three
The Honourable Company
John McLoughlin Jr. stumbled into manhood with no marketable skills, a poor reputation, and a bad attitude. As he contemplated his future with the HBC, his father was haunted by his own past. Fur held remarkably little interest for Dr. McLoughlin; true, it made him a very rich man, but the doctor seemed out of place in an industry devoid of diplomacy or fundamental decency. Medicine remained his first love, but his fateful run-in with an insolent British soldier had tied his fortunes to the North West Company (NWC), a Montreal-based fur trading concern that operated from 1779 to 1821 and “left behind a legacy of alcoholism, syphilis, [and] Mixed Blood babies.”
From its inception, the NWC was the chief rival and existential bane of the Hudson’s Bay Company. The HBC was bigger and had been in the game longer; the Company was granted its charter by King Charles II in 1670. The royal decree gave the firm monopoly over all land drained by the waters flowing into Hudson Bay, a region dubbed Rupert’s Land after the Company’s first governor. Prince Rupert was “a man of intense loyalties but few friends,” a description which proved equally applicable to the post’s later occupant, George Simpson.
From 1783 to 1820, the North West Company repeatedly challenged the supremacy of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Although the Nor’Westers initially concentrated their efforts in the United States, the War of 1812 forced the company north of the border, where it clashed with the HBC. The rivalry intensified as the years wore on, leading to some rather shady business practices. Both the HBC and NWC used liquor and trade goods to curry favour with the indigenous peoples in an effort to secure the choicest furs. When booze and baubles weren’t enough, NWC traders began telling the aboriginals the HBC planned to exterminate them, and a few scoundrels even whispered that the Company’s clerks mixed their trading tobacco with poison.
Despite the NWC’s questionable policies, Dr. McLoughlin enjoyed a cordial relationship with the First Nations at Kaministikwia. Indeed, he was “proud of having so many Indians employed and always held out to the missionaries that that was the way to civilize them, to teach them to work.” Those interactions had dire consequences, however, as European-derived diseases “scourged the poor Indians dreadfully.” Dr. McLoughlin soon realized the timing of outbreaks coincided with the arrival of the annual supply ships from London. Although the prophylactics available were limited and often suspect, he saw to it “all the Indians that could be got at were vaccinated.”
Dr. McLoughlin had witnessed first-hand the devastation wrought by the fur trade, and he wanted no part of it. He quietly put out feelers and was soon being courted by banking and other less offensive industries. On October 5, 1818, he ended a letter to Simon Fraser with a cryptic postscript: “Between you and me I have an offer to enter into Business in the civilized world — if I do not accept the proposal — it will be from want of capital. This is between us — no one else must know it.” McLoughlin and Fraser held true to their oath of secrecy, for no record survives as to the source of the offer. Given that Dr. McLoughlin remained in the employ of the North West Company, it is safe to assume he never acquired the necessary capital to fund his return to civilization.
As Dr. McLoughlin struggled to secure a brighter future, his employer was hitting hard times. The competition for control over the North American fur grounds had driven both the HBC and the NWC to the brink of bankruptcy. Although the HBC was larger and better funded, the NWC had two significant advantages: “sheer manpower,” and the “ability to make decisions on the spot,” rather than waiting for dictates from London. To save both organizations from fiscal destruction, a merger was proposed, and in 1821 both companies sent representatives to London to negotiate the terms. McLoughlin (then an NWC wintering partner at Fort William) agreed to serve as his company’s delegate at the conference. He quickly learned he was to be a decorative placeholder; he contributed nothing to the final negotiations, and the meeting ended with the Hudson’s Bay Company in full control of the Canadian fur trade. Disgusted, McLoughlin elected to spend the winter with his brother David in France. The siblings’ bond was “one of real affection,” the only truly equitable relationship in McLoughlin’s life, and he used the time to re-evaluate his priorities.
