by Debra Komar
Thursday, April 21, 1842 — Midday
fort stikine
The last of the morning fog burned away as Louis Leclaire made a coffin, finishing the solemn task around eleven o’clock. The body of John McLoughlin was laid inside and the lid securely nailed. For want of a better location, the box was then taken from the carpentry shop to the bathhouse. As the pallbearers laid the casket down, Urbain Heroux surprised everyone by pleading, “My friends, pray do not suspect me. I have a wife and child to provide for and I am not wicked enough to commit such a deed.” His defence rang hollow, for no one within earshot questioned Heroux’s capacity for evil. To soothe the simmering tensions, “McPherson gave the men a dram” of spirits. It was a curious choice, given how poorly the last round of drinks had gone down, but it was the only way he knew to buy the men’s loyalty. As dusk approached, the fort’s complement settled in for a fitful night.
The morning of April 23, 1842, dawned clear, with a light westerly wind. The time had come to commit John McLoughlin’s remains to the Sandy Hills. The fort’s journal records the event without sentiment: “The men were employed digging the grave for the body and about 12:00 at noon it was deposited in the ground.” Ceremony was hard to come by. They lowered the fort’s flag to half-mast, and “the corpse was carried to the grave by Lasserte, Pressé, Leclaire, and some Kanakas, but Urbain did not touch it.” As the coffin hit bedrock, “the salute of a gun” rang out across the barren tidal plain. The grave was dug some distance from the fort, just beyond the high-water line, and marked with a rugged wooden cross. In a final hollow gesture, “the men drank another dram,” a cynical toast to their fallen leader’s good health.
Unwanted, unwelcome, and unprotected, McLoughlin’s wife left the fort immediately after the burial, running back to the shelter of her father, the tribal chief. As “McLoughlin’s wife” once again became “Quatkie’s daughter,” life at Fort Stikine returned to normal, or what passes for normal in hell. Time, tide, and fur wait for no man, and the day’s journal recordsthe officers of Stikine traded “five black bear skins for various articles” that afternoon. They also welcomed visitors when “Several canoes arrived from up the river.” John McLoughlin was not yet two hours in the ground, and already every last trace of him had been erased.
thirteen
Endgames
The Hudson’s Bay Company closed the book on the death of John McLoughlin, but the fallout reverberated for years. Dr. McLoughlin never relented, even when all hope of victory (as he defined it) was lost. He ignored Simpson’s edict and ordered his son’s body exhumed, but the remains were too decomposed to autopsy. John Jr. was reinterred at Fort Vancouver on October 25, 1843, in a “divine Service which was chanted for him.” His bones were buried “on the rising ground near to the woods” in a simple ceremony attended by his parents, Paul Fraser, and James Douglas. The removal of McLoughlin’s mortal remains from Stikine began as an impotent protest, but the gesture soon transformed into a powerful symbol of paternal love and guilt. His grave was marked and faithfully tended by his father in a display of care rarely evident during McLoughlin’s tumultuous life.
As for the fort that had witnessed such misery, it continued to be dogged by intrigue and scandal: “Stikine remained open long enough to fill a few more despatches with news about another plot against officers’ lives.” Simpson’s plan to phase out the west coast trading posts soon came to pass. Fort Tako was closed as scheduled, and Stikine was abandoned in 1849, although Simpson insisted McLoughlin’s murder did not figure in his decision. The fort closures were entirely a matter of economics, as over-trapping had “beavered out” the region, and “the posts were not remunerative.”
John McLoughlin Jr. was not the only casualty of Fort Stikine. The outpost’s first commander, William Rae, also met his end with a single bullet. In Simpson’s 1832 assessment of the troops, Rae earned praise as “a very fine high spirited well conducted Young man…Stout, Strong and active,” who also happened to be “quite a Mechanical Genius.” Blindness in one eye disqualified Rae “from constant Desk Work,” but the Governor marked him as “a rising Man in the country.” Simpson later hand-picked Rae to establish a new California outpost, but that fort struggled from its inception. When Simpson visited Yerba Buena in 1841, he dismissed the location (now downtown San Francisco) as “a wretched place.” The Governor saved some disdain for Rae, berating him for granting easy credit to settlers. Sir George, thoroughly disgusted with the fort’s limp bottom line, ordered the post closed. Dr. McLoughlin wanted to give Rae more time to turn things around and delayed the closure, but Simpson was adamant. On the morning of January 19, 1845, William Rae took his company-issue revolver and “shot himself in his wife’s bedroom.”
