Selkirk’s pick for governor of the Red River colony was Miles Macdonell, a native of Inverness, Scotland, and former captain in the Royal Canadian volunteers. He was a man of great courage but no diplomatic skill whatsoever. Everything he did seemed calculated to antagonize the Nor’ Westers rather than conciliate them. His first official act was to invite the resident Indians, Métis, and Nor’ Westers to a “seizin’ of the land” ceremony. Standing on the empty, windswept prairie under a flapping banner, he shouted that the land would be known henceforth as “Assiniboia.” He was their governor, and the Nor’ Westers were there by his sufferance. On January 8, 1814, he issued his notorious “Pemmican Proclamation.” As it was by then the dead of winter, he did not attempt to assemble the people again, but he had copies of his proclamation nailed to the gates of the North West Company posts in the area.7
In two long paragraphs the document described the territorial boundaries of Assiniboia and restricted exports of pemmican from the domain for the next year. The ostensible purpose of the control of exports was to provide food security for the growing population of settlers until they could establish farms and raise their own food. The Nor’ Westers saw a more hostile intent. Calling it an embargo, they saw an effort to interdict the great quantities of pemmican the North West Company needed to fuel its voyageur-canoe-based transportation system. The Nor’ Westers believed the Red River colony was simply a front for Selkirk’s larger scheme, which was to put a stranglehold on the North West Company and take over its vast hinterland for the Hudson’s Bay Company. The resident Métis, for their part, saw the Pemmican Proclamation as an attack on them. They considered the Red River valley to be their homeland and the provisioning trade with the North West Company to be the basis of their economy. A disruption of their pemmican exports would soon lead to their expulsion from the area.8
McLoughlin followed these developments from afar, being informed by Nor’ Westers who passed through the Rainy Lake district in the early months of 1814. The Nor’ Westers mostly resolved to ignore the order even as evidence mounted that Macdonell was arming and training the colonists to seize supplies of pemmican as necessary to protect the colony. Tensions in the Red River valley rose as spring came and the season for producing and distributing pemmican neared. With spring breakup, the Métis began rafting loads of buffalo meat down the Assiniboine River. In May, Captain Macdonell sent a force of fifty men with two field pieces to blockade the river. The Métis circumvented the blockade by transferring their cargoes onto carts and taking a road instead. A few days later, Macdonell dispatched his sheriff, John Spencer, with a warrant to seize pemmican stores held in North West Company posts before they could be shipped north. Spencer and his men broke into the trading post on the Souris River opposite the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Brandon House, where they confiscated 500 bags of pemmican, 96 kegs of grease, and 9 bales of dried meat. It was the opening action in what came to be known as the Pemmican War.9
In June 1814, five North West partners in or near the Red River valley met with Captain Macdonell and made a truce. The parties agreed to a temporary division of the Red River country’s pemmican production: Macdonell would allow a certain quantity to be shipped out to feed the North West Company’s northern posts, and the North West Company would guarantee that another quantity remained in the valley to feed the colony. Meanwhile, the two sides would await a decision by the colonial government for Upper Canada as to the legitimacy of Macdonell’s governing authority.10
When the North West Company held its rendezvous at Fort William later that summer, William McGillivray blasted the agreement and denounced the five men as cowards for conceding anything to Macdonell after the violent actions he had taken against them. He called on the rest of the partners to censure the five. He insisted that the winterers must buck up and defend the company’s rights and property at all costs. McLoughlin was not directly involved in either the truce or the recriminations that followed, but he was now close enough to the wintering partners to observe that they all “had their Belly full.”11
