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 accused 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.”

§

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 & Day 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.

Sir George had only been thinking of his own welfare when he ordered the Finlaysons to move in, but it was soon Frances who was in need of constant care. Always fragile, she had never adapted to the ceaseless travel that was a major part of her life as Sir George’s better half. In her final days she sat, pale and consumptive, racked with a persistent cough that threatened to tear her twig-boned frame asunder. Frances was no match for the ravages of tuberculosis and died peacefully at home on March 21, 1853. She was just forty years old.

§

By the mid-nineteenth century, the HBC’s monopoly was under siege on all fronts. A new wave of settlers encroached on Company-held territory after the railroad opened the American west, and many pioneers crept northward in search of arable land. Those years also saw the deaths of many of the key players in the fur trade, including Pelly, Peter Skene Ogden, and John Rowand. The changes threatened to sink Simpson, and his detractors delighted in his lost potency. Edward Ermatinger gleefully chronicled his decline: “Our old Chief, Sir George, as you describe him, tottering under the infirmities of age, has seen his best days. His light canoe, with choice of men, and of women too! can no longer administer to his gratification.” Yet despite their prognostications as to his limited future, Simpson soldiered on, so much so that “some suspected he must be in league with the powers of darkness.”

Simpson’s pact with Satan was leading him into dangerous territory with the HBC. By his own reckoning, the Company’s charter was now of little value, and Simpson argued it was best sold while others still saw some worth in its holdings. The charter was offered first to the obvious choice: the English. The British government, however, knew all too well what troubles lurked in Rupert’s Land and decided to pass, leaving Canada as the lone potential buyer. Unfortunately, in 1850, the colony could not afford to purchase the territory. It wanted the land for free, as a large and vocal segment of the Canadian populace felt the region was rightfully theirs. Those in favour of annexation waged a ruthless campaign, attacking the Company’s monopoly and its flagrant exploitation of the aboriginal people. A groundswell of support grew louder as the anti-HBC rhetoric (which included calls for the expansion of western settlement and the promise of prime farming land) found a receptive audience.

Simpson tried to stem the tide by declaring the country to be useless for agriculture or settlement by Europeans. The Governor was called before the Canadian Parliament to represent the interests of the Honourable Company, where he emphatically announced, “I do not think that any part of the Hudson’s Bay territory are well adapted for settlement.” He was even less discreet in private, telling John McTavish he was “quite disgusted with the country.”

Simpson’s clumsy defence of the Company angered its senior members and converted Dunbar Douglas, the sixth Earl of Selkirk, once an ardent Simpson supporter, into an outspoken advocate for the Governor’s retirement. Selkirk called Simpson’s lacklustre performance at Parliament a “wretched expedition,” and the lord’s displeasure was soon shared by the Committee as a whole, which came to see Simpson as “deficient in sound judgement,” and felt “his nerves had quite given way.” Conveniently forgetting his prior calls to sell off the charter, Simpson reversed his stance and began campaigning to retain the HBC’s monopoly. The sale of Rupert’s Land was temporarily shelved.

With his wife dead and the Committee no longer in his thrall, Simpson made do as best he could. He sloughed off the care of his four legitimate children to lesser mortals and resumed a punishing work schedule, but his health continued to decline. Simpson shrank in frame and persona, and his once inexhaustible dynamism was reduced to a simpering mewl. Seizures and intermittent bouts of idiopathic blindness kept him bedridden until even he was forced to concede he could no longer fulfill his professional obligations. As he had so often said of others, “’Tis high time he should make room for a better man,” even as he steadfastly maintained there were no better men than he.

Faced with the inevitable, Simpson tendered his resignation in a confidential yet surprisingly emotional letter to the Committee. He reflected on his four decades of service: “I have never been off duty for a week at a time, nor have I ever allowed Family ties and personal convenience to come in competition with the claims I considered the Company to have on me.” He also developed a strangely nostalgic view of life in Canada, fondly recalling his days in the bush. He often sighed “for the Indian Country, the squaws, and skins, and savages,” the same aboriginals he had so ruthlessly disparaged while in their domain. Following his resignation, he stepped back from the Company’s day-to-day operations, but he retained a ceremonial role that left one foot firmly planted in Rupert’s Land.