Rae had always been a troubled man. He was a heavy drinker and had “indulged in a torrid affair with a Spanish woman.” Yet Dr. McLoughlin blamed Simpson for the man’s death, just as he blamed the Governor for all of life’s misfortunes. In another rambling, bitter letter to Pelly and the London Committee, McLoughlin placed Rae’s suicide on Simpson’s shoulders, citing the closure of the outpost in Yerba Buena as the catalyst for his son-in-law’s downward spiral. Sir George counterpunched, saying Rae had simply “collapsed under the strain of work and alcoholism.” Whatever culpability Simpson or the Company had in the man’s death, the net result was the same: less than four years later, the HBC closed its operations in California and retreated northward.
Rae’s body and soul lingered in the abandoned outpost, producing a curious footnote. In 1858, workmen digging new sewer lines near the old Yerba Buena trading post found a “glass-covered coffin containing the headless remains of Rae.” These remains were buried later in a less fraught location, forever freeing him from the clutches of the Honourable Company.
The fort at the mouth of the Stikine River — that hell upon earth with a sink of pollution — had been operational for less than five years, but it had extracted a heavy price from Dr. John McLoughlin. The fur trade had made him a very wealthy man, but it had stolen everything of value, and the doctor tallied his losses with a simple equation: “Sir George Simpson’s Visit here in 1841 has cost me Dear.”
The unnatural deaths in his family were not the only price Dr. McLoughlin paid. His erratic behaviour had unnerved Governor Pelly, and in the spring of 1844 the London Committee decided to terminate McLoughlin’s superintendency of the Columbia District. In a terse letter from the board, the doctor was told “he would no longer be in charge west of the mountains, and he was on furlough and leave of absence from mid-1846.” Broken in heart and spirit, he vacated Fort Vancouver as soon as the notice arrived in 1845, although technically he would remain in the Company’s employ until 1849.McLoughlin’s unquenchable rage at the mishandling of his son’s death forever tainted his view of the corporation to which he had given his life’s blood, but it was not the only reason he and the Company parted ways. A few of the doctor’s contemporaries thought the falling-out had more to do with his rabid commitment to the territory of Oregon. In his 1878 oral history of the region, J. Quinn Thornton claimed the rift developed over the HBC’s treatment of immigrants. The popular media of the age was filled with favourable depictions of the west coast’s limitless bounties, and those images enticed scores of desperate families to the Pacific Northwest. Many of the pioneers were poorly equipped, and few had any experience in growing crops so far north; as a result, hundreds soon teetered on the brink of starvation. Dr. McLoughlin could not allow American settlers to starve, even if those homesteaders threatened the HBC’s monopoly, and his compassion put him at odds with Company policies. McLoughlin told his superiors: “I found women & children there in a suffering condition; they were in want of food & clothing & while, as a Trader, I could have wished they had not come, yet as a man and as a Christian, I could not turn away from them.” Thornton recalled how battle lines were drawn after “Dr. McLaughlin [sic] furnished them with seed & Cattle & some tea. His fellow officers found fault with this and ac
cused him of assisting the Americans to occupy the country; that without such assistance they could not sustain themselves here and must leave. He said he did not wish them to come but they were here and he could not see them suffer.”
