Then the door burst open and McLoughlin stood there, his hulking frame filling the doorway. Ten weeks he had been away, and this fracas in the officer’s house was his welcome home. But the doctor held his temper. He immediately took charge of the meeting, providing assurances all around. No, he affirmed, it was not possible the girls had come to any harm inside the fort. Yes, he agreed, they must be found and returned to this place posthaste, so that Tanner could leave with the American expedition. No, the search would not be undertaken till morning—it was pitch dark and pissing rain outside. Long found that he trusted McLoughlin more than he trusted McGillivray. “The deportment of this gentleman,” Long later wrote in his journal, “was calculated to leave on our minds the most favourable impressions as to his humanity and hospitality.”4
In the morning, the men searched all around for the girls’ tracks in the wet earth. However, no evidence was found of their departure either by canoe or foot. McLoughlin offered a reward to anyone who could find their trail, catch them, and bring them back safely. Two Indians volunteered. While Tanner waited anxiously, the rain lifted and Long’s canoemen went to work repairing the canoes. The search for the girls notwithstanding, Long was eager to get underway. Toward dusk, the two Indian searchers returned, empty-handed. With the repairs on the canoes completed, Long announced that the expedition would wait until 10:00 a.m. the next morning to make its departure in the hope that the girls would come back by their own volition before then.5
That night and the next morning there was still no sign of them. As the hour advanced, everyone tried to console Tanner and persuade him to leave with the expedition anyway, without his daughters. The Americans urged him to put his own safety first and not forfeit this chance to get back to Mackinac and proper medical care before winter. McLoughlin promised to make every effort to learn where the girls had gone. As soon as he discovered who they were with, he said, he would rescue them and keep them with him at Rainy Lake House until Tanner was healthy enough to return for them in the spring. McGillivray went on arguing—brutally, it seemed to Keating—that the girls had surely decided to forsake their father and join their mother at Lake of the Woods. Tanner would not even admit that possibility, for he believed the girls felt a stronger attachment to him and were sincere when they told him they would accompany him to Mackinac. He still feared they were captive. What if the girls’ captors were in collusion with some of the mixed-blood dependents living around the fort? Maybe the girls were hidden in one of their wigwams? If that should be the case, McLoughlin responded, then he would find them soon enough and keep them safe in his custody.6
At last Long’s men persuaded the anguished father to leave without his daughters. The canoes were loaded with fresh provisions purchased from the Hudson’s Bay Company. McLoughlin presented Long two pounds of tea as a parting gift. Tanner sat in Long’s canoe wedged among the packs with his right arm immobilized. The canoes pushed off. The strong and stout voyageurs sitting fore and aft of Long and Tanner dug their paddles into the water with their customary gusto. From the bank above the canoe landing, McLoughlin waved farewell.
It was to be a short parting between the doctor and the wounded American, however. At the first portage, Tanner debarked and walked onshore with the expedition without complaint, but on the next stretch of water his arm began to swell and ache unbearably. Just before they reached a small rapid at the outlet of Rainy Lake, Tanner suddenly announced that he could proceed no farther. The pain was too much. Pointing to the guardhouse at the outlet of the lake where employees of the trading post stood watch for Indians, he requested to be put ashore there. From that point, he could easily return to Rainy Lake House. Long directed the voyageurs to land the canoes.7
Tanner’s relief was clearly visible as he parted from the expedition—so much so that Long, Say, and Keating each remarked upon it and described the moment in their journals. Long focused on Tanner’s medical condition: the “considerable inflammation” of his arm, the sweat beading all over his face and hands, revealing a breaking fever. Say saw the sheen on Tanner’s cheeks and thought he was crying. It startled him, since until that moment Tanner had shown relatively little emotion through all his pain and torment. In fact, others had told Say that no one had ever seen the man shed a tear. “But it was evident that the conflict of emotions in his mind, at the time that he was compelled to land from our canoes, overpowered him, and his eyes glistened with a tear which he attempted in vain to shake off.” Keating, for his part, thought the flash in Tanner’s eyes was something else, a gleam of hope as his thoughts turned to renewing the search for his daughters. Although Keating believed along with the others that the girls had run off to find their mother, he also recognized that Tanner was utterly convinced of their loyalty to him. That could mean but one thing: that they were being held captive until he left the area. When Keating considered the girls—about sixteen and fourteen years of age, physically attractive, socially engaging—he well understood Tanner’s apprehension about their chances at the trading post.8
As there was a fair wind, Long’s pilot ordered the voyageurs to hoist sail for the all-day journey across the big waters of Rainy Lake. With the wind filling their square sails, the two canoes raced out into the sparkling cold waters. When the members of the expedition looked back, they saw Tanner’s solitary figure slowly diminish to a dark speck on the shoreline and finally disappear into the featureless forest-covered horizon that rimmed the whole, vast lake.
