Rainy Lake House

by Theodore Catton

  When his fever at last subsided, Tanner made another attempt to get help from the Indian agent. Using two sticks for walking canes, he hobbled the short distance back to Wolcott’s house and begged him for food for his starving children. Once more, Wolcott drove him away. This was the point at which Tanner nearly broke, crying like a woman—as he thought—because he could not contain his sorrow.7

  They were discovered by a French trapper and his Ojibwa wife, who agreed, for a fee, to carry the four of them and their canoe over the portage in their horse-drawn cart. But after this couple had conveyed them several miles beyond the end of the Chicago River, the trapper was suddenly seized with fever and diarrhea. He insisted on offloading his passengers and turning his cart around right there. Now they were marooned with their canoe midway across the portage, which, in that low-water year, was reckoned to be a distance of sixty miles.

  An old Potawatomi man came along on foot and offered to help. Tanner put his children and baggage back in the canoe, and the two men began towing it through the shallows, Tanner pulling at the bow and the older fellow pushing at the stern. This soon proved too slow and arduous to get them anywhere. When they rested, Tanner had to admit that they were well and truly stuck. But while they were sitting there, another Potawatomi man with two horses happened by. The older man, who was called the Smoker, spoke to the younger man in their Potawatomi tongue, bargaining on Tanner’s behalf. The younger man finally offered to transport the children and baggage on his horses in exchange for a blanket and a pair of leggings. He would go one way while the Smoker and Tanner went another with the empty canoe and they would meet where the stream once again became navigable for the fully laden canoe. Tanner was suspicious of his proposal, especially since the rest of the baggage that he would entrust to the man had value. Yet what choice did he have? They were stranded in the middle of a vast swamp, sick, hungry, and exhausted. The Smoker promised him that this other Potawatomi was trustworthy. Tanner finally agreed to the arrangement, saying not another word as the younger Potawatomi put the three children on one horse and the baggage on the other. In three days, the man said, he would meet them at the mouth of a certain stream—the Smoker knew the one.

  When Tanner and the Smoker came to the designated place, they found the man with his two horses waiting for them, the children all in good shape. At last they had reached water deep enough to float their canoe. Tanner paid the man, who went off with his horses, while he and his family, accompanied by the Smoker, threaded down the stream to the Illinois River. As they navigated this river across the prairie, Tanner was able to kill plenty of game. Finally eating well again, they recovered their strength and regained their health.8

  It was mid-October when they reached St. Louis. They had been traveling nearly four months since departing Lake of the Woods, and they had covered more than a thousand miles, nearly all of it in small, birchbark canoes. Considering all the sickness, the children’s young ages, and the necessity of hunting for food as they went, the journey was a remarkable feat. Tanner must have felt some pride in their accomplishment, even though the ordeal had nearly killed them all, and had driven away his wife. Docking their last canoe on the waterfront in St. Louis, Tanner led his children and the Smoker to the Indian agency to inform Governor Clark of his return.

  The complex of buildings that made up the Indian agency covered over half a block along Main Street and included the governor’s private residence, office building, factory house, blacksmith, gunsmith, and council house. The latter building, constructed according to Clark’s personal specifications, featured a long meeting hall with a conference table down the center and display cases along the walls. The many glass cases exhibited more than 200 Indian artifacts collected from all over the West. Clark had designed the hall specifically for receiving Indian visitors and tribal delegations.9

  Clark received them warmly. The governor doted on the children, presenting each one with a comb. Then he thanked the Smoker for his help in seeing the family safely to their destination, gave him a present, and offered assistance for his homeward journey. The old Potawatomi soon departed, while Tanner and the children remained in the city several days as the governor ordered a set of clothes made for each one of them. Clark also gave Tanner another letter, this time to the Indian agent at Cape Girardeau.10

