One wonders what Simpson had in mind when he assigned McLoughlin and McGillivray to work together. Not only were the two men both ill tempered, the doctor’s feud with Simon McGillivray’s father was well known. Yet, despite their differences, the men’s two-year partnership at Rainy Lake succeeded.
Besides Simon McGillivray as chief trader, McLoughlin was assigned two clerks, William Clouston and Charles Bouck. Both were Hudson’s Bay men who had been at Rainy Lake since the company moved into the area in 1817. Clouston came from the Orkney Islands, the rain-swept archipelago off the northern tip of Great Britain, where the Hudson’s Bay Company recruited heavily in the early nineteenth century. Orkneymen were found to make good employees, being for the most part loyal, temperate, and hardworking. At the time of the merger in 1821 an estimated 40 percent of Hudson’s Bay employees came from the Orkney Islands. Bouck, on the other hand, was Canadian. In the service of the Hudson’s Bay Company since 1815, he had taken a wife à la façon du pays—a marriage that stood him in good stead with the Rainy Lake Ojibwa. McLoughlin wrote of Bouck, “knows every Indian in this place—their character and disposition—is a good trader and respected by the Indians but has no education.” He wrote of Clouston, “has no education—is a good trader—a very fit person for the charge of small outposts.”4
Among the two dozen laborers at Rainy Lake House were at least two mixed bloods, Jean Baptiste Jourdain and Charles Roussin, and one full-blood Indian by the name of Peninshin. Besides Peninshin and a man named William Schelling, all the other men had French names, reflecting the fact that the reorganized Hudson’s Bay Company still drew heavily on French Canadian voyageurs as well as Métis for its labor supply. The Rainy Lake House annual account books and journals contain a wealth of information about this population; for example, Jean Baptiste Auger was a guide and canoe builder who served at Rainy Lake House beginning in 1820 and performed a wide variety of tasks around the fort; Jacques Beauvais and Pierre Chalifoux, both at Rainy Lake starting in 1821, were two strong-backed men who often worked together as woodcutters; Nicholas Chatelain, though new to the place in 1823, must have been an energetic and trustworthy individual, for McLoughlin sent him out frequently on fishing and trading expeditions. McLoughlin regarded all of his laborers as unique individuals, recognizing that their skills and physical strength differed widely.5
McLoughlin likewise treated the Rainy Lake Ojibwa as individuals. In his report on the Rainy Lake district for the fall, winter, and spring of 1822–23, he listed more than a hundred hunters by name. Next to each name he included a brief notation as to their hunting skills and character: “a tolerable Hunter but doubtful Character,” “a good Hunter & honest,” “a poor Hunter and Great Rascal,” and so on. After each notation he jotted two numerals followed by an “N” or an “S.” The numerals indicated how many women and children were with each hunter, and the letter indicated whether the person hunted north or south of the US border. Altogether he enumerated 118 hunters, 230 women, and 455 children. Not many traders made such an effort to know every Indian hunter within their districts.6
McLoughlin correctly observed that the extended family group formed the basic social and economic unit in Ojibwa culture. Family groups typically stayed together through the winter, hunting and taking care of domestic chores as a unit. Often the group consisted of one old man, his adult sons, and their spouses and children. McLoughlin’s list of Indian hunters reflected this social structure; for example, the fifty-first name on his list was “Two Hearts Senior” and the next two names were “Two Hearts 1st Son” and “Two Hearts 2nd Son.” The largest extended family group was that of Old Premier, a chief renowned for his excellent hunting skills and many brave deeds fighting the Sioux. In McLoughlin’s 1822–23 census, Old Premier was the first person listed. He was followed by three brothers, two sons, and one stepson, with a total of ten women and twelve children attached to these seven men.7
McLoughlin recognized that the Ojibwas also had higher levels of social organization beyond the extended family group. The Ojibwas were grouped into clans, each clan being identified with a totem animal. Kinship was determined by patrilineal descent, and marriage partners had to come from outside the clan. Moreover, the Ojibwas came together in larger numbers during various seasonal food-gathering activities such as making sugar in the spring and fishing for sturgeon in the fall. They also gathered in large numbers each summer for the Midewiwin, a religious ceremony, and sometimes to form war parties against enemies such as the Sioux. McLoughlin and his contemporaries referred to the Ojibwas as Saulteaux (the name derived from the Ojibwa ancestral homeland around Sault Ste. Marie) and recognized them as a distinct Indian nation (a nation in the nineteenth-century sense of that word was a people united by culture). However, McLoughlin naturally focused on the smaller Ojibwa groupings because of their singular importance in trade. When he provided the Indians with ammunition and other supplies on credit, he did so in the expectation that they would return at the end of the hunting season in the same extended family groups.