“At the H. Bay Co.’s Fort we met with an American by the name of Tanner,” Long had tersely written in his journal on the previous day. The words fail to satisfy. Unfortunately, he did not elaborate on them much, though it is clear from the official narrative of the expedition that he ruminated over Tanner’s unusual history and character afterwards and tried to put the man in some kind of context. Was he a lost American citizen? A tragic outcast? Or a useless vagabond and misanthrope? Was he, in a sense, still a captive of the Indians? Or had he turned quite Indian himself?
Long was a man of many strong loyalties—to God and country, to the army, to his men, to his Christian marriage. Personally, he did not care for this man who had broken so many bonds of his own. Tanner had forsaken the white man’s world for what end? That he might live among a race of savages? For Long, that was Tanner’s own errant choice, as it was the shame of all white Indians.
44
The Onus of Revenge
John McLoughlin first learned that John Tanner had been shot and seriously wounded in midsummer of 1823, when he was away at York Factory. He also received the intelligence that the shooter was the good-for-nothing Little Clear Sky. Probably the news reached him by way of Alexander Stewart, the chief factor at Fort William who had rescued Tanner after the shooting.1
Tanner’s situation was the first thing to command McLoughlin’s attention when the chief factor arrived back at Rainy Lake House with his brigade late in the evening on September 1, 1823. Besides Tanner, he found Major Long and his party camped at the fort, and when he entered the officer’s house he walked into the middle of an argument between Long and the chief trader, Simon McGillivray, over the whereabouts of Tanner’s daughters. Obviously there was no hope of finding the girls that night in pitch darkness. But as soon as he got control of the meeting, McLoughlin promised Long that he would organize a search in the morning.2
McLoughlin’s thoughts turned from Tanner to the assailant, Little Clear Sky, when he sat down to record the events in the post journal later that night. What could have motivated this young man to shoot Tanner? McLoughlin considered Little Clear Sky to be a poor, useless hunter and a rogue—utterly untrustworthy—and he also knew that this same Ojibwa had taken credit from the American traders across the river. But he had heard of nothing between Little Clear Sky and Tanner that would precipitate a murder attempt. He put no stock in the theory that Tanner’s former wife was behind it. “Mere suppositions,” was his brusque comment on that.3
McLoughlin had to decide
whether to send his men to Little Clear Sky’s village to mete out punishment. Between traders and Indians, blood for blood was the law. When Indians killed traders, the fur companies usually responded with lethal force, either finding the responsible Indians and summarily executing them or, if the perpetrators could not be found, killing other Indians in their stead. There were no procedures for the gathering and weighing of evidence, no trials by jury, or jail sentences. The traders gave no quarter, believing that the least show of clemency would be construed as weakness. And they could not afford to appear weak, because the Indians greatly outnumbered them. The traders’ rule was that they would always come to one another’s defense—even traders of different companies or nationalities would unite in case of Indian troubles—and when it became necessary, they would exact revenge. They believed that if a killing went unpunished it would invite more killings, whereas if they retaliated in kind Indian violence against them would be minimized.4
McLoughlin subscribed to this general view.5 He was an authoritarian as well as a humanitarian. But he was also a practical businessman. If anything moderated his approach to the Indians, it was his strong sense that they must be dealt with as trading partners first. The Hudson’s Bay Company utterly depended on the Indians as hunters, for it had no other way of obtaining furs so cheaply. “It is therefore clearly our interest, as it is unquestionably our duty, to be on good terms with them,” he would later write.6 Demanding blood for blood made sense only insofar as it would further the company’s interest in maintaining proper relations.
