Rainy Lake House

by Theodore Catton

  6. Grace Lee Nute, “Border Chieftain,” The Beaver 282 (March 1952), 35–39.

  7. Podruchny, Making the Voyageur World, 203–5.

  8. Harmon, A Journal of Voyages and Travels, 126, 130–31.

  9. Ibid., 118–19, 130. Harmon’s wife eventually did accompany him back to Vermont, but that was not his expectation when he married her, nor was it the typical pattern. See Sylvia Van Kirk, “Many Tender Ties”: Women in Fur-Trade Society in Western Canada, 1670–1870 (Winnipeg, MB: Watson & Dwyer Publishing Ltd., 1980), 138–39.

  10. Van Kirk, “Many Tender Ties,” 93–94.

  11. Wallace, ed., Documents Relating to the North West Company, 211.

  12. Podruchny, Making the Voyageur World, 247–49, 252–57.

  13. The most reliable source on McLoughlin’s first wife is the fragmentary information provided by his son David as cited in Morrison, Outpost, 51. Her connection to Fort William is suggested by the biographical sketch of McLoughlin in US House, Report of Lieut. Neil M. Howison, United States Navy to the Commander of the Pacific Squadron, House Misc. Rept. 29, 30th Cong., 1st sess., 1848, 12–13.

  CHAPTER 14. MARRIAGE à la façon du pays

  1. T. C. Elliott, “Marguerite Wadin McKay McLoughlin,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 36, no. 4 (December 1935), 344–45; Marjorie Wilkins Campbell, The North West Company (Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 1957), 19, 28.

  2. Van Kirk, “Many Tender Ties,” 36–37; Sylvia Van Kirk, “The Role of Native Women in the Creation of Fur Trade Society in Western Canada, 1670–1830,” in The Women’s West, Susan Armitage and Elizabeth Jameson, eds. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 53–62.

  3. Ibid., 51, 54–59; Podruchny, Making the Voyageur World, 248–49.

  4. Morrison, Outpost, 58–59; Jean Morrison, “McKay, Alexander,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online at www.biographi.ca ; Jennifer S. H. Brown, Strangers in Blood: Fur Trade Company Families in Indian Country (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1980), 157. Thomas McKay was born in 1796 at Sault Ste. Marie, according to Reuben Thwaites, ed., Early Western Travels, Vol. 21 (Cleveland: A. H. Clark, 1907), 201; or he was born in 1797 at Ile á la Crosse according to John C. Jackson, Children of the Fur Trade: Forgotten Métis of the Pacific Northwest (Missoula, MT: Mountain Press Publishing Company, 1995), 70.

  5. Morrison, Outpost, 58. See also Fred Lockley, Oregon Trail Blazers (New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1929), 162–63. Lockley based his chapter on McLoughlin on an interview with Mrs. M. L. Myrick, a granddaughter of McLoughlin who served as his private secretary when she was a girl. Myrick stated that McLoughlin met Marguerite at Fort William.

  6. Mother and son finally met again in 1824, and Thomas eventually settled in Oregon near his mother and stepfather. Morrison, Outpost, 117–18, 128; Elliott, “Marguerite Wadin McKay McLoughlin,” 344; Jackson, Children of the Fur Trade, 69–72.

  7. Brown, Strangers in Blood, 96–98, 158, 170–76; Podruchny, Making the Voyageur World, 206–11.

  8. Morrison, Outpost, 58; James Douglas quoted in Adele Perry, “ ‘Is your Garden in England, Sir’: James Douglas’s Archive and the Politics of Home,” History Workshop Journal 70 (August 2010), 75; Col. James K. Kelly, “Dr. John McLoughlin,” undated manuscript, Box 2, Oregon Historical Society Collections, McLoughlin-Fraser Family Papers, MSS 927 (hereafter OHSC, MSS 927), Box 2, Folder 2. Speaking to the couple’s relationship later in life, one Elizabeth Wilson said that the doctor treated his wife “like a princess” and assigned her a place of honor when “handing her out to dinner.” See Theressa Gay, Life and Letters of Mrs. Jason Lee: First Wife of Rev. Jason Lee of the Oregon Mission (Portland: Metropolitan Press, 1936), 155.