The partners suspended their debate over how to retaliate against the Hudson’s Bay Company to resolve another urgent item of business: bringing in new partners. Five clerks, including McLoughlin, were due a promotion. McLoughlin had long anticipated the day he would be promoted to partner. In becoming a partner, he would give up his annual salary of £200 in exchange for one share of profits plus living expenses. In former times that would have been a big raise in pay, but now the company’s future was so uncertain it was a rather dubious proposition. The company was girding for war with its major rival. The partners were divided, with McGillivray calling for a fight to the finish and many of the winterers advocating restraint. But McGillivray and the other Montreal agents held a controlling number of shares. The two dozen wintering partners held just one or two shares apiece, amounting to about one-third of the total. Even if the winterers could all speak as one, they still held only a minority position in the company. McLoughlin well knew that McGillivray was marshalling the wintering partners to take up arms against the Hudson’s Bay men if their struggle should come to that. It made him sick, yet he had so long set his sights on a company share he could not turn it down now. He took the offer of a single share, and afterwards transferred his entire account on the North West Company’s books to a new account with McTavish, McGillivrays and Company. His accumulated savings from his clerk’s salary came to 7,318 livres and 12 sous, or just over £600.12
As soon as McLoughlin and the other four clerks had committed to taking shares, the partners returned to the subject of the Red River colony. The Montreal agents insisted that Selkirk’s colony must be crushed. William McGillivray’s brother Simon, representing the firm of McTavish, McGillivrays and Company in London, had been urging them to oppose Selkirk’s scheme for over two years now. “It will require some time, and I fear cause much expense to us,” he had warned in 1812, “yet he must be driven to abandon it, for his success would strike at the very existence of our Trade.”13 The pemmican embargo gave proof of this. The Montreal agents insisted that if Selkirk were allowed to succeed in his real object of depriving them of provisions, “it would result in the total stoppage of the North West Company trade.”14
There were two parts to the North West Company’s plan for a counteroffensive. The first part would entail the removal of Miles Macdonell, leader of the Red River colony. The idea was to capture him, put him in chains, and haul him down to Lower Canada to stand trial on charges of illegal seizure of property. Toward that end, McGillivray presented a couple of the men with commissions for justice of the peace under the Canada Jurisdiction Act, which empowered them to make arrests in the Indian Territories and bring criminals to court in Upper or Lower Canada. One of them, Archibald McLeod, made out a warrant for the governor’s arrest and gave it to another partner, Alexander Macdonell, who was tasked with bringing him in. By a strange twist, Alexander Macdonell was a cousin of the governor, Miles Macdonell. Though he and his cousin had already clashed several times and had no fondness for each other, the fact that he was given the task of arresting his own kinsman appears to have been a calculated move designed to test his loyalty to the North West. Like McLoughlin, he had just been promoted to partner. Like his blood relative the governor, Alexander Macdonell was endowed with more courage than cunning. As he was departing the rendezvous, he blustered to another partner: “One thing certain, that we will do our best to defend what we consider our rights in the interior. Something serious will undoubtedly take place. Nothing but the complete downfall of the colony will satisfy some by fair or foul means.”15
Alexander Macdonell’s “foul means” alluded to the second part of the North West Company’s counteroffensive. One way or another, the Red River colonists must be persuaded to leave. Alexander Macdonell would use his influence with the Métis to incite violence against the colony. Once the settlers were sufficiently terror stricken, the Nor’ Westers would offer them protection from the
Métis within Fort Gibraltar’s palisaded walls. Then, when the settlers were utterly demoralized, they would offer them free passage in the North West Company’s canoes down to Lower Canada. In this way the Nor’ Westers hoped to effect the complete abandonment of the colony while giving the outside world the impression that they had rescued the colonists from a hostile native uprising.
But the chicanery did not end there. Another wintering partner, Duncan Cameron, was assigned to the Red River as well. While Alexander Macdonell incited the Métis against the colonists, Cameron would present the colonists an opportunity to join a militia. With the War of 1812 still on, William McGillivray came to the 1814 rendezvous supplied with a handful of officer’s commissions for raising a frontier militia, a unit known as the Corps of Canadian Voyageurs. He assigned one of these commissions to Cameron, giving him the title “Captain, Voyageurs Corps, Commanding Officer, Red River.” Dressed up in his red officer’s coat with epaulettes, he was to pose as a recruiting officer for the militia. It was a bit of flimflam aimed at undermining the settlers’ allegiance to the governor.16 All in all the North West Company’s plan for destroying the Red River colony was a tawdry mix of legal procedure, propaganda, terror, and subterfuge.