McLoughlin and his fellow traders thought retaliation worked because it dovetailed with the Indians’ own custom of blood revenge. In his previous observations on the Ojibwa, McLoughlin had marveled at how the revenge principle tended to check violence within tribal society. As he wrote in his “Description of the Indians from Fort William to Lake of the Woods,” the Ojibwa lived in a state of complete freedom with virtually no tribal government and no judicial system. And yet, the revenge principle was so clearly expressed that it functioned as a powerful restraint. “The fear of retaliation operates as strongly on their minds as punishment by law in the civilized world.”7
But the “justice” which the fur traders recognized in the revenge principle was not simply a borrowing from Indian law; it also resonated with their own Christian beliefs and English common law. Some years later, when McLoughlin was in charge of the entire Columbia District and Simon McGillivray was chief trader at Fort Walla Walla, he advised McGillivray regarding a situation similar to the one he confronted at Rainy Lake in 1823. A prominent Indian killed one of McGillivray’s men and the culprit’s tribesmen would not give him up—how was McGillivray to approach those Indians? “If I was addressed on the subject by any of them,” McLoughlin intoned, “I would say the Almighty has forbid the shedding of innocent blood, and commanded that he who shed man’s blood by man shall his blood be shed, and in obedience to this command, if a Chief among us was to Kill a slave that Chief would be killed.”8 All men were equal when they committed a capital offense. Under English law in that day, murder and attempted murder were both punishable by death.
McLoughlin finally decided against trying to capture and punish Little Clear Sky. That may have been because he knew the Indians drew a sharp distinction between murder and attempted murder. In Indian law, the motivation behind a bad deed mattered little compared to the actual result. No one would dispute that Little Clear Sky’s attack was premeditated with intent to kill. But the act of “attempted murder” had no standing in Indian law. If the Hudson’s Bay men killed Tanner’s young assailant in retaliation, it was doubtful that Little Clear Sky’s people would see the justice in it.
Other circumstances weighed against the operation of the revenge principle in this case as well. Since Tanner was disabled and incapable of taking his own revenge, it was unclear who should take revenge on his behalf. Where did the onus lie? Tanner was not an employee of the Hudson’s Bay Company. It was not even clear that he was a fur trader. True, he had been engaged by the American Fur Company the previous fall. But his contract had expired in the spring, and he was acting on his own at the time of the shooting. And though he was a white man who had come under the care of the Hudson’s Bay Company after the shooting, he had lived so long among the Indians that his case might be considered an Ojibwa matter. McLoughlin, like many traders, made it a policy not to meddle in the internal affairs of the Indians. Or, as another Hudson’s Bay officer once said about Indian-on-Indian murders, “The practice of the company in such cases was to outlaw the murderer and kill him when caught—it might be years afterwards.”9
As there was to be no retaliation against Little Clear Sky, the problem boiled down to what should be done for Tanner. McLoughlin organized a search for Tanner’s missing daughters as promised, but at the end of the day he called it off. In all likelihood, he thought, the girls had gone back to their mother in their home village. With Long, he persuaded Tanner to take passage with the American expedition back to the United States while he had the chance. The next morning, as the Americans made ready to go in their two canoes, McLoughlin sold them fresh produce from the garden. Then he watched them paddle away, relieved to have Tanner off his hands.
The next morning, however, one of McLoughlin’s men reported that the American expedition had landed Tanner at the guardhouse at the outlet of Rainy Lake. From there, he had taken passage in a Hudson’s Bay canoe back downriver. Now he was at the American trading post across the river. After the hubbub over his runaway daughters, Tanner had gone back to Cȏté, of all people.