At the start of October, Ojibwa family groups began arriving at Rainy Lake House, seeking to obtain goods on credit for the approaching winter. But now that they could trade their furs to the Americans on the other side of the river, McLoughlin could not be sure that the Indians would honor their debts at the end of the winter. He had no doubt that the Americans lacked the wherewithal to outfit the Indians as they were accustomed to being outfitted by the British. Yet these American interlopers (as he saw them) would do everything in their power to obtain the Indians’ furs, irrespective of the fact that the Indians owed those furs to the British. McLoughlin’s answer to the problem was to impress upon the Indians that they must henceforth respect the line between the British and American traders. If they took credit from the Hudson’s Bay Company, then they must hunt on the British side and bring their furs to the British trading post. But if they went to the Americans for credit or trade, then he would not incur the expense of provisioning them because they were no longer the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Indians to trade with. For this strategy to succeed, all depended on establishing credit with the right Indians. “I will only endeavor to keep the Best hunters—The poor hunters and cheats I will allow [to] go to the Americans,” he wrote in the post journal. “It will answer a double purpose—Clear us of a set of Indians who never pay us and if these Americans give them Debt it will clean them of a good lot of Goods and drain off their attention from others.”8
McLoughlin first put his plan into action when Old Premier appeared with his band in early October. As was customary, on the evening of his arrival Old Premier sought out McLoughlin and they smoked the calumet. This ritual signified that the trade relationship was not just a matter of material exchange but carried social and political implications as well. Since Old Premier was a prominent chief, with a big following, he was used to generous treatment by the traders. McLoughlin did not disappoint him, filling his canoe the next morning with goods and a keg of rum—but only after he had used the occasion to announce the new regime: the Indians must repay their full debt to the British and have nothing to do with the Americans. When one of Old Premier’s sons unwittingly disclosed that he had just obtained credit from the Americans, McLoughlin denounced Old Premier for his son’s action and insisted on taking everything back, returning it to the store. Old Premier was astonished by this disrespectful treatment. As a token of his hurt, he took off his Hudson’s Bay Company trade medal and hung it on a peg in McLoughlin’s office. Then he went off and slept that night in his canoe.