All the bombast and plotting at the North West Company’s summer rendezvous in 1814 filled McLoughlin with dread. In a letter to his family in Quebec, he wrote that he felt “loansome, and quite low spirited.” Now more than ever he regretted having ever gotten himself into the business. He had finally realized his ambition of making partner just when the company was in crisis, and it no doubt gave him a bad case of buyer’s remorse over investing so much in a company share. But there was more. He felt moral indignation, and he wished he could be disassociated from the whole enterprise. “I Still call Canada my home and reckon myself only as a Bird of Passage in this,” he wrote to his relatives back home.17
The following winter, as agents Alexander Macdonell and Duncan Cameron went to work harassing and haranguing the Red River colonists, many of them were frightened into deserting the colony and joining either the North West Company or the Métis. With the arrival of spring, the threats of violence intensified. Those colonists who were still loyal to the Hudson’s Bay Company sought refuge inside Fort Douglas. When Captain Miles Macdonell returned to Red River from a trip to Hudson’s Bay in June, he found the huts and fields abandoned and the few remaining settlers huddled within the stockade. Now the ground was prepared for the North West Company’s main counteroffensive, taking the fort and capturing the governor.
Later that month, Duncan Cameron led a combined force of Nor’ Westers and Métis to Fort Douglas and showed the baymen his arrest warrant. When Miles Macdonell refused to open the gates, Cameron laid siege to the fort. After a ten-day standoff, the governor surrendered. The Nor’ Westers made him a prisoner together with his sheriff, John Spencer. With the governor in his custody, Cameron then offered the few remaining settlers a free passage down to Montreal. Some of them accepted and went with the two prisoners to Fort William. Others fled in the Hudson’s Bay Company’s york boats, descending the Red River to Lake Winnipeg, where they took refuge at another of the Hudson’s Bay Company forts.
As soon as they were gone, the Métis pillaged the deserted settlement, tore down fences, trampled crops, and set fire to buildings. So ended the opening rounds of the Pemmican War. They were a prelude to greater violence ahead.18
McLoughlin passed the winter of 1814–15 at Rainy Lake, somewhat removed from events on the Red River. Thankfully, he had other preoccupations. That year, Marguerite gave birth to Eliza, their second child together. Then, over the winter, he took on an unusual medical patient: a white man who had grown up among the Ojibwas and who called himself Shaw-shaw-wa ne-ba-se, the man he would soon come to know as “the American,” or John Tanner.
McLoughlin’s relationship with Tanner began after some Indians from Lake of the Woods informed him that one of their people had broken several ribs in a fall from a tree. McLoughlin directed his clerk, John Warren Dease, to go to the Indians’ village and examine the man’s injuries. His instructions to Dease were that if he found the injured man able to walk then he was to take him to the nearby outpost at White Fish Lake to convalesce. Dease did as he was told, and McLoughlin corresponded with him through the winter about the patient’s up and down condition. When Dease appeared in the spring with his winter returns, he reported that the man’s ribs had healed.