Tales of the doctor’s largesse reached George Simpson, who called McLoughlin on his reckless charity and “generous treatment of potential American settlers.” The two adversaries also differed over how to harvest the Pacific coast. Simpson’s policy was “to destroy [the fur-bearing animals] along the whole frontier,” ensuring “every effort be made to lay waste the country, so as to offer no inducements to petty traders to encroach on the Company’s limits.” Dr. McLoughlin had always known their fur trading days were numbered, and so he established mills and farms to help sustain the employees. Simpson thought it was all a colossal waste of time, preferring to trap a region clean and move on, sustainability be damned. Their fiercest disagreement, however, pivoted on whether the HBC should use ships, as Simpson advocated, or fixed trading posts (McLoughlin’s method of choice) to service the west coast. The two men almost came to blows over a single vessel, the SS Beaver, a hulking steamship Simpson had commissioned in hopes of “overawing the natives,” but which Dr. McLoughlin dismissed as “a travelling circus.” If you look closely, you can see the ghost of John McLoughlin Jr. hovering over every conflict.
Whatever professional alliance Simpson and McLoughlin once had, the two men no longer saw eye to eye on anything, least of all how best to deal with people. Both were dangerously pig-headed, willing to fight to the death to be proven right. They held wildly divergent business philosophies: Simpson was myopic and favoured minimal investment, while McLoughlin was in it for the long, expensive haul. They were also oceans apart when it came to their goals, for Simpson was running a company while McLoughlin was building a new world.
Something had to give. The Committee summoned Dr. McLoughlin to London and “rebuked him sharply” for his actions with the settlers, as well as for his disregard of Simpson’s orders. The doctor could take no more. McLoughlin squared his shoulders, steeled himself with all the dignity he could muster, and in a cool calm voice declared: “Gentlemen, I have served you some many years.…I have served you faithfully and the Hudson’s Bay Company service under my administration has achieved a wonderful success.…And I will serve you no longer.” With that, the doctor “threw up his commission” and resigned.
McLoughlin’s exit was graceful, but in his letter of resignation to Governor Pelly, he wrote: “I have Drunk and am Drinking the cup of Bitterness to the very Dregs…So Distressed am I at being disgraced and Degraded.” His ignominy did not stop at the water’s edge, for there remained the issue of an outstanding debt he had incurred for the materials given to the American immigrants. Out of sheer spite, Simpson wanted McLoughlin to pay back the balance owing on the credit he had extended to the settlers, but it was a bill the doctor never paid.
Simpson could be ruthless, but he was not entirely without heart. After McLoughlin formally resigned, Sir George — who had once cut off the doctor’s pay to teach him a lesson — did not fight the Committee when they voted to award McLoughlin “a very generous pension.” It was the closest Simpson ever came to benevolence.
In his heyday, Dr. McLoughlin had been feared, but in his senescence he was to be pitied. His son’s death, and his subsequent abdication from the Honourable Company, left him a shadow of his former mountainous self; “his word was no longer law…he had, at the age of sixty-one, like Samson, been shorn of his power.” The resignation had stripped him of all authority and wounded his pride, leaving him “fairly crushed in a business like but kingly way.”
He retired to Oregon City and applied for US citizenship, hoping to find solace among those he had once helped, but the settlers now viewed him with suspicion. Certain “American demagogues” accused McLoughlin of having “caused American citizens to be massacred by hundreds of savages.” It was a stinging rejection of their guardian angel, who once claimed to have “saved all I could.”
The man who would one day be heralded as the “Father of Oregon” received no such recognition in his lifetime, and he spent the remainder of his days in “a continuous protest against this dethronement.” Riddled with guilt, cast aside by the fur trade, and set adrift in a hostile land not his own, McLoughlin filled his final days and letters with acrimonious regret: “I might better have been shot forty years ago than to have lived here and tried to build up a family and an estate.”
His bitterness was briefly tempered by a single piece of paper, a document the doctor “prized most” in this world. His salvation came in the form of an Apostolic Brief, dated February 27, 1846, and signed by His Excellency Pope Gregory XVI. The brief declared John McLoughlin Sr. to be a Knight of St. Gregory the Great. The honour, bestowed on civilian and military Roman Catholics for outstanding service to the Holy See, came as a great comfort to McLoughlin in his darkest hour. It was printed on the finest vellum, the sort of stock normally reserved for diplomas or currency. The proclamation bore enough embossed seals to assure its authenticity and was accompanied by a red and yellow ribbon affixed to a medal, an octagonal cross to be worn “at the breast on the left side after the ordinary fashion of Knights.” For a man terrified of introspection, this last token of external validation sustained him in his final days. Dr. John McLoughlin died in stiff-lipped discontent on September 3, 1857. He was seventy-three.