The next day Old Premier returned, apologizing for his son’s action and promising his loyalty to the British, at the same time reminding McLoughlin that he and the British traders had known each other a long time. McLoughlin granted this, admitting “it was true we had brought him and all his [family] up,” but he stressed that the British traders did not want the Indians to be “slaves” to that relationship. Old Premier and his people were free to take cre
dit from the Americans instead. In other words, McLoughlin sought to deflect Old Premier’s characterization of their relationship as a social contract and make it more of a commercial relationship. Feeling that he had made his point, McLoughlin ordered his men to load the chief’s canoe with goods all over again. “I think it was necessary to treat him in this unceremonious manner,” McLoughlin wrote afterwards. “By acting in this manner with the principal man of the District, it will show the others that if they value our favour & approbation they must deserve it.”9
Europeans and Indians knew that whenever they engaged in trade rituals the transaction involved more than a simple exchange of goods. Each exchange of furs for goods, or goods for credit, in addition to bringing material gain, entailed various shades of influence, interdependence, status, and obligation for both parties. However, if both parties saw clearly enough that their trade included all of these complex facets, they could never see eye to eye on what the ritual symbolism or terms of trade meant precisely. Their different cultures prevented it. Ojibwas viewed their trade relations with Europeans through the prism of their kinship relations, in which mutual gift giving had important social and even spiritual meanings aside from its economic benefits. European traders viewed the same transactions from the standpoint of commerce in a global economy. They operated within a company structure that was primarily organized to respond to market forces and maximize profit. McLoughlin and Old Premier were able to communicate with one another only up to a point; then their opposing mindsets confounded them.10
Part of why communications were so challenging was that the conditions of the fur trade were constantly changing. If a ritual such as smoking the calumet could embrace a world of meanings, it could not begin to register the profound impact of an ever more dominant European presence in North America, or the effect of European power and influence on Indian cultures.11 McLoughlin and Old Premier each struggled for words to explain how the fur trade was changing in their particular place and time. Old Premier used the analogy of a child growing under its parents’ protection, while McLoughlin used more abstract terms such as “pity” and “charity” to explain the moral obligation that sometimes entered into the exchange.12 If McLoughlin’s effort to reset trading practices between the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Rainy Lake Ojibwas was in one sense naïve (since he had only a partial grasp of the Indian perspective), his effort was in another sense quite realistic: it took into account the new realities imposed by the 1821 coalition and the coming of the American Fur Company.
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Providence
Everyday life at Rainy Lake House revolved around the changing seasons.1 The annual cycle of activity began at the end of summer, when the chief factor arrived with his brigade of voyageurs and several tons of goods to be traded for furs in the coming year. As soon as the voyageurs had offloaded their cargo and carried it into the store, these same men became farm laborers, artisans, traders, hunters, and fishermen. The large north canoes were stowed out of the weather until the following spring, and local transportation needs were met by a combination of light canoe, foot, snowshoe, and sled as the seasons progressed.
Fall was spent stocking the fort with provisions for the long, cold winter ahead. In September most of the men and women went to work in the fields, cutting and drying hay and reaping and threshing wheat. Other men ran the mill, rolling the grain and loading flour into kegs. By October women were digging potatoes in the garden. Gradually, as the mornings turned frosty and days grew shorter, the food bins began to fill. By mid-November the barn would be crammed with bundles of hay and sheaves of wheat, and the corn bins would be packed with kegs of flour, potatoes, and garden produce.
The fall harvest included Indian crops as well as crops grown around the fort. The most important food obtained from the Indians was the seed of the water grass, Zizania palustris, commonly known as wild rice, which grows around the shores of shallow lakes from the Great Lakes region westward through southern Manitoba. The Ojibwas harvested this grain by going about the shallows in their canoes, bending the reeds over the gunwales of the canoe, and gently brushing the rice grains from the stalks. Rainy Lake House purchased a considerable store of this food through trade. Some of it the Indians brought to the fort, and some the traders purchased among the Indian camps. The Rainy Lake traders went to Plantation Island in Lake of the Woods to purchase corn, pumpkins, potatoes, and onions. They purchased corn from the Lake of the Woods Indians at the price of one three-point blanket for a bushel. In the fall of 1822, the clerks Clouston and Bouck each made separate trips to Plantation Island and returned with more than twenty kegs of corn apiece.2
Inside the fort, too, there were preparations for winter. The men replastered the walls and chimneys and repaired the roofs. The women made moccasins and snowshoes. Everyone worked on building up the enormous woodpiles.
As winter set in, the traders’ attention focused on two imperatives: obtaining furs and ensuring that the food stores would last till spring.