  9. Nute, “Border Chieftain,” 35–39.

  10. Jean Morrison, “Fur Trade Families in the Lake Superior–Rainy Lake Region,” in Morrison, ed., Lake Superior to Rainy Lake, 95.

  11. Jean Morrison, ed., The North West Company in Rebellion: Simon McGillivray’s Fort William Notebook, 1815 (Thunder Bay, ON: Thunder Bay Historical Museum Society, 1988), 28–31.

  CHAPTER 15. BAD BIRDS

  1. John McLoughlin, “Description of the Indians from Fort William to Lake of the Woods,” Richard H. Dillon, ed., Amphora 8 (Spring–Summer 1971), 11.

  2. Ibid., 12. McLoughlin referred to a prophet in the direction of Fond du Lac. This was probably Le Maigouis, the Trout, who was active among the Ojibwa in 1807 and 1808. He was a disciple of Tenskwatawa, the Open Door, the younger brother of Tecumseh, otherwise known as the Shawnee Prophet. See R. David Edmunds, The Shawnee Prophet (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 51–53.

  3. Harold A. Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930), 258–59. Innis gives year-by-year returns for the North West Company for 1804 through 1818 and comments, “The tendency toward decline was persistent. Declining returns were of serious consequence to the organization of a concern which required a heavy capital outlay for its operations.”

  4. Chapin, ed., “Letters of John McLoughlin, 1805–26,” 328.

  5. “Some Account of the Trade Carried on by the North West Company,” in Report of the Public Archives of Canada for the year 1928, Arthur G. Doughty, ed. (Ottawa: F. A. Ackland, 1929), 63–65.

  6. Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada, 261–68.

  7. John McLoughlin, Lac La Pluie Post Journal for 1822–1823, HBCA, B. 105/a/9 (entry for September 14, 1823).

  8. Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada, 269; Walter O’Meara, The Last Portage (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1962), 133.

  9. Gordon Charles Davidson, The North West Company (New York: Russell & Russell, 1967), 224. The volume of liquor reached another high in an earlier period of competition between the North West Company and the XY Company during the years 1798–1803. The Montreal merchants claimed that imports of liquor then soared to 50,000 gallons annually. See Samuel Hull Wilcocke, Simon McGillivray, and Edward Ellice, A Narrative of Occurrences in the Indian Countries of North America, since the Connection of the Right Hon. The Earl of Selkirk with the Hudson’s Bay Company . . . (London: B. McMillan, 1817), viii–x.

  10. Wallace, ed., Documents Relating to the North West Company, 268–69.

  11. Daniel Francis, “Traders and Indians,” in The Prairie West: Historical Readings, R. Douglas Francis and Howard Palmer, eds. (Edmonton: Pica Pica Press, 1985), 64.

  12. Henry, The Journal of Alexander Henry the Younger, 2:405.

  13. McLoughlin, “Description of the Indians from Fort William to Lake of the Woods,” 13.

  14. Colin G. Calloway, Crown and Calumet: British-Indian Relations, 1783–1815 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 152–54.

  CHAPTER 16. THE RESTIVE PARTNERSHIP

  1. Douglas MacKay, The Honourable Company: A History of the Hudson’s Bay Company (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1936), 47–48; Eric W. Morse, Canoe Routes of the Voyageurs: The Geography and Logistics of the Canadian Fur Trade (Ottawa: Royal Canadian Geographical Society, 1962), 9.

  2. Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada, 237–38.

  3. Campbell, The North West Company, 35–36, 112–14; David Thompson, Travels in Western North America, 1784–1812, Victor G. Hopwood, ed. (Toronto: MacMillan of Canada, 1971), 120.