McLoughlin Sr. returned to Canada in January 1822, uncertain what the future held. When the Company restructured post-amalgamation, it allocated forty percent of the profits to its field traders, namely former HBC field officers and NWC wintering partners. McLoughlin was made an HBC chief factor, transforming him overnight from a salaried employee into a wealthy shareholder, and his first assignment under the new umbrella corporation was at Lac La Pluie.
The posting did not last long. The region was quickly trapped clean and, as the Company expanded westward, Dr. McLoughlin was transferred to Fort George on November 8, 1824. The change of scenery was not to the doctor’s liking. The local tribes were extremely hostile to Company operatives encroaching on their lands, and he was certain “the country was not worth a war.”
Despite the hardships, Dr. McLoughlin ruled over Fort George “with unorthodox methods and astounding results.” His love of innovation and refusal to toe the party line won him admirers and critics alike, and many of his underlings were convinced the doctor believed “too firmly in his own incorruptibility.” Governor Simpson argued both sides when he described McLoughlin Sr. as “very Zealous in the discharge of his public duties and a man of strict honour and integrity but a great stickler for rights and privileges [who] sets himself up for a righter of Wrongs.” Daughter Eloisa was equally conflicted: “I always heard that my Father had a good head. He was quick in trading with the Indians and could get on well with them.” Of course, it was to his benefit that his aboriginal colleagues “were afraid of him.…He was very large and strong, a straight and fine looking man and they were afraid of him.”
The Governor continued to have strong reservations, viewing McLoughlin as “a very bustling active man who can go through a great deal of business but is wanting in system and regularity, and has not the talent of managing the few associates & clerks under his authority.” Simpson also vacillated on the man’s character, as he found Dr. McLoughlin to be “a disagreeable man to do business with, as it is impossible to go with him in all things and a difference of opinion almost amounts to a declaration of hostilities, yet a good hearted man and a pleasant companion.”
Meanwhile, the seasons came and went as Dr. McLoughlin completed work on an outpost of his own design, later christened Fort Vancouver. It was a formidable presence, “an island of luxury in the wilderness,” dominating the north bank of the Columbia River. When she first laid eyes on the fort’s towering palisades, missionary Narcissa Whitman dubbed it “the New York of the Pacific.”
Dr. McLoughlin governed his creation with a mirthless, inflexible fist: “There was no society. The clerks just came in when the bell rung. After that they went right away to their business. And so with the men in the field. The bell was rung at twelve for dinner and at one o’clock for work; and they all kept regular hours, like clock-work.” According to fort inhabitant George Roberts, Dr. McLoughlin did what the politicians in London could not: “One thing occurs to me that has been little noticed & that was the good order & discipline that was maintained by the Company. No organized govt could have maintained better order.”
Despite his legendary inflexibility, McLoughlin’s views on business were surprisingly progressive. HBC policy held “that this country should not be inhabited by an agricultural population; they wished to keep it for hunting & trapping purposes. They were influenced purely by a mercantile spirit.” Despite his employer’s singular focus on the bottom line, the doctor knew beaver skins were a finite resource, and he kept one eye on the horizon. He set about making the fort self-sufficient, ordering the construction of grist and lumber mills, the large-scale cultivation of all arable lands, and the tending of livestock. Dr. McLoughlin also encouraged the clerks to fish and harvest the region’s plentiful natural resources, and the result was the Company’s only truly autonomous outpost, offering comforts and amenities rarely found in such remote locations.
It was not all work at Fort Vancouver. A portion of every man’s salary was paid in liquor, although the doctor never drank anything stronger than wine. McLoughlin’s temperance was born of a teetotal mother and a religious indoctrination that left no room for sinning and little tolerance for sinners.