The first test of Simpson as decorous figurehead came in the summer of 1860 when he was asked to play host to the Prince of Wales during his tour of the colony. Simpson wanted the future monarch’s inspection of Île Dorval to eclipse his prior stops in the Maritimes and Montreal, visits much lauded by the press. To that end, Sir George crafted an excessive bit of pageantry grounded in his fond remembrances of a once-vibrant fur trade. He arranged for a flotilla of canoes, but as the vast majority of traditional Canadian voyageurs were now dead or retired, Simpson was forced to marshal the services of some local Iroquois. The Governor thought the aboriginals were second rate, claiming they could not hold a candle to the “dash, vivacity and song” of the Metis.

On August 29, 1860, His Royal Highness made his way toward Dorval in the imperial carriage. Three miles out, the party boarded a barge to cross to the island and Simpson’s waiting extravaganza. Rain had plagued their voyage, but as the ferry approached the dock, sunlight burst from the heavens. Taking their cue from the weather, the flotilla of canoes (each bearing twenty men) descended on the royal retinue. Frustrated by the lack of proper voyageurs, Simpson had overcompensated by dressing the men in war paint, feathers, and red serge, transforming his actual Iroquois into stereotypical “Indians” suitable for the European palate. All who witnessed the theatrics declared Simpson’s effusive display to be “a social triumph.”

For one brief moment, Sir George Simpson had reclaimed the admiration of the London Committee, and he intended to make the most of it. On September 1 he took a final victory lap through the HBC offices in Montreal, giving his former colleagues ample opportunity to congratulate him. Drenched in felicitations, Simpson then mounted his carriage and was headed to his home in Lachine when he fell violently ill. He took to his bed, where he languished for six days, drifting in and out of lucidity. One moment he thought his nurses were trying to murder him, while the next, struck by a wave of guilt-induced generosity, Simpson wrote sizable bonus cheques to his long-time employees. After his death, the executors of his estate refused to honour the drafts, claiming the very existence of such gifts proved Sir George was not of sound mind when he issued them.

John Henry Lefroy, a scientist who travelled throughout Rupert’s Land, once joked that Simpson was “a fellow whom nothing will kill,” a hyperbole that begged to be refuted. In the end, George Simpson died at half past ten on September 7, 1860, the victim of his own faulty circulatory system. His official cause of death was haemorrhagic apoplexy, with convulsion —Victorian medical speak for a massive stroke — although historian Frits Pannekoek is convinced Simpson actually succumbed to tertiary syphilis. Given the damn-the-torpedoes manner in which he lived, Governor Simpson died with far less fuss than one might expect.

This being Simpson, however, fuss was inevitable. He was laid to rest at Mount Royal Cemetery in Montreal beneath a monument fit for an emperor, a job description to which he aspired and arguably ascended. He no doubt would have loved the pomp and circumstance accompanying his funeral, although his ego would not have allowed him to see that many in attendance were more jubilant than mournful. Even in death, his enemies were legion. Far more curious was the seemingly authentic display of grief from representatives of the First Nations community. As the funeral procession wended its way to the cemetery, “the Caughnawaga Indians escorted the melancholy cortege…the red men and their squaws sung a wild, and doleful but solemn dirge,” a tender and somewhat remarkable show of respect for a man who had shown them nothing but contempt. The few who still harboured warm feelings for Sir George took some measure of comfort from the timing of his death. Dugald Mactavish observed: “The Little Emperor’s light has gone out, just after he basked in a final blaze of glory.”

Simpson was gone but his legacy was secure. Even his detractors conceded his reign had been a success, just as surely as “his own friends will admit that much of that success must be ascribed to his good fortune rather than to his talents.”

Over Simpson’s dead body, Canada finally purchased the rights to the Company lands, assuming ownership on December 1, 1869. Sir George Simpson and Dr. John McLoughlin helped build the Hudson’s Bay Company into one of the most profitable corporations in the world, and their creation outlasted them both. The monopoly once denounced for doing business “as if drawn by a dead horse” lives on in the venerable department stores that bear its name and still sell the iconic striped point blankets that were the currency of its trading days. Three of its largest forts became provincial capitals — Fort Garry (now Winnipeg), Fort Edmonton, and Fort Victoria —while others, such as Fort Vancouver and Fort William, have been preserved as national heritage sites.