  4. Gregg A. Young, “The Organization of the Transfer of Furs at Fort William: A Study of Historical Geography,” Thunder Bay Historical Museum Society Papers and Records 2 (1974), 30–32; Joseph D. Winterburn, “Lac La Pluie Bills Lading, 1806–1809,” in Morrison, ed., Lake Superior to Rainy Lake, 59.

  5. Theodore Catton, The Environment and the Fur Trade Experience in Voyageurs National Park, 1730–1870, Special History Report prepared for the National Park Service (Missoula, MT: Historical Research Associates, Inc., 2000), 74–75.

  6. Francis, “Traders and Indians,” 51.

  7. Louise Phelps Kellogg, The British Regime in Wisconsin and the Northwest (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1935),
103; Wallace, ed., Documents Relating to the North-West Co., passim.

  8. Francis, “Traders and Indians,” 51.

  9. Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada, 258.

  CHAPTER 17. THE PEMMICAN WAR

  1. John A. Alwin, “Pelts, Provisions and Perceptions: The Hudson’s Bay Company Mandan Indian Trade, 1795–1812,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 29, no. 3 (July 1979), 17–27; Catton, The Environment and the Fur Trade Experience in Voyageurs National Park, 1730–1870, 7–9.

  2. Thompson, Travels in Western North America, 89.

  3. George Colpitts, Pemmican Empire: Food, Trade, and the Last Bison Hunts in the North American Plains, 1780–1882 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 94–97.

  4. John Morgan Gray, Lord Selkirk of Red River (London: MacMillan & Co., Ltd.), 16–20, 56–66; Alexander Ross, The Red River Settlement: Its Rise, Progress, and Present State (1856, reprint, Minneapolis: Ross and Haines, Inc., 1957), 16–18.

  5. Campbell, The North West Company, 202–3.

  6. John Perry Pritchett, The Red River Valley, 1811–1849: A Regional Study (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1942), 56–87.

  7. Ibid., 79, 128–39.

  8. MacKay, The Honourable Company, 135–38; Campbell, The North West Company, 205–08.

  9. Wilcocke, McGillivray, and Ellice, A Narrative of Occurrences in the Indian Countries of North America, 24–28, and Appendix, 28; Pritchett, The Red River Valley, 141.

  10. J. M. Bumsted, Lord Selkirk, A Life (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2009), 245.

  11. Quoted in Gray, Lord Selkirk of Red River, 104.

  12. Wallace, ed., Documents Relating to the North West Company, 290; Morrison, ed., The North West Company in Rebellion, 36; Burt Brown Barker, “McLoughlin’s Proprietory Account with North West Company,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 45, no. 3 (September 1944), 39–40.

  13. Quoted in Morrison, Outpost, 74–75. Emphasis in the original.

  14. Wallace, ed., Documents Relating to the North West Company, 291.

  15. Quoted in Pritchett, The Red River Valley, 148.

  16. Gray, Lord Selkirk of Red River, 106; Morrison, ed., The North West Company in Rebellion, 12.

  17. Chapin, ed., “Letters of John McLoughlin,” 330–31.

  18. Campbell, The North West Company, 212–13; Pritchett, The Red River Valley, 150–54.

  19. Tanner, Narrative, 205.

  20. John McLoughlin, Lac La Pluie Post Journal for 1823–1824, HBCA, B.105/a/9 (entry for September 1, 1823).

  21. Tanner, Narrative, 205.

  CHAPTER 18. THE BATTLE OF SEVEN OAKS

  1. Morrison, ed., The North West Company in Rebellion, 27–29.

  2. Ibid., 24.

  3. Ibid., 28.

  4. Ibid., 30.

  5. Quoted in Gray, Lord Selkirk of Red River, 135.

  6. Pritchett, The Red River Valley, 172.

  7. John Halkett, Statement Respecting the Earl of Selkirk’s Settlement upon the Red River (1817; reprint, Toronto: Coles Publishing Co., 1970), 101.

