Tanner ferried across the Rainy River and knocked at McLoughlin’s door. The wounded American proposed to embark with a company of Hudson’s Bay men who were set to leave for the Red River valley. The doctor inspected his wound and advised against it; although a month had passed since Tanner’s aborted trip with Major Long, the arm was still not in shape for travel. McLoughlin told him to go back to the American clerk and tell him that if he could lodge over there then he, the Hudson’s Bay doctor, would provide medicine and advice. Tanner went away but soon came back. This time he had a message from Cȏté stating that the Americans definitely could not lodge him, for their house was too small. McLoughlin recognized full well the real reason for the Americans evicting him. “The fact is,” he wrote in his journal, “they are afraid if he remains with them it will be the cause of quarrels with the Indians.” He then told Tanner to go back and tell Cȏté if his people would help Tanner put up his tent on the American side of the portage then he would assign a man to bring him water and firewood and change his dressings every day. Back went Tanner a third time. Returning to McLoughlin yet again, he explained that Cȏté was adamant: he could not stay there. For McLoughlin, this was proof of what Cȏté and his men were thinking. “They are afraid that the man’s relations who shot him would not go to their House,” he wrote in the journal. In other words, Cȏté was trying to see it like the Ojibwas: whichever house took in Tanner, the onus of revenge would affix to that house. And so the Ojibwas would avoid Tanner’s house and trade with the other. McLoughlin found the whole business deplorable. “This conduct in a manner forcing him out of this house is very inhumane and unfeeling,” he fumed.
McLoughlin yielded. Tanner could stay in the men’s quarters at Rainy Lake House until such time as he was able to make his camp on the American side. The chief factor knew that he was handing the heartless Cȏté a tactical victory in their little battle over Tanner’s care. But he was a doctor and a humanitarian as well as a trader, and he would do the right thing whatever it might cost him in trade with the Indians.14
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Journeys Home
In just eleven days, Stephen Long and his men traveled from Rainy Lake to Fort William, making upwards of forty portages along the way that ranged in length from a few hundred yards to three miles. Long would later describe the country as “rugged, wild and romantic . . . composed of a ceaseless alternation of lakes, islands, rivers, waterfalls, abrupt precipices, rugged hills and mountains everywhere clad with forests.” At Fort William, the Hudson’s Bay traders advised him that the weather was too stormy and the season too far advanced to embark on Lake Superior in their frail canoes. However, as the explorer was determined to get home before winter, the Hudson’s Bay traders led him to an old Mackinaw boat that the US Boundary Commission had used three months earlier, scuttled, and sunk in the river. The boat was raised and repaired, and in that shaky vessel the expedition set sail. Hugging the shore, and being repeatedly forced to beach their craft to wait out squalls, the expedition took some two weeks to reach Sault Ste. Marie.1
From Sault Ste. Marie, they proceeded to Mackinac, where Long officially disbanded the expedition in early October. While the soldier escort headed for Prairie du Chien, Long and the scientists boarded a revenue cutter bound for Detroit. From Detroit, Long and his companions traveled via steamer on Lake Erie to Buffalo, by stage from Buffalo to Rochester, then by canal boat on the partially constructed Erie Canal to Albany, and finally by steamer and stage from Albany to Philadelphia. Long reported back to the War Department in November. True to form, he had rushed his men over a distance of some 4,500 miles in six months, covering an average of twenty-five miles per day.2
The explorer returned with new, broad observations about the fur trade and Indians. As an army officer, Long had always taken the military view that the fur trade was the surest means for the United States to pacify and subjugate the Indian tribes on the western frontier. The fur trade tethered the roaming Indians to the white man’s trading posts; it established a dependent relationship between Indians and traders that slowly destroyed the tribes’ ability to resist American control. The army’s chief concern about the fur trade was the need to Americanize it—replace British traders operating on US soil with American traders—in order to break the British-Indian alliance of the Revolutionary War era once and for all.
On his last expedition, Long found that the fur trade existed on the northern frontier as part of a natural buffer against foreign invasion. The territory along the US border west of Lake Superior was inhospitable to agricultural settlement and practically all a wilderness. It formed a natural barrier to an invader in the same way that the Great American Desert, or Great Plains, gave assurance that the nation would never face a significant foe to the west. The United States was fortunate that the whole extent of British territory lying west of the Great Lakes was now vested in the reorganized Hudson’s Bay Company. Since it was the policy of the Hudson’s Bay Company to restrain agricultural settlement so as to protect its interests in the fur trade, there seemed to be little prospect of a foreign population building up in that region. The United States would have no need to maintain military defenses along its northwest frontier except as might be necessary to deal with Indian uprisings.3
As for the Indian tribes, Long had come to appreciate even more fully than on his past expeditions why they bore such animosity toward the United States. Nothing could be more devastating to their hunting way of life than the encroachment of American settlements on their territory. White settlement led to depletion of the game supply, robbing the Indians of their subsistence and turning them into a race of paupers. When his expedition passed through Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, Long saw the shattered remnants of the once powerful nations of the Shawnee, Delaware, Miami, Potawatomi, and Kickapoo. As the party continued its journey through the upper Mississippi country, it was evident to him that the Menominee, Winnebago, Sac, Fox, and Ioway tribes, already feeling the pinch of a diminishing game supply, awaited a similar fate in the not-too-distant future. As they proceeded farther west and north, Long assumed that the various Sioux tribes and the many small bands of Ojibwas were declining in numbers as well. Although the Sioux and Ojibwas faced no imminent threat of invasion by white settlers, he believed they were steadily being reduced through their constant wars against each other. (Long was mistaken about that, but he was no different from other whites of his era in perceiving intertribal warfare to be a cause as well as a symptom of the Indians’ inexorable demise.)