Dr. McLoughlin was “a convert to Catholicism, with all the zeal that this involved,” and at his bidding “they kept Sundays” at Fort Vancouver. No trade was permitted on the Sabbath; instead, the chief factor and his clerks read the Bible. His campaign of forced spiritual conversion also included the aboriginal tribes of the Columbia region. McLoughlin was a brilliant man of two minds. He was, first and foremost, “a British subject with British prejudices & British Characteristics,” predisposed to believe in the absolute superiority of the English and, by extension, the inferiority of those they sought to colonize. But McLoughlin was also “a gentleman of large heart & catholic spirit, benevolent in his feeling.” He fervently believed the road to civilization ran straight through the Catholic Church, and he was supported in his thinking by a much higher power.
The HBC’s charter mandates included a call to bring Christianity to the country’s aboriginal masses, yet many perceived the Company’s efforts in this regard to be a resounding failure. One trader claimed the natives were “neither more enlightened, nor more civilized, by our endeavours than if we had never appeared among them.” Even First Nation members employed by the HBC remained “as ignorant of Christianity as the rudest savages who have never seen the face of a white man.”
Dr. McLoughlin used the lure of trade to impose his own moral code on everyone within the sound of his voice. He broke with HBC custom and allowed aboriginal hunters to enter Fort Vancouver. Eloisa believed the aboriginals welcomed her father’s brand of frontier justice: “The Indians came and asked what is right to be done, and my father told them what was right and what was not right — whether they should kill such a man for doing so and so. My father said ‘No, you must not do it, it is wrong’ and it would all stop.”
In a land without police or courts, the Hudson’s Bay Company appointed itself as judge, jury, and (if need be) executioner in all criminal matters relating to trade or employees. The genesis of such notions was legitimate — in the rural outposts, there were no social structures in place to administer justice — but the HBC leadership took this lack of regulation to lengths that were often extreme and sometimes downright illegal. In clashes between the First Nations and traders, “the HBC settled such incidents by the adoption of a ‘blood for blood’ policy against the immediate wrongdoers.” Things grew far more ruthless when events involved traders alone, for the Company viewed such transgressions “as matters of corporate discipline,” to be handled entirely in-house. That unwavering sense of judicial entitlement sprang from the head of George Simpson and trickled down to senior management, including the chief factor for Columbia District. West of the Rockies, Dr. McLoughlin’s word was gospel and his rule was absolute.
Dr. McLoughlin kept the peace through a volatile mix of civility, sobriety, incarceration, despotism, and unflinching brutality. Many of the men under his command marvelled at the results: “It is strange that without police or military the good order we had could be maintained. It is perhaps owing partly to the diverse people…& partly to there being no liquor & partly to the good management of the Company’s officers. They never used bad or ribald language.”
Dr. McLoughlin also refused to hear dissenting views from his subordinates. “You see the Co.’s chiefs in my mind were not at all influenced by any passions or prejudices entertained by men less capable than themselves,” one underling later recalled, “they were very independent in that way, no government from below.”
John McLoughlin Sr.’s disregard for his subordinates came back to haunt him when he was posted in the Red River valley in 1824. One day, an aboriginal boy approached him with a disturbing story. He said some white men from the fort had tried to convince him to kill McLoughlin with his own gun. The doctor was outraged and summoned the men immediately. He dragged the boy before the company and demanded he repeat his accusation. The terrified youngster stammered out his account, but the allegation met with vehement denials. The boy insisted the men were lying, but again they denied it. At a stalemate, McLoughlin told the boy to go home. Eloisa McLoughlin, an eyewitness to the strange event, picked up the tale: “My father’s method in such cases was to iron the men and keep them in a private room and separate them. The men finally admitted that they said so, but they said they were joking with the boy.” McLoughlin was not amused. The treacherous conspirators were shackled — “the punishment was always putting them in irons” — and thrown in a cell indefinitely, without due process or appeal. Dr. John was the first McLoughlin to have his life threatened by his own men, but he would not be the last.
§
Although he ruled Fort Vancouver with impunity, Dr. McLoughlin had been on the wrong side of the law. His dust-up with the British soldier was a youthful indiscretion, but in 1816 the fur industry’s brand of justice collided head-on with the laws of the land, and McLoughlin found himself accused of a heinous crime: the murders of twenty-one men during the “Seven Oaks Massacre,” the horrifying climax of an ongoing campaign to settle the Red River valley.