  8. Quoted in B. C. Payette, The Northwest (Montreal: Printed privately for Payette Radio Limited, 1964), 442.

  9. Quoted in Gray, Lord Selkirk of Red River, 148.

  10. Halkett, Statement, xxxi, xlviii, lxvi; Morrison, Outpost, 84; Pritchett, The Red River Valley, 178–79.

  11. Pritchett, The Red River Valley, 179.

  12. Ibid., 180; “Summary of Evidence in the Controversy between the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North-West Company. Reprinted from Papers relating to the Red River Settlement, 1815–19. Ordered by House of Commons to be printed July 19, 1819.” In Collections of the State Historical Society of North Dakota, Vol. 4 (Fargo, ND: Knight Printing Co., 1913), 553.

  CHAPTER 19. THE SURRENDER OF FORT WILLIAM

  1. Campbell, The North West Company, 223–24; Gray, Lord Selkirk of Red River, 153–54.

  2. Halkett, Statement, 60, lxxxv; Wilcocke, McGillivray, and Ellice, A Narrative of Occurrences in the Indian Countries of North America, 63–67; Gray, Lord Selkirk of Red River, 129, 137; Pritchett, The Red River Valley, 181–85.

  3. Gray, Lord Selkirk of Red River, 155.

  4. Halkett, Statement, xcii.

  5. “Summary of Evidence in the Controversy between the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North-West Company,” 556–62.

  6. Halkett, Statement, xcii–xciii; Gray, Lord Selkirk of Red River, 156–57.

  7. Halkett, Statement, xciii.

  8. Ibid., 67.

  9. Ibid., xciv; Gray, Lord Selkirk of Red River, 163.

  10. Campbell, The North West Company, 230–31.

  11. Wilcocke, McGillivray, and Ellice, A Narrative of Occurrences in the Indian Countries of North America, 82.

  CHAPTER 20. LORD SELKIRK’S PRISONER

  1. Halkett, Statement, 179–83, lxxxvii–lxxxviii; Nicholas Garry, “Diary of Nicholas Garry,” in Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, 2nd Series, Vol. 6 (Ottawa: James Hope & Son, 1900), 113; Wilcocke, McGillivray, and Ellice, A Narrative of Occurrences in the Indian Countries of North America, 102–3; Morrison, Outpost, 89–90.

  2. S. Marinozzi, G. Bertazzoni, and V. Gazzaniga, “Rescuing the Drowned: Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation and the Origins of Emergency Medicine in the Eighteenth Century,” Internal Emergency Medicine 6, no. 4 (August 2011), 353–56.

  3. T. C. Elliott, “Documentary Letters of Dr. John McLoughlin,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 22, no. 3 (September 1922), 366, 370; Morrison, Outpost, 95, 97, 99, 103.

  4. Halkett, Statement, lxxxix.

  5. Ibid.

  6. Ibid., lxxxviii–lxxxix; Payette, The Northwest, 414; Morrison, Outpost, 92.

  7. Gray, Lord Selkirk of Red River, 240–77; Bumsted, Lord Selkirk, 331–58.

  8. Morrison, Outpost, 93.

  9. Barker, The McLoughlin Empire and its Rulers, 169.

  10. Report of the Proceedings connected with the disputes between the Earl of Selkirk and the North West Company at the Assizes Held at York in Upper Canada, October 1818 (Montreal: Printed by James Lane and Narum Howes, 1819), passim.

  11. Report of the Proceedings, 215.

  CHAPTER 21. TIME OF RECKONING

  1. Brown, Strangers in Blood, 107–10.

  2. Halkett, Statement, cv–xcvi.

  3. Barker, The McLoughlin Empire and its Rulers, 171.

  4. Barker, “McLoughlin Proprietory Account with North West Company,” 44. The page from the ledger, which is reproduced in the Oregon Historical Quarterly, leaves room for various interpretations. Furthermore, McLoughlin’s letters refer to other accounts besides this one, so it would seem that the North West Company ledger book presents at best an incomplete picture of McLoughlin’s finances. For example, McLoughlin stated to his Uncle Simon in 1820 that he had sent a total of £500 to his family since 1816. But this does not necessarily contradict Barker’s assessment, and as Barker also points out, after the North West Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company amalgamated in 1821, McLoughlin remained in debt to his new employer until 1829.