What struck the explorer most forcefully in his observations of the Indian frontier was that white-Indian contact tended to bring out the worst in both races. For the Indians, contact with the whites was such a defeating prospect that it only deepened their innate distrust of outsiders and their animosity toward Americans. For the civilized whites, meanwhile, contact with savage Indians too often led to the whites’ own moral degeneracy. The hard, fraught, often brutal white-Indian relations that Long witnessed around trading posts reinforced his Puritan notion that human beings, no matter how civilized, were intrinsically prone to individual and cultural degeneracy. The official report of the expedition did not mince words on this point, saying that the intercourse between US citizens and Indians was “of a nature calculated to vitiate and deprave the former.”4
For Long, the encounter with John Tanner gave proof that the Indian and white races must be kept apart. In Long’s mind, the hapless Tanner personified the problem of degeneracy. Tanner’s many years of living among the Indians had shaped him to such an extent that he was probably irretrievably lost to the civilized world. When Long and his men discussed with one another the potential, suggested by some including Tanner’s brother Edward, that he might find his way back to the white man’s ways by embracing Christianity and serving as a missionary to the Indians, they finally concluded that it did not seem possible. While his “strong mind” appeared to have “rejected the superstitions of Indians,” nevertheless, he seemed too hard-he
aded and instinctual in his mental processes ever to accept the abstract teachings of the Bible and the Christian faith in God. His thirty years among the savages had dulled the sensibilities common to civilized men.5
They talked about Tanner for days after leaving him behind at Rainy Lake. Thomas Say wrote the most extensive notes on him of any of the expedition members. Keating incorporated them verbatim into the official report. “What will be the future destiny of Tanner appears to us very uncertain,” Say wrote, in a passage that reflected Long’s thinking as much as his own. “We much question whether he can ever be satisfied with sharing in the occupations and comforts of civilized life. We think it more probable that the wandering and irregular habits which he seems to have imbibed from the Indians will soon drive him back from the settlements to his usual haunts in the woods.”6
Two days into their eleven-day trek from Rainy Lake House to Fort William, Long and his men came to the place where Tanner had been ambushed six weeks earlier. It was on a small stream called the Maligne, or Bad River, so named because the many rocks and rapids made it an especially treacherous and arduous passage for canoes. They stopped for dinner just below the first set of rapids and recalled Tanner’s chilling vow of revenge against his attacker. While the others ate, Seymour got out his drawing materials and made a sketch of the scene. As the rapids made a considerable fall, Long decided to name them Tanner Falls in honor of the man whose strange and adventurous life was so entwined with this wilderness.7 Today, the falls are known still as Tanner Rapids, while the small lake at the head of the Maligne River is called Tanner Lake.
At Rainy Lake House, Dr. McLoughlin finally took charge of Tanner’s medical case, allowing him to convalesce there through the winter of 1823–24. By the end of October he directed the patient to perform light chores, and by the second week in November he encouraged him to do a little hunting. On one such hunting excursion, Tanner fell ill and returned to the fort so exhausted that he was laid up for several days afterwards. On November 27, McLoughlin noted in the post journal: “Opened the Wound in Tanner’s Arm—it seems there is some fragment of Bone yet to come.”8
It was customary in the posts to celebrate Christmas and New Year’s with feasting, dancing, and a week-long respite from winter chores. On Christmas Day, McLoughlin gave the twenty men under his charge twenty-five pounds of flour, four pounds of sturgeon, and a gallon of spirits to have a Christmas feast. McLoughlin joined with them in the week-long holiday, as evidenced by his perfunctory entries in the post journal over that time: on December 27, “fair but Cold—all hands idle”; on the 28th, “fair but very cold—”; on the 29th, “The men bought a little liquor and are Keeping up the Holidays”; and on the 30th, “the men unwell or rather too much spent to work after their frolic.” (The usually abstemious Tanner may have sat some of this out.) On New Year’s Day, McLoughlin gave the men another twenty-five pounds of flour, three pounds of sturgeon, and another helping of spirits. He also invited the American trader Cȏté to come join in their festivities. He took care to extend this invitation to all of the women at the American establishment and none of the men, except for Cȏté. “I do this to prevent any misunderstanding arising in consequence of men going with Stories from one house to the other.” After a late night of drinking, fiddling, dancing, and flirting, one more day was given over to rest and recuperation.9
Gradually, McLoughlin integrated Tanner into workaday life in the fort. One evening shortly after New Year’s, he sent Tanner to get water—no easy task when the water lay beneath several inches of ice. Tanner slipped and fell on the ice, breaking his humerus where it had been shattered previously as well as fracturing his collar bone. McLoughlin put him on bed rest again for several weeks while the bones mended. Finally, when spring came, he ordered the patient onto his feet. He assigned Tanner to snare rabbits near the fort, a task normally given to women. He paid Tanner in cash for the rabbit skins, knowing that he would need a little money as soon as he was fit to leave his care.10
Little Clear Sky remained at large. Not surprisingly, his name vanished from McLoughlin’s roll of Indian hunters for the winter of 1823–24. Perhaps he left the area, knowing the fur traders were after him. Or perhaps he went over to the American side and simply managed to elude the Hudson’s Bay traders. Whatever his fate may have been, McLoughlin did not dwell on it. Discussion of the offense faded away. The young man’s motive for trying to kill Tanner was never discovered.