  When Tanner came to the Mississippi River town of Cape Girardeau, he happened to see the explorer, Stephen H. Long, then returning from his expedition to the Rocky Mountains. Tanner gave this incident only passing mention in his Narrative, so it would seem that he merely observed the members of the expedition from afar. That he had this encounter at Cape Girardeau three years before meeting Long for a second time at Rainy Lake House in 1823 was a coincidence and nothing more, though it speaks to what a small world the United States was in 1820, when the nation had fewer than ten million people.11

  Tanner’s white kin lived on both sides of the Mississippi River around Cape Girardeau, some in Missouri and others in Kentucky. They formed a large clan—perhaps a dozen brothers, sisters, and nephews, together with their spouses and many offspring. In the thirty years that John had been absent from the family, they had migrated from eastern Kentucky down the Ohio River valley to its junction with the Mississippi. They were part of a great migration of “southern plainfolk” who trekked across the Appalachians following the American Revolution and down into the Mississippi valley after the Louisiana Purchase. Southern plainfolk were yeoman farmers who typically cleared their own land, grew a patch of corn, raised a few dozen head of livestock, and subsisted their families by a combination of farming and herding. As their mode of living was well adapted to the sparsely populated frontier, they often pulled up stakes and moved farther west when other families settled nearby. A few, such as Tanner’s father, owned slaves, but as they never owned more than a few at a time they were not part of the Southern slaveholding aristocracy. Although they often migrated in clans, like the Tanners did, generally each nuclear family worked its own land. As a people, they put a high value on self-reliance.12

  Tanner did not thrive in this new environment. Despite the love and affection his relatives had shown him during his previous stay, he seems to have been ill at ease on his return. For whatever reason, he did not go back to his brother Edward’s place. Edward’s idea of their going on a mission together fell by the wayside. John lived with one sister on the Missouri side of the river for four months, then with another on the Kentucky side. He and his children were often sick. They suffered most in fall and winter, when the houses became stuffy and dank. They felt a terrible craving for fresh air. On Tanner’s prior visit to the region, he had finally taken to sleeping outdoors, finding that it improved his health. But now his children were not permitted that option. His sisters, determined to raise them like white children, made them sleep in a bed indoors. That winter, all three children became ill with a fever that swept through the local population. The older two finally recovered; the youngest one died.13

  After a year went by, John Tanner decided he could not stay there. He was simply not interested in farming, and as he remained quite odd to the Tanner clan in many ways, it is likely he wore out his welcome.

  Perhaps most revealing of his inability to assimilate is this: his relatives finally quarreled over how they should collectively provide for him. At issue was the family’s slave property. Several of John’s relatives wanted to sell the slaves and put the proceeds into a trust fund, while another faction opposed that plan. The slaves had once belonged to John’s father and now belonged to the father’s estate; in other words, they were the property of the whole clan. Probably the several Tanner households took turns keeping these slaves and owning their labor; such an arrangement was not unheard of, and it would explain why no one had authority to sell them outright. The matter came to a head when John’s stepmother took matters into her own hands and sent the slaves to the West Indies—apparently under lease, to keep them off the auction block in St. Louis. Those in the f
amily who advocated setting up a trust fund for John took her to court, challenging her right to have done so without their consent. The matter had not yet been settled by the time John left.14

  With his two daughters, Tanner made the long journey back to Mackinac. He knew that Therezia was living there, working as a domestic for Thérèse Schindler. In his Narrative, Tanner stated that a principal reason for going to Mackinac was to secure a job as interpreter for the US Indian agent, George Boyd. He had had repeated invitations from Boyd to come back and serve in that position once his English-speaking ability improved. After sixteen months with his white relatives, Tanner’s proficiency with the language had indeed become much better. However, Tanner’s own actions point to two other reasons for returning to Mackinac that he was disinclined to acknowledge. The first was to reconnect with Therezia. He was loath to admit it, but he missed her. In fact, the two resumed their tumultuous marriage as soon as he got there and she quickly became pregnant again. His second reason for settling in Mackinac would have been more difficult for him to explain in that era, but it was probably no less real for that. He wanted a community in which interracial, white-Indian families were not freakish, where he and his wife and children would suffer less prejudice.15