The campaign was waged by Thomas Douglas, the fifth Earl of Selkirk. In 1810, Selkirk received a land grant of 116,000 square miles of the Red River valley from the Hudson’s Bay Company, in which he was a major shareholder. The North West Company counted the valley among its holdings, and the slight was not soon forgotten.
Selkirk paid only one visit to Red River, and he did not stay long. Upon his return to the British Isles, he began recruiting settlers from across Scotland with exorbitant promises of prosperity and transported them to Red River. They arrived in 1812 woefully ill-equipped, wielding hoes and spades against the granite-like soil of the prairies. During their first year in-country, the settlers endured extreme hardships: predators feasted on their livestock, floods washed away seedlings, and punishing weather and plagues of insects destroyed what few crops survived.
When the end came for the settlement, it came from within. Miles Macdonell, the newly appointed governor of Selkirk’s lands, issued two fatal proclamations. The first prohibited the export of pemmican, a noisome blend of dried meat, berries, and fat that was a mainstay of Metis voyageurs. In his second declaration, Macdonell ordered the evacuation of all North West Company posts in the area. Both pronouncements caused resentment among the company’s traders, and they retaliated by marshalling the aboriginal and Metis people — who also laid prior claim to the land settled by Selkirk’s pioneers — to run out the homesteaders.
So began the Pemmican War. The militia organized under the leadership of Cuthbert Grant, and they arrested Macdonell, charging him with illegally seizing their foodstuffs. He was dispatched to Montreal to stand trial, leaving Selkirk’s followers without a leader. Terrified and unprotected, many fled for their lives, and by the fall of 1815 only thirteen of the original settler families remained in Red River.
A new governor was hastily appointed. Robert Semple was a steely-eyed, hawk-nosed Loyalist who had been a popular travel writer in his native England before making his way west with the second wave of Scottish emigrants. Semple, blessed with an “overburden of self-importance,” gathered up the last few survivors and his fresh recruits and returned to Red River in hopes of salvaging the harvest. Cursed with equal parts naivety and arrogance, Semple refused to learn from the mistakes of his predecessor. In June he ordered the destruction of the NWC outpost Fort Gibraltar, which was burned to the ground as its occupants looked on in disgust. The sacking of Gibraltar became the rallying cry for Grant and his ragtag band of Metis, who began targeting the region’s settlers, as well as the HBC’s five newly established but poorly fortified outposts.
Hubris proved the undoing of Robert Semple. He believed his pen to be mightier than any sword, and he drafted “a stern proclamation forbidding Metis” from acts of violence. Governor Semple sent word to Cuthbert Grant demanding a meeting so he might recite his edict in person. Grant agreed, and Semple ordered two dozen men to accompany him to the rendezvous.
Semple and his men rode to an area known as Seven Oaks, delivering themselves into a perfectly orchestrated ambush. Semple’s cohort was instantly surrounded, and they were told to lay down their weapons or be shot. Grant kept his own gun trained on Semple, who foolishly entered into a war of words with his enemies. One Metis, Francois Firmin Boucher, called Semple a “damned rascal” for burning Gibraltar. Semple took offence and grabbed for Boucher’s gun, at which point Cuthbert Grant shot Semple in the thigh, igniting the massacre.
The battle lasted fifteen minutes. When the smoke cleared, Semple and twenty of his men lay dead alongside the lone Metis who fell that day, but an even greater atrocity was yet to come. There, in the shade of the seven oaks, “the dead were stripped and dismembered in an orgy of mutilation.”
Word of the slaughter soon reached Lord Selkirk, who was marching toward Red River, backed by his personal army. Selkirk pointed his cannons at the NWC stronghold of Fort William, and after a brief, lopsided battle he planted his flag and claimed his spoils. He also ordered the arrest of the fort’s senior officers.