Not surprisingly, nothing remains of Fort Stikine. The fort lay abandoned until 1868, when the US military built Fort Wrangell near Stikine’s crumbling, waterlogged footprint. Those who ignore the lessons of the past are condemned to repeat them, and the American soldiers experienced the same horrific conditions as their HBC predecessors. The US army gave up the site as a lost cause in 1877. The city of Wrangell rose slowly around the fort’s listing walls, although a fire in the early 1950s razed all traces of the town’s historic past. Those visiting Wrangell today would be hard pressed to find any sign of the fort, John McLoughlin Jr., or this sad chapter in the Hudson’s Bay Company’s history.

§

Justice does not always look the way we want it to. John McLoughlin Jr. did not deserve to die as he did, nor did he earn the character assassination that followed. We cannot retroactively punish McPherson or Heroux, but we can amend our image of the victim. Let history record that John McLoughlin Jr., the so-called bastard of Fort Stikine, was neither a bastard by birth nor in bearing; he was simply a fatherless son. The indifferent response to his death spoke more to the damaged character of George Simpson than it did of McLoughlin’s failings. There was nothing about his death that was “justifiable.”

It bears noting this case was always solvable, for this was not a murder that lay dormant for decades, patiently awaiting the advent of new technologies in order to be resolved. No genetic testing or cutting-edge computer simulations were needed to ferret out the identity of those responsible. Ultimately, all that was required was an impartial eye and a systematic assessment of the evidence. This crime could have been solved the day it was committed, were it not for Governor Simpson, Dr. McLoughlin, and their respective agendas and personality disorders.

The mechanics of the crime are now credibly established. Urbain Heroux fired the fatal shot, at the urging of Thomas McPherson, and with the help of Pierre Kannaquassé and Antoine Kawannassé. More than 170 years on, even the question of why can be addressed with some certainty. An exhaustive search of the historical archive has yielded all the relevant information touching on the murder of John McLoughlin. What gaps remain will likely never be filled, given the capricious whims of time, but the motivation of those involved was clear.

Although Dr. John McLoughlin was quick to label what happened at Fort Stikine a mutinous conspiracy, the truth is far more mundane. It was a conspiracy, in that there were multiple perpetrators acting in concert, but it was not mutiny. In the end, Thomas McPherson did not stage a coup so much as throw a lethal temper tantrum. And so it falls to us as jurors to decide whether the killing of John McLoughlin was an act of treason or self-preservation, or the premeditated endgame of a petulant clerk and his malleable henchmen.

Perhaps the solution lies in the answer to another question: who was the real bastard of Fort Stikine? Although the epithet was first affixed to John McLoughlin, it no longer sticks. With so many reprehensible candidates on offer — Thomas McPherson, Urbain Heroux, Pierre Kannaquassé, George Simpson — it may be impossible to choose just one.

Murder is a loud word, and it easily distracts us from the second tragedy of Fort Stikine: the self-inflicted destruction of Dr. John McLoughlin. Embalmed alive by guilt and enshrouded by impotent rage, the doctor died alongside his son at Fort Stikine; it simply took him longer to lie down.

Some of us never learn to mourn, particularly great hulking “lords of the lands and the forests.” Dr. McLoughlin was a product of a time when men lived by their wits and the strength of their spines. Emotions were a luxury they could not afford, a trifle best suited to women. Dismissing McLoughlin’s inability to grieve as an artifact of his era or his sex is tempting but facile, for unprocessed sorrow can mire anyone, anytime, anywhere.

McLoughlin’s quicksand was his unacknowledged guilt. He needed the Company to assign the blame for his son’s death to Simpson so that he would not have to deal with his own culpability. He could have saved his son but he failed to act, to pay attention. This was a lifelong dynamic between the distant, demanding father and his untethered son who sought love and acceptance through his achievements.

Dr. McLoughlin demanded that the HBC, as the de facto legal system, deliver justice as he defined it, then railed when they refused to do so, a pattern that continues to manifest in courthouses to this day. Like McLoughlin, those who leave the courtroom disillusioned or bitter have entered with unrealistic expectations, narrow parameters for success, and the misguided belief that extracting their pound of flesh will alleviate their own suffering. We cannot expect the courts to do for us that which we cannot do for ourselves: make peace with our circumstances.

The pain we seek to avoid cannot be foisted onto others. Protection from harm, accountability, and punishment has its place in our collective search for justice, but it is not what brings peace. In the wake of tragedy and loss, the resolution must come from within.