  Mackinac would allow him to straddle two worlds. Existing at a crossroads between white and Indian peoples, the small settlement with its military fort, trading post, and boarding school was home for a few, a meeting place for many more, and a jumping-off point for still others. Both whites and Indians regarded Mackinac as a portal into the world of the other. The tragedy for Tanner was that he had known one world and then the other, yet he had become estranged from both. Paradoxically, his unusual experience bridging two worlds had come to limit his options rather than broaden them. The old Ottawa man, Wah-ka-zhe, who once told him he would have to make his way among the whites as an interpreter, had turned out to be right. It was almost the only occupation left to him. And going hand in hand with that, the little village of Mackinac, with its predominantly Métis population, must have seemed like one of the few communities still open to him. Alienated from both his Indian people and his white heritage, he may have hoped to find some sense of belonging there. At the very least, it would be a refuge.

  In the summer of 1822, he and Therezia set about building a new life together. They found a dwelling on the island and bought a few modest furnishings for it. According to the Schindler granddaughter, whose memory may have been skewed on this point, Therezia then requested that her husband marry her in a Catholic service. Like so many white-Indian couples who married in Indian country and later came to live among the whites, the two came under pressure to sanctify their nuptials in the Christian faith. Whether or not Therezia accepted the Church’s position that they were living in sin, she may have wanted a Christian ceremony simply to ease their way in their new community. Tanner refused. As the Schindler granddaughter recollected: “He said he had married her as they were all married in the Indian country, and she was his wife.”16

  Meanwhile, Tanner pursued a wage-earning job. It was not the first time he had worked for wages (the Hudson’s Bay Company had paid him in cash when he hunted for the Red River colony, and he may have worked for wages in Kentucky as well). But now he considered taking wage work as a mainstay in place of his usual occupation of hunting. Boyd, the Indian agent, was as encouraging as ever about Tanner’s long-range prospects for employment as an interpreter for the US Indian Office. Though he could not yet offer him a position, he proposed to put Tanner on as a striker in the blacksmith shop until he could find him one. Tanner was still weighing this offer when he went to see Robert Stuart, the American Fur Company agent at Mackinac.

  The company offices were located in a brand new, three-story building on Market Street. Stuart was a second-generation fur trader whose father and uncle had both worked for the North West. He himself had sailed aboard the Tonquin around Cape Horn to serve two years at the Pacific Fur Company’s outpost near the mouth of the Columbia River. At the end of that stint he had led an overland expedition from the Oregon country eastward. Since then, he had become prominent in John Jacob Astor’s rising empire, overseeing the American Fur Company’s expansion into the upper Great Lakes region. When Tanner inquired with Stuart about work, the trader could appreciate Tanner’s unusual circumstances. In particular, he understood Tanner’s desire to reclaim his children from Indian country.

  Stuart drew up a labor contract tailored for Tanner’s particular needs. He was to join William Morrison’s Fond du Lac outfit. From Fond du Lac (modern day Duluth, Minnesota) he would go with the company of men to Rainy Lake, where he would hunt and trade with Indians through the winter. In late spring, when the others returned to Mackinac, he would be released to go to Red River to find the children of his first marriage and bring them out. In this last endeavor, he would be strictly on his own. For his services to the American Fur Company, he would be paid $225 per annum plus one set of clothes and a daily allowance of food.17

  Tanner signed the contract with his mark, and walked out of the building with a renewed sense of purpose. This was to be his last journey to Red River.

  VII McLOUGHLIN

  36

  Chief Factor

  John McLoughlin settled easily into his old post at Rainy Lake. In the eight years since he previously resided there he had proven himself to be a strong, intelligent manager, and he was comfortable in his new position of chief factor. In some ways, being chief factor of the Rainy Lake district was like being seigneur of his grandfather’s Mount Murray Seigneury. There were elements of the job that must have reminded him of his late grandfather Fraser’s preoccupations. He was running a farm as well as a trading post; he was overseeing a multiethnic community of men, women, and children; and he was directing a sizeable labor force. He was husband and father to a growing family and, as he saw it, patriarch to a considerable body of Rainy Lake Ojibwa, too.