Among those charged with treason was William McGillivray, who refused to go quietly. He demanded a meeting with the earl, who had taken to strutting about the fort “like a kilted messiah.” McGillivray asked two other NWC officers — Dr. John McLoughlin and Kenneth McKenzie — to accompany him to the meeting, but it did not end well. McGillivray called Selkirk a “piddling lord,” and a foot-stamping Selkirk had the men arrested. The earl then decided anyone representing the NWC was guilty of murdering twenty-one of his men. The charges laid against Dr. McLoughlin included “receiving, relieving, comforting or assisting the felons to escape,” as well as the capital offence of accessory to murder.
Dr. McLoughlin and his fellow Nor’Westers waited for their day in court in the outpost’s mess hall, mere feet from the quarters he shared with his wife and John Jr. The earl tried repeatedly to extract confessions from his hostages but they refused to yield, even burning incriminating documents in the kitchen stove. Selkirk then ordered them to be sent to Upper Canada to face trial.
Selkirk had legal problems of his own, including countercharges stemming from his unlawful occupation of Fort William. He was also riddled with tuberculosis and had little fight left, having exhausted his fortune to sustain the settlement and his army. The earl was detained by NWC traders and soon found himself headed for Upper Canada to await justice beside his former prisoners.
It was a fateful voyage to the courthouse. Dr. McLoughlin’s canoe tipped in rough seas near Sault Ste. Marie, and nine of the twenty-nine passengers onboard were drowned. McLoughlin Sr. “was taken lifeless to the shore, and it was long before he was restored.” From that day on, he was plagued by “a haunting fear of death.”
Dr. McLoughlin eventually landed in Upper Canada, only to spend months awaiting his turn to answer the indictment against him. McLoughlin had never set foot in Seven Oaks, yet he still faced the death penalty if convicted. The trial was a showcase for the chronic ineptitude of the legal system, lasting less than two days. McLoughlin and his co-defendants never testified, the jury deliberated a mere forty-five minutes, and on October 31, 1818, he was discharged as “not guilty.” Dr. McLoughlin, scarred by his near drowning, nervously took his place in the canoe and paddled home to Fort William, arriving just in time for John Jr.’s seventh birthday.
The Seven Oaks debacle instilled a healthy respect for the rule of law in Dr. McLoughlin, but when the NWC joined the HBC, he immediately returned to the fur trade model of autonomous justice. In 1828, Clallam hunters in Puget Sound killed a young clerk named Alexander McKenzie. The senseless violence enraged Dr. McLoughlin, and he sent his men on a series of retaliatory raids. His henchmen killed twenty-three members of the local tribe before burning two of their camps to ashes, all with McLoughlin’s blessing. His message was clear: attack the Hudson’s Bay Company at your peril. The family of McKenzie’s killers took the warning to heart, and those responsible were executed by their own kin in a shocking effort to “placate the Company’s death squads.” In an eerie corollary to the Seven Oaks massacre, Dr. McLoughlin had not pulled the trigger, but his hands bore blood all the same.
The HBC’s motto — Pro Pelle Cutem — translates to “a skin for a skin.” The slogan was meant to reflect their trading philosophy, but Dr. McLoughlin had recast it as the basis for a system of jurisprudence, in which the senseless deaths of twenty-three people was fair compensation for the murder of one clerk.
John McLoughlin Sr. had been accused of a massacre he did not commit and saddled with the weight of a bloodbath executed on his command. It was not the life of peace and healing he had planned for himself, nor was it a life he wanted for his son.
The fur trade had been a bad fit for Dr. McLoughlin from the start, and he feared his son would prove an even worse match. After years of faithful service, McLoughlin Sr. had grown weary of the Hudson’s Bay Company. He was at odds with the Company’s policies, and he knew all too well the lawless nature of the business. His experiences were enough to give any man pause, but Dr. McLoughlin could sum up his strongest reservations about the Honourable Company in two words: George Simpson.
