had paid him a visit. All of this McLoughlin had recalled earlier that summer, when word passed around that Tanner had been shot and was recovering from his wounds at Rainy Lake House.
Now he learned that Tanner’s daughters were missing—runaways, he was told by the fort’s summer caretaker. The Hudson’s Bay men stood accused by Tanner and the American officers of holding them captive in the men’s quarters. Nonsense, the doctor insisted, siding with his own people. The girls could be nowhere in the house; he gave the Americans his word on it. He would organize a search at daybreak. He would offer a reward to the local Indians for their safe return. Until then, everyone must get some rest.
Stephen H. Long, John Tanner, and Dr. John McLoughlin each made his own record of the events that occurred at Rainy Lake House on the late afternoon and evening of September 1, 1823. McLoughlin made an entry in the trading post’s journal, which was later preserved in the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives. Long and his men wrote in their expedition journals, and the expedition journalist, William H. Keating, later compiled all their notes and produced the official narrative of the expedition, which was published in 1824. Tanner, for his part, recalled the events from memory when he related the story of his life to an ethnographer, Edwin James, some five years later in 1828. Tanner’s autobiography was published in New York in 1830 under the title Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner. Long’s, Tanner’s, and McLoughlin’s written records of what happened basically corroborate one another. Moreover, the journal entries, which recorded the events right after they had occurred, support Tanner’s account pulled from memory. They help authenticate Tanner’s remarkable narrative as a true and unembellished testament of a life lived among Indians in an oral culture without writing.
Yet there are subtle variances in the three men’s accounts—differences not of fact but of perception. Each man had pressing questions on his mind to which the othe
rs were either indifferent or unaware. Long was perplexed by Tanner’s character as much as he was moved by Tanner’s circumstances. Long considered him to be an American citizen, or at least a former US citizen, yet in manner and speech he was more Indian than white. The onetime captive struck the American explorer as a tragic figure caught in a no-man’s-land between drastically different cultures. Half-civilized and half-savage, Long thought, a hopeless misfit. Long wanted to help him, but he felt at a loss how to save him.
Those concerns contrast with Tanner’s, who alone of the three men believed his daughters would be raped by the Hudson’s Bay men. Tanner saw, as the others apparently did not, the lustful, plotting looks that followed his young teenage girls wherever they moved around the fort.
McLoughlin, meanwhile, had the interests of the Hudson’s Bay Company in mind. As a doctor and a humanitarian, he was concerned about the welfare of the wounded American. Yet, his entry in the post journal reveals other concerns. Why had the Rainy Lake Indian called Little Clear Sky tried to kill Tanner earlier that summer? Would the attack put a damper on their trade in the coming winter? In the de facto law of the country, an Indian attack on a white man demanded blood for blood. Since the wounded American had been rescued by the Hudson’s Bay men, would the Rainy Lake Indians stay away from the Hudson’s Bay post, in fear of revenge? Would they go to the American trading posts instead?
Tanner, Long, and McLoughlin were not just witnesses to the events of 1823 but are sources on the wider world of the fur trade in the early nineteenth century. Their differences of perspective color many other mutual experiences beyond their encounter at Rainy Lake House. The three men all came together in the same place just once, but in their years of experience on the frontier before 1823, they saw many of the same things from different angles. All three were participants in the changing power dynamics between Europeans and Indians, Americans and British, Ojibwas and Sioux, and the rivalry of fur companies great and small. All three struggled with the meaning of race and culture in that place and time. Comparing their biographies side by side, and listening closely to their discordant voices, one finds a kind of frontier Rashomon tale.
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