  McLoughlin’s youngest daughter, Eloisa, was five years old, and his youngest son, David, was one-and-a-half when the family moved to Rainy Lake in 1822. In an interview more than a half century later, Eloisa recalled that her father “took charge of a little fort there” and the family “stayed two years.” Her recollections are valuable because in McLoughlin’s two years at this post he did not once mention his family in the official post journal or in his correspondence. Eloisa’s statement confirms what would otherwise be left to supposition: his family was there with him. That the family is never mentioned in the company records is not surprising. McLoughlin always made it his practice to keep his wife and children separate and apart from his official duties. Whenever he entertained visitors, Marguerite did not dine with him and the children were kept in the family’s private rooms. “The families lived separate and private entirely,” Eloisa recalled with regard to their subsequent years at Fort Vancouver. “We never saw anybody.”1

  The Rainy Lake House that the McLoughlins occupied in 1822 was not the same trading post that they had lived in before. It was a newer set of buildings situated a few miles upriver from the old North West post, now abandoned. The Hudson’s Bay post stood on a low promontory overlooking the Rainy River, the Koochiching Falls, and one end of a well-trodden portage that led around the falls. On the riverbank below the post there was a yard for making birchbark canoes, and a landing from which a path ran up the slope to the gate. The post itself consisted of a square stockade with two bastions situated at opposite corners and three buildings arranged around an interior courtyard: the officers’ house, the servants’ quarters, and a storehouse for skins and supplies. Above the palisaded stockade fluttered the crimson flag of the Hudson’s Bay Company. And next to the flagpole stood a spindly watchtower from which a sentinel could observe Indians canoeing up the river from the west or portaging around the falls from the east. Behind the fort was a small clearing planted with corn, wheat, potatoes, peas, pumpkins, and melons, and beyond this patch of cultivation spread a field of stumps where trees w
ere chopped down for firewood.

  Rainy Lake House had a wintering population of around thirty male employees plus an unknown number of women and children. This small community cleaved into three distinct groups: an English-speaking officer class of four men, a French-speaking laboring class, and the mostly Ojibwa-speaking women and children. But the community was like three compact islands connected by a hundred bridges. Most of these people spoke at least two languages and some, like McLoughlin, spoke all three. A few of the men, and perhaps all of the women and children, were of mixed blood. Even in the matter of religion there was a crossing over of sometimes hard differences. McLoughlin himself had been baptized Catholic and then raised in the Protestant Church (at his grandfather Fraser’s insistence). As practically the only literate person at Rainy Lake House, he took it upon himself to read aloud from the Bible on Sundays to his mostly Catholic employees.2

  McLoughlin’s three officers included one former Nor’ Wester and two Hudson’s Bay men. The former Nor’ Wester was Simon McGillivray, the Métis son of William McGillivray. George Simpson described Simon in his notorious “Character Book.” This notebook, which contains a series of personality sketches of Simpson’s many associates, is well known by fur-trade historians for its raking personal remarks and cynicism. Concerning the younger McGillivray, Simpson wrote:

  Possesses a good deal of superficial cleverness and is very active but conceited, self-sufficient and ridiculously high-minded. Very Tyrannical among his people which he calls “discipline” and more feared than respected by men & Indians who are constantly in terror either from his Club or his Dirk. Would be a very dignified overbearing man if he was in power; fond of little convivial parties and would soon fall into intemperate habits if he had an opportunity of indulging in that way. Has a good deal of the Indian in disposition as well as in blood and appearance, and if promoted would be likely to ride on the top of his commission and assume more than it is either fit or proper he should have an opportunity of doing; in short I think he would make a bad use of the influence he would acquire by promotion and be a very troublesome man.3