History has not been kind to Sir George, but since he never gave a tinker’s damn about kindness, let’s call it a wash. To be kind was to be weak, at least as Simpson saw it, and he abhorred weakness, as well as indolence, drunkenness, stupidity, and anyone with the temerity to disagree with him. Sir George also had a penchant for name-calling. Early in his career, Simpson created his “Character Book,” a leather-bound, no-holds-barred accounting of his thoughts on his colleagues. The tome was “a tour de force,” a hymnal of indiscretion, which Simpson kept under lock and key, his victims identified only by number.
Simpson fancied himself something of an armchair alienist, able to diagnose any man’s mental ills simply by looking at him. He displayed “a readiness, almost an eagerness, to pass judgement on his fellows.” Few others agreed with his perspicacity, although the Governor’s ability to call them as he saw them impressed at least one powerful ally. Lord Selkirk believed Simpson “has such tact in seeing people’s characters that there is not a man in the country that he cannot lay down on paper at once, and tell what they are good for.” With few exceptions, Simpson thought his colleagues weren’t good for anything, and he felt most would benefit from a sound “Damning & Bitching.”
Simpson’s Character Book reads more like an unintentional autobiography than a searing exposé of others. Simpson’s lifelong tendency to tar others with a brush best suited to himself is well-represented in the historical record, leading scholar Alan Cooke to posit the Governor was “an outstanding example of an immature ego possessed by personal complexes, which he projected onto his colleagues.”
The most telling projection of all was Simpson’s denouncement of Francis Heron as “a perfect Hypocrite.” The Governor should have engraved the words “hypocrisy” and “inconsistency” on his letterhead, for they seemed to be the watchwords of his administration. His cousin Thomas felt Simpson’s “firmness and decision of mind are much impaired,” and his tendency to shift with the winds reduced him to “a weathercock.”
Like all clueless egotists, Simpson was easily manipulated, provided one knew how. HBC employee John Stuart once advised a junior man that, when it came to Simpson, “it is his foible to exact not only strict obedience, but deference to the point of humility. As long as you pay him in that coin, you will quickly get on his sunny side.” Complexity and vanity are mutually exclusive in the human psyche, and, thanks to the Governor’s excess of ego, the portrait limned by his contemporaries bordered on caricature. Perhaps the most generous assessment of his personality ever offered was that Simpson “had unrivalled opportunities for personal growth but did not seize them.”
Those on the receiving end of Simpson’s scorn reciprocated, for however lowly he held his fellows, his contemporaries thought even less of him. He had earned his place as “one of the best-hated men in North America.” He was “despised” by his closest relations; the kindest thoughts they could muster were that he was “plausible and full of animal spirits.” His cousin Thomas declared the Governor to be a “severe and most repulsive master” who was “guilty of many little meannesses…quite beneath a Gentleman, and…are indicative of his birth.”
George Simpson came by his dysfunction honestly, for he was quite literally “a bastard by birth and by persuasion.” He was born the unintended by-product of a “non-conjugal relationship” between an eponymously named Scottish lawyer and an unknown mother and was left to be raised by his aunt Mary.
While still in his teens, he was sent to apprentice at the London brokerage firm of his uncle Geddes, “where his talents soon advanced him to the first seat at the desk.” The firm dealt in sugar, one of the top commodities of the day, but it was all the same to young Master Simpson.
The first requirement of any social climber is a good toehold, and he found sure footing in Andrew Colvile, one of the partners in his uncle’s firm. Simpson possessed plenty of derring-do, and Colvile was taken by the young man’s “sufficient promptness and determination.” Colvile also held a seat on the Committee of the Hudson’s Bay Company, an institution then mired in turmoil thanks to the feisty antics of its overseas governor, William Williams. The sitting governor had been “chosen for his courage rather than his business acumen or his good judgment,” and his unique brand of rash diplomacy had landed him in hot water with the Company’s competitors. Arrest warrants were issued for Williams following his attack on North West Company employees in Grand Rapids, and the Company feared he would soon be captured. HBC leaders were quietly on the hunt for an acting governor for Rupert’s Land, and Colvile nominated the red-headed spitfire with the impenetrable Scottish brogue, George Simpson. It bears noting Andrew Colvile “did not allow consideration of personality to intrude into his business affairs.”