For McLoughlin the news smarted a bit. It was surprising after everything the doctor had done for him. Once, years ago, when McLoughlin served at the former North West post, he had taken Tanner under his care after Tanner fell from a tree and broke his ribs. A year or two later, the doctor had taken him into that same house again after Tanner spilled his canoe in the Rainy River. On that occasion Tanner had been accompanied by two wee daughters—a younger pair than the two teenage girls who were now missing. And McLoughlin could recall a third time, when he lived at Fort William, that Tanner came to him for help. Tanner was on his way back to the States looking for passage to Mackinac. The doctor had arranged for him to board the company’s sloop for its run across Lake Superior. Three times McLoughlin had shown Tanner his friendship. And yet, instead of returning to Rainy Lake House and placing himself under the doctor’s care for a fourth time, now he sought help on the American side of the river. “I cannot imagine the reason of his going there except that perhaps Major Long advised him to go there,” McLoughlin confided to the post journal.10
But Long had given Tanner no such advice, as McLoughlin soon discovered. Four days later, the doctor received a letter from Long recommending Tanner to his care and promising that the Hudson’s Bay Company would be reimbursed for expenses. McLoughlin found Long’s promise of reimbursement by the US government so naïve as to be insulting. “Does he take us for such fools?” he wrote in the post journal. “Does the Major think we will not do our utmost to assist a fellow being in distress when he can get no provisions from any one Else and is laying in the Bed of Sickness?” Better if Long had simply asked him to take care of the wounded American on humanitarian grounds, the proud doctor felt. Long’s message was doubly irritating because it arrived just hours after he received a note from across the river, purportedly from Tanner, though it looked suspiciously like a forgery penned by the American outfit’s summer caretaker, a Mr. Davenport. Saying he had nothing to eat, Tanner (or was it Davenport?) asked for a bushel of corn, fifty pounds of flour, twenty pounds of grease, and a bag of potatoes. Thinking that the communication was likely a ruse by Davenport to fill the American post’s larder at Hudson’s Bay Company expense, McLoughlin sent over just a small fraction of the amount of food requested, with a note stating that more would be provided from day to day. (McLoughlin was correct in his suspicion: Tanner later stated that the daily rations McLoughlin sent acr
oss were mostly consumed by the young Davenport and his wife, with Tanner receiving hardly any.) Still, the scanty daily rations that McLoughlin sent to Tanner were not calculated to fetch the invalid back to Rainy Lake House. Tanner stayed at the American fort, while McLoughlin sent food across the river each day.11
On October 2, Cȏté arrived with the American Fur Company’s winter contingent. The sight of the flotilla coming up the river dashed McLoughlin’s hopes that his competitor would pull out of the area. In fact, Cȏté was much better supplied than in the previous year: his flotilla of five canoes included two large canoes filled with a dozen bales of trade goods and several kegs of rum. That evening, Cȏté paid a visit to the chief factor. The competitors discussed prices: McLoughlin wanted to trade with the Indians at one fathom of cloth for five made beaver, Cȏté wanted to put the price at one for four. McLoughlin explained his object in setting a higher price and told him to think it over. The subject of Tanner’s lingering convalescence did not arise.12
As McLoughlin soon discovered, Cȏté took a sterner view of Tanner’s situation than he. The attempted murder, in Cȏté’s judgment, unquestionably invoked the rule of revenge, and Cȏté wanted no part of it. As Tanner was Cȏté’s former employee as well as his fellow countryman, he saw Tanner’s right of revenge as nothing but a liability for his own interests. If Tanner were to remain under his care, it would send a damaging signal, conveying to the Rainy Lake Indians that the Americans were Tanner’s people and that they would seek revenge on the wounded American’s behalf. In which case, the Indians would fear going to the Americans and would trade with the British instead. When Cȏté saw Tanner lying on a bed inside the house, his only remark to him was, “Well, you have been making a war by yourself.” The next morning he evicted him. To distance himself and his outfit from Tanner and his troubles, Cȏté would not even allow the former employee to pitch his tent on the US side of the river.13
Rainy Lake House Page 39