His wife, Marguerite Wadin McKay McLoughlin, outlived the first of her sons and the latter of her husbands. She died on February 25, 1860, at the family home in Oregon City. Marguerite had never shared the piety that earned her husband his papal knighthood, and as she lay on her deathbed, she initially refused the sacraments. For the sake of appearances, the local archbishop dispatched some nuns from St. Mary’s Academy in Portland to attend Marguerite in her final hours. She tolerated this eleventh-hour scrimmage to save her soul, lingering for five days “in a sort of agony which is at length terminated by a most peaceful death.”
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A disillusionment of sorts also plagued the saga’s last surviving headliner, Sir George Simpson. After his knighthood, Simpson bullied his way into the gentrified class, leaving behind his carefully crafted persona as the rugged “wilderness administrator” to become “a diplomat and international financier.” For a man devoid of a moral core, the shift was disquietingly simple, but the transition was not without difficulties. Splitting his focus robbed him of his power base within the HBC, which he had taken to calling the “harassing service.” As he felt his dominance slipping, the Governor overcompensated with frivolous ceremony and empty ritual. His annual inspection tours devolved “into theatrical productions,” and it became difficult to take the little man seriously. By the 1850s, Simpson’s “swath of absolute power could no longer hold,” and he was progressively marginalized by the company he once ruled.
His few remaining cronies stepped in to salvage his wounded ego. They arranged for the Governor to be presented with “a very valuable piece of plate…as a mark of respect and esteem; and as proof of his popularity,” a ridiculous bit of burlesque conjured up by those seeking the favour of a dying king. To commission the meaningless trophy, Simpson’s covey of minions took up a petition, forcing others to sign, “well knowing that none dare refuse.” Simpson had earned such odium, for he had crafted the Company in his own image, infecting every last crevice with his “pontifical sternness” and incurable need to belittle others for his own amusement.
Simpson appeared indestructible, but the lone chink in his armour had always been his health. He was convinced he suffered from “determination of blood to the head,” a condition which holds no modern equivalent. He often groused of chronic headaches, what he called “my old complaint in the head,” brought on by his frequent bouts of insomnia. Cold weather inevitably triggered “affections of the Lungs and Bowels,” and his delicate constitution was further taxed by overwork. Simpson both complained and boasted that he “fagged Night & D
ay and became so unwell in consequence.” He obsessed over his own well-being, convinced he would be struck down at any moment by an attack of apoplexy. Others suffered for his fear, including William Todd, the chief trader and surgeon of the Red River outpost, as Simpson kept Todd on call around the clock. Simpson demanded to be bled almost to the point of exsanguination, a request Todd often refused at the risk of being fired. Simpson was so accustomed to having his orders followed and was so anxious to receive Todd’s ministrations that when the surgeon was summoned to bleed him, he always found the Governor with his “arm bared up and ready for the operation.” A diagnosis of hypochondria would not be out of the question.
Given his druthers, Simpson would have lived and ruled forever, but his mortality won out in the end. Failing health and a lifetime of excess took their toll on the once immutable Caesar, and in 1844, Simpson ordered long-time HBC employee Duncan Finlayson and his wife, Isobel (Frances Simpson’s sister), to move into his palatial estate in Lachine to serve as his personal assistant and nurse. At this stage in his life, there were few people Simpson could trust. The Finlaysons reluctantly agreed and were soon ensconced in the servant’s quarters, replete with a soul-crushing view of the HBC warehouse across the way. Finlayson complained privately to a friend that he hated his “enforced intimacy with the governor, who was accustomed to having his own way,” and confessed he intended to resign from the service simply to be rid of Simpson.