Simpson thought himself the perfect candidate and felt his nomination deserved serious consideration despite his having “no background…or demonstrable skills.” What Simpson had was “an authority combining the despotism of military rule with the strict surveillance and mean parsimony of the avaricious trader.” The rest he could learn, as, thankfully, “the North-West Company had previously reduced the business to a perfect system, which he had only to follow.” The HBC’s London Committee clearly agreed, and Simpson became the “heir apparent to the HBC’s overseas operations” in 1820. His notice of appointment explicitly stated his powers were limited and temporary at best, but Simpson overlooked such conditions.
The HBC were “the ultimate absentee landlords,” and Simpson was their new superintendent, although he acted as if he owned the place. He landed with a resounding thud on the shores of British North America, teeming “with the lordly hauteur of a man in charge of his private universe.” According to one employee firmly under the jackboot of an increasingly “despotic” Simpson, the little emperor treated his underlings “as if we had been so many cattle,” and saw himself “clothed with a power so unlimited, it is not to be wondered at that a man who rose from a humble situation should in the end forget what he was and play the tyrant.”
His unwelcome habit of “acting as uncrowned king” was brought to the fore in his first meeting with William Williams. The sitting governor’s days as a free man were numbered and, under duress, he agreed to step down and let Simpson take charge. Luck and timing continued to be on Simpson’s side; in less than one year, an unknown, unskilled sugar clerk had gone from locum tenens to the overseas governor of one of the most powerful monopolies on the planet. With the nod of the outgoing governor and the stroke of a pen, Simpson’s rule was now “more absolute than that of any governor under the British Crown.”
Simpson found himself in the enviable position of answering only to the HBC’s London-based governor Sir John Henry Pelly and his committee. Simpson considered “his role in Hudson’s Bay Company as proxy for the British government in North America,” a self-serving interpretation that was equal parts ego and truth. He was a master of misdirection and exaggeration, but Simpson’s true font of power was “the slowness of the communications system with London.” In an age before transatlantic telegraphy, correspondence travelled by ship and often took a year to reach its destination. Simpson always did Governor Pelly the courtesy of writing a letter, ostensibly seeking permission, only to then do as he pleased, safe in the knowledge it would be a year or more before he would be called to account, by which time the damage was inevitably done.
Buoyed by his mercurial rise through the ranks, Simpson transformed overnight from insufferable to unbearable. He introduced sweeping policy changes and imposed cost-cutting measures he called “Œconomy.” He slashed wages, eliminated “old and useless men,” and denied pension benefits to widows and dependents. His belt-tightening was seen by those affected as “parsimony of a very questionable and impolitic kind.” It became an issue of character, as many employees felt “economy so ill-timed argued as little in favour of the Governor’s judgement as of his humanity.” It was the worst kind of micromanaging, but it fattened the bottom line, and that was all the proof Simpson needed to show he was steering the Company in the right direction. The shareholders in London appreciated his efforts, but the men in the field were not impressed. They labelled him “mangeur du lard” — a “pork-eater,” untutored in the ways of the trade. They had a point, and Simpson had a morale problem.
In his first act as governor of the northern department, Simpson called a meeting of the Company’s chief factors, summoning Dr. McLoughlin and his peers to York Factory. The host and his skeptics were led to the dining hall, where a sumptuous banquet awaited. Wine, port, and spirits flowed freely, loosening the tongues and tempers of those assembled. By sun-up, the Governor had won over his critics, save for Dr. McLoughlin. Simpson was a master “in the art of getting his way,” and McLoughlin soon had a very large target on his back.