But a few days later Tanner showed up at McLoughlin’s door. With him were two little girls, barely big enough to walk. In an instant, the doctor could see that Tanner was a very sick man, and he made him come inside. He soon learned that rather than returning to his people, the patient had attempted to follow Dease to the North West Company’s house at Rainy Lake. His canoe had sunk while ascending a set of rapids in the Rainy River. He was lucky to get his two little daughters safely to shore, but then he had had to walk for two days with the girls on his back to reach the house. The exhausting ordeal had made him sick. Clearly his ribs were mended, but his strength was not yet restored. McLoughlin insisted that Tanner stay with him for as long as necessary to regain his health.19
McLoughlin gave Tanner and his two daughters a room in the house. The wee girls, who barely came up to the doctor’s knees, mostly stayed by their father’s side while he lay on the sickbed. As the condition of his patient improved and he and Tanner talked a little, McLoughlin asked him how he had come to live with the Indians. It was then that he learned how close Tanner had become with his Ottawa mother. When McLoughlin broached the subject of whether Tanner might someday return to his white folk, Tanner replied that he would not consider it as long as the old woman lived. When he asked Tanner about his wife, Tanner did not offer much. Only that the children still had a mother and that she lived with the Lake of the Woods Indians.20
The two men did not become friends, exactly, but they acquired a certain degree of familiarity and mutual respect.
Then one day, Tanner abruptly left with his children. Lonely and dissatisfied, was all he said. Going back to Lake of the Woods to be with my wife.21
18
The Battle of Seven Oaks
Despite the Nor’ Westers’ success in dispersing the Red River colony in June of 1815, they were hardly in a mood to celebrate victory when they gathered at Fort William in July. Largely because of the fighting, the Nor’ Westers costs were up and their profits down. Relations between the wintering partners and the Montreal agents had never been so frayed. William McGillivray, sensing trouble, urged his younger brother Simon to come all the way from London to attend that year’s rendezvous. Simon’s job would be to engage with the wintering partners a few at a time and help his older brother collar the men one by one. In private dialogue with each wintering partner, William hoped to win back their allegiance.
Simon went at his brother’s bidding and recorded his impressions in a private diary. “A good deal of conversation ensued about the gloomy times,” he wrote one night. The partners talked of “the opposition, the consequences of dissention among ourselves, the information said to have been given to Lord Selkirk by proprietors, the presumption that some of them entertain a hostile feeling towards the Concern, which however all disavowed.” He suspected, as did his brother, that there might be traitors among the wintering partners—men who secretly believed they would be better off if the Hudson’s Bay Company prevailed in this struggle. Others were simply demoralized. “There seems a general wish to retire from the Country, some from getting old & tired of it, others from a dread of opposition.”1
That month the Nor’ Westers had two prisoners at Fort William: the deposed governor Miles Macdonell and his erstwhile sheriff, John Spencer. When Simon McGillivray went to interrogate the latter prisoner in his room on the morning of July 16, he asked McLoughlin to accompany him. As the interrogation concluded, McGillivray informed Spencer that it was the Nor’ Westers’ intention to prosecute either him or the ex-governor to show the Hu
dson’s Bay Company that it could not seize the North West’s property and get away with it. Spencer declared himself ready to cooperate with the prosecution to obtain his own freedom. He revealed to them a warrant and written orders, signed by Miles Macdonell on June 7, 1814. McGillivray took the two documents from him for evidence in court.2 McLoughlin did not record his thoughts on this meeting, so his role in Spencer’s “conversion” can only be conjectured. Perhaps Simon McGillivray expected that McLoughlin’s giant physique would intimidate the prisoner. Or perhaps the younger McGillivray brother, in his careful surveillance of all the wintering partners, detected a note of dissension in McLoughlin, and deliberately involved him in the unsavory business of interrogating a prisoner to test his loyalty and resolve. If so, it was not the last time McLoughlin found himself under the McGillivrays’ suspicion.
McLoughlin had resented William McGillivray since the days he was an apprentice clerk, but he was hardly alone in his resentment. Many wintering partners were weary of their leader’s chidings, his misplaced sense of entitlement in gambling with their fortunes, his imperiousness. The McGillivray brothers were not insensitive to this. A few days into the rendezvous, Simon realized that much of the wintering partners’ restiveness sprang from the recent poor returns from the Athabaska Department, where another member of the McGillivray family, John, was the partner in charge. Although John McGillivray was only a cousin to the brothers William and Simon, the wintering partners all knew that he owed his position to family connections. The McGillivray brothers concluded that the best way to placate the wintering partners was to remove their kinsman from his post.
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