Around the first snowfall, Indian hunters or their surrogates started coming in, animal peltries loaded on their backs or towed behind on sleds. Their loads (a mix of beaver, marten, mink, muskrat, bear, moose, lynx, otter, and fisher) sometimes amounted to just a few pieces, or, at other times, dozens or even hundreds. After the fur traders’ careful planning and preparations through the preceding months, it all came down to this: passing a bitterly cold winter at the trading post and waiting anxiously for the Indian hunters to bring in furs. “On the 9th [January] the Little Deer’s young Wife & daughter arrived,” McLoughlin recorded. Much to McLoughlin’s chagrin, the mother-daughter pair presented him with just one lynx skin and five marten skins—a very poor showing for their own and Little Deer’s efforts thus far that winter and a paltry return on the family’s credit of sixty skins. In one of his bleakest entries in the post journal of that winter, McLoughlin went on to relate that the mother and daughter told him the Little Deer remained behind in their winter camp “starving.” McLoughlin gave the Little Deer’s wife ten quarts of flour to take to her husband, who was waiting for her at the Manitou Rapids, plus two quarts “to feed her on the way.”3
But even if the Ojibwas did virtually all of the hunting, the fur traders did not wait idly in the fort for the hunters to come in. Rather, they maintained contact with their Indian partners in every way possible. Rainy Lake House supplied two satellite outposts, one to the east and one to the west, each staffed by a handful of men, while those at the main fort took turns going out in parties of two or three to search for Indians and trade with them wherever they could be found. One of the most miserable duties was to man the guardhouse. This one-man shelter was maintained throughout the winter at the outlet of Rainy Lake, three miles from the fort. There a sentinel was expected to scan miles of lakeshore hour after hour watching for the least little flicker of human activity. As if the desolation of this post were not enough, the watcher often had to face into a cutting wind.
All winter long the fort’s occupants obsessed about food. Their diet consisted mostly of porridge flavored with animal fat, augmented by an occasional helping of dried or freshly caught fish. Such a monotonous diet was vastly preferable to the alternative: hunger and dread of starvation. The traders lived on rations, and as the winter progressed and their Indian hunters more and more often came to the fort to beg for food, they found themselves in the uncomfortable position of drawing down their own food stores to pay for those coveted furs.
If one reads the Hudson’s Bay Company’s records from this era too literally, one easily gets the impression that fur traders and Indians alike were very often desperately hungry. McLoughlin’s post journals, like many others, are filled with references to people starving. “Baballiards two sons with their families and their followers arrived here starving,” he wrote at one point. “The Barque and another . . . are suffering the greatest degree of starvation—which they give as the cause of their poor hunt,” he wrote in another entry.4 All suc
h references must be interpreted with care. Ethnographer Mary Black-Rogers made a close study of the various meanings and contexts of the word “starving” in Hudson’s Bay Company records and found that these references fall into three broad usages. First, there was the literal usage, which described people who were actually dying of hunger or suffering horribly because they had no food. Second, there was a technical usage (unfamiliar to the modern reader because it belonged to a specialized fur-trade glossary), which referred to a condition in which the quest for food became so precarious as to allow no time or energy for other pursuits. In this sense, starving Indians were those living too close to the edge to be effective fur hunters. Viewed in this light, McLoughlin’s statement, “They are suffering the greatest degree of starvation—which they give as the cause of their poor hunt” takes on a very different meaning. The third usage that Black-Rogers identified was manipulative in intent. This involved declaring oneself to be starving, whether it was literally true or not, in order to receive food or some other compensation. Often the Ojibwas called out that they were starving even as they approached a fort. As Black-Rogers pointed out, European traders and Indian hunters had different cultural perceptions of begging and supplicating. While Europeans tended to view an announcement of one’s pitiful condition or helplessness as ignoble behavior, Indians generally regarded it as merely disarming or nonaggressive. (Another ritual greeting that both sides adopted was to fire guns in the air when approaching, the purpose being to show that all guns were unloaded as the parties drew close.) Perhaps when McLoughlin wrote that the Baballiards “arrived here starving” it was his shorthand for recording such ritualized behavior when the Ojibwas approached the fort.5
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