Company regulations required Simpson to meet with a full council of his factors once a year, but the Governor detested both regulations and the chief factors. He weaned them off the mandate by holding “sham” councils, which were nothing more than a recitation of fait accompli edicts from London, reducing the factors from full shareholders to glorified errand boys. Dr. McLoughlin rebelled, but Simpson remained confident in his shameless power grab, gloating the factors “could outvote me, but it has never been so.”
Governor Simpson had become that most loathsome of creatures: a narcissist with actual power. His bosses in London swore by Simpson just as the men in the field swore at him, though rarely to his face. His detractors tried to warn the home office: “The Committee received several hints of the Governor’s ‘strange management’ but they only smiled at the insinuations.”
Dr. McLoughlin saw through Simpson’s carefully crafted façade and hated him for the same reason the HBC loved him: his ruthlessly inhumane approach to business. The animosity between the two men had been instantaneous. Simpson and McLoughlin Sr. first crossed swords on July 26, 1824, when the newly appointed governor transferred the doctor to Fort Astoria. Simpson agreed to meet him there, leaving several weeks after the chief factor was dispatched. The journey from Fort William required both men to make a series of lengthy portages, and what began as business travel soon escalated into a cross-country grudge match.
Dr. McLoughlin had a twenty-day lead but Simpson, driving his voyageurs to the point of exhaustion, soon caught up, and McLoughlin never heard the end of it. Throughout the journey, Simpson had dined on “tidbits and wine” served to him on china by his manservant in between naps, all while his rugged engagés chased their daily allotment of pemmican with another six hours of hard paddling. Those in the trenches were painfully familiar with meals consisting of nothing but “Hudson’s Bay sauce” — a euphemism for hunger and privation — and while such class disparity undoubtedly caused resentment, the crewmen knew the temper of their captain well enough to keep their displeasure to themselves.
After weeks of arduous travel, Dr. McLoughlin was dressed in “Clothes that had once been fashionable but [were] now covered with a thousand patches of different Colours, his beard would do honor to the chin of a Grizzly Bear, his face and hands evidently Shewing that he had not lost much time on his Toilette, loaded with Arms and his own Herculean dimensions for a tout ensemble that would convey a good idea of the highwaymen of former Days.” The Governor, meanwhile, was playing dress-up. Simpson had temporarily eschewed his usual finery in favour of the checked chemise, green blanket coat, moccasins, and unkempt beard of a voyageur.
Such adventures can lead to the sort of bond forged in foxholes, but their competitive natures, and mutual distrust, drove a wedge between the Governor and the doctor. The demands of work forced the men to broker a fragile détente once the competing teams arrived in the Columbia District, but the brittle truce did not hold for long. The Governor dismissed Dr. McLoughlin as “a Radical” who “would be a troublesome man to the Company if he had sufficient influence to form and tact to manage a party.” He thought Simpson was arrogant, ridiculous, and dangerously short-sighted.
Simpson and McLoughlin Sr. continued to square off on matters great and small over the next three decades. The two were more alike than either man cared to admit, yet on one topic they were in complete agreement: the Hudson’s Bay Company was no place for John McLoughlin Jr. For Dr. McLoughlin, his hesitation was born of parental concern. He wanted to protect his son from the so-called Honourable Company and its tyrannical leader, although pride and the likelihood John Jr. would reflect poorly on him may also have coloured his thinking. Simpson, on the other hand, was driven by his disdain for those of mixed race in general, and for John Jr. in particular, thanks to the boy’s tantrum in a Montreal boarding school sixteen years prior. Whatever their respective motivation, the net result was the same: John Jr.’s future did not rest in the Canadian fur trade. His application was summarily rejected.
It was official: John McLoughlin Jr. was unemployable. Even a company that routinely hired criminals and deviants did not want him, and his desperation was about to lead him into strange and dangerous territory.