  5. Colin Robertson, Colin Robertson’s Correspondence Book, September 1817 to September 1822, edited by E. E. Rich, assisted by R. Harvey Fleming (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1939), 82.

  6. Statement by David McLoughlin, June 20, 1901, OHSC, MSS 927, Box 1.

  7. Campbell, The North West Company, 248–49; MacKay, The Honourable Company, 151–52.

  8. Quoted in Lamb, ed., McLoughlin’s Fort Vancouver Letters, xlii; W. Kaye Lamb, “Dr. John McLoughlin,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online at www.biographi.ca .

  9. Quoted in ibid.

  10. Ibid., xliii.

  11. Campbell, The North West Company, 255–56.

  12. Lamb, ed., McLoughlin’s Fort Vancouver Letters, xliv; Campbell, The North West Company, 256; Davidson, The North West Company, 175; Morrison, Outpost, 99.

  13. Barker, The McLoughlin Empire and its Rulers, 170–71.

  14. Lamb, ed., McLoughlin’s Fort Vancouver Letters, xlv; Ro
bertson, Colin Robertson’s Correspondence Book, cv.

  CHAPTER 22. LONDON

  1. Robertson quoted in Peter C. Newman, Caesars of the Wilderness: Company of Adventurers, Vol. 2 (New York: Viking, 1987), 184.

  2. Ibid., 184–86; Campbell, The North West Company, 244–45; MacKay, The Honourable Company, 150–51.

  3. Robertson, Colin Robertson’s Correspondence Book, 139.

  4. Ibid., 138–39.

  5. Ibid., 139.

  6. “Now and Then, London,” The Beaver: Magazine of the North Outfit 300 (Spring 1970), 24; Diary of Woodfall’s Register (London), January 26, 1790.

  7. Stella Margetson, Regency London (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1971), 12–13.

  8. G. E. Mingay, Georgian London (London: B. T. Batsford, Ltd., 1975), 86–88.

  9. Margetson, Regency London, 62–65; Paul Johnson, The Birth of the Modern: World Society, 1815–1830 (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1991), 458–62.

  10. Robertson, Colin Robertson’s Correspondence Book, 142; MacKay, The Honourable Company, 158–62; Newman, Caesars of the Wilderness, 206–7.

  11. Newman, Caesars of the Wilderness, 204–5.

  12. Robertson, Colin Robertson’s Correspondence Book, 142–43.

  13. Ibid., 145.

  14. Lamb, ed., McLoughlin’s Fort Vancouver Letters, xlvii; MacKay, The Honourable Company, 158.

  15. John S. Galbraith, The Hudson’s Bay Company as an Imperial Factor, 1821–1869 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 14.

  16. Robertson, Colin Robertson’s Correspondence Book, cvi.

  17. Harold A. Innis, “Interrelations Between the Fur Trade of Canada and the United States,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 20, no. 3 (December 1933), 329.

  18. Richard G. Montgomery, The White-Headed Eagle: John McLoughlin, Builder of an Empire (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1934), 46; Brown, Strangers in Blood, 111–12; E. E. Rich, The History of the Hudson’s Bay Company, 1670–1870, Vol. 2, 1763–1870 (London: The Hudson’s Bay Record Society, 1959), 406–7.

  19. MacKay, The Honourable Company, 160.

  20. Ibid., 161–62.

  21. Ibid., 158–59.

  22. Morrison, Outpost, 107.

  23. Barker, The McLoughlin Empire and its Rulers, 84–85.