If the bad blood existing between Tanner and Little Clear Sky did cause any of Little Clear Sky’s people to avoid Rainy Lake House and trade with the Americans instead, as McLoughlin feared, the effect turned out to be negligible. By January, the chief factor felt confident he was outdoing the opposition for a second winter in a row. By June, Rainy Lake House had acquired a total of thirty-three packs, the Americans just sixteen.11
McLoughlin fulfilled George Simpson’s expectations during his two years as chief factor of the Rainy Lake District. In the first season he succeeded in eliminating the petty American traders by intercepting their trade and starving them out. If he was unable to do the same with the American Fur Company, then at least he was able to divide the Indian trade peaceably with the Americans along the US border.
In the spring, word came to McLoughlin that he would be reassigned to another post when the Council of the Northern Department met at York Factory in July. George Simpson wanted him to take over administration of the enormous Columbia District in the Far West. Many years earlier, the North West Company had made the same request of him and he had refused to go. This time he accepted. The circumstances had changed. The “troublous times” between the rival fur companies had passed, and the Hudson’s Bay Company held unchallenged dominion over the Indian trade in British territory. As chief factor of the Columbia District, he would be in charge of a huge territory stretching from the heights of the Rocky Mountains westward to the Pacific Coast and from the mouth of the Columbia River northward to Russian Alaska and southward to California. Remote as it was vast, and still rich in furs, the Columbia District was an important post. At last he had obtained the high position in the fur trade that he had long felt to be his due.12
On June 10, 1824, the McLoughlins embarked for Hudson Bay with twenty-five voyageurs in four fully laden canoes. Besides the doctor and his wife, the other family members on board were seven-year-old Eloisa and three-year-old David. The rest of their children were widely dispersed and well provided for. Marguerite’s third daughter, Mary McKay, had married a chief trader the previous summer. McLoughlin’s son Joseph, age sixteen, was employed by the Hudson’s Bay Company at Sault Ste. Marie. Their son John, twelve, was now in his third year of studies at a school in Terrebonne, in the care of his great uncle Simon. And their daughter Eliza, ten, was a pupil in the Ursuline convent in Quebec.13 So, with their two youngest children at their sides, John and Marguerite McLoughlin bid farewell to the Rainy Lake country, their home for a majority of the past twelve winters, and to Rainy Lake House, their residence for the past two years.
At the approach of summer, Tanner asked McLoughlin’s help in finding him passage to Mackinac. By then he had reconciled himself to leaving the country without his daughters. He had discovered that they had returned safely to their former band at Lake of the Woods. Maybe, someday, he would come back for them.
He dropped his vow of revenge against Little Clear Sky. In presenting his story a few years later, he just let the matter slip. Perhaps he saw the futility in it when he decided to leave the Rainy Lake country for good. As an ex-patriot of the Ojibwa nation, to mete out punishment for Little Clear Sky’s bad deed lost all meaning for him. It is worth recording the fact, as Tanner did not, that in all his years among the Indians he never killed a man. He was tomahawked in the head twice, shot once, robbed a number of times, assaulted with a hoe by his mother-in-law, and condemned to death by a medicine man, and through it all he inflicted little physical pain upon others. He did not have a taste for hurting people.
After more than thirty years in Indian country, a part of him, at least, clung to the belief that he was home at last.
EPILOGUE
Mackinac, 1824—and After
Nineteenth-century travelers found Mackinac Island an exotic, even enchanting, place. Three miles long and a mile wide, it rises precipitously out of the clear, blue waters of Lake Huron. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, a geologist and ethnographer who served for many years as Indian agent in the Michigan Territory, said that the Ottawas named the island Mish-i-nim-auk-in-ong for its resemblance to a great turtle rising from the lake. In Ottawa legend its original inhabitants were a race of little men, or “turtle spirits,” who had dropped from the sky. On moonlit, wind-still, summer nights, it was said, fishermen could see the turtle people’s lodge shining atop the white cliffs and hear them singing and dancing on the island’s summit. Schoolcraft walked the whole circumference of Mackinac Island in one day and found its rugged interior a “labyrinth of curious little glens and valleys.” Most of it was covered by cedar, juniper, and pine, but there were grassy openings where the Indians had once cultivated the soil, gathering up the rocks in stone circles that had long since grown over with moss.1
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