3
The Trader

It was no coincidence that the adult John Tanner, after being ambushed and badly wounded in Canada that summer of 1823, ended up in the care of Dr. John McLoughlin. McLoughlin was then the only surgeon in all of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s vast domain. For two decades, he had provided medical services for sick and injured fur traders, who came for treatment often from hundreds of miles away. During his many years with the old North West Company from 1803 to 1821, he resided most summers at Fort William, the Nor’ Westers’ great gathering place on the north shore of Lake Superior. There he ran a hospital and apothecary, attending to the many cases of venereal disease, hernias, and broken bones incurred by the several hundred employees who congregated for the yearly rendezvous. Indians came to him for help as well. He had given medical aid to John Tanner on two prior occasions: once when Tanner suffered broken ribs after falling from a tree and another time when he fell sick after overturning his canoe in an icy river. Not all of McLoughlin’s patients came to see him at Fort William or Rainy Lake; sometimes he took his medical kit and traveled by canoe for days to visit a patient at some isolated outpost.¹

But practicing medicine made up only a small part of McLoughlin’s duties as a trader and administrator, and he often brooded about the twist of fate that had caused him to enter the fur trade instead of acquiring a comfortable medical practice in Quebec, as he had once imagined. At the end of his first five-year engagement with the North West Company in 1808, he looked back on the whole experience with regret and pronounced it a “sad experiment.” After his second five-year hitch, he wrote plaintively to an uncle, “People talk of the desert of Siberia, but this is as bad.” The harsh environment, the rough society—it was all “one Universal sameness.” In another letter home, he wrote that he would rather be “living on potatoes and milk than in this country.” These were not simply ill-humored remarks written on a gloomy day but markers of his growing disillusionment. Life was passing him by. “Removed so far as I am into the wilderness,” he wrote to his uncle again, “it is not in my power to communicate any thing very new or agreeable to you.” And in another missive, “When a man has been for any time in this Country he is entirely unfit for any other.” McLoughlin continued to characterize his life in the fur trade as one long, dreary, self-imposed exile even after he gave up any thoughts of returning to his native Quebec.²

John McLoughlin was born October 19, 1784, in Rivière-du-Loup, an agricultural village perched on the south bank of the wide St. Lawrence River. His father was of Irish Catholic extraction, his mother a mix of Scottish Presbyterian and French Catholic. John was the third of seven children. Through John’s early childhood the family lived on a prosperous farm fronting on the great waterway. When he was eight the family moved to Quebec, the colony’s fortress city with a population of about 10,000 inhabitants. It was there, at the age of fourteen, that John decided to become a doctor and thus began a three-and-a-half-year apprenticeship with one of Quebec’s leading physicians, Dr. James Fisher.³

John’s maternal grandfather, Malcolm Fraser, was a towering figure in his early life. He was owner of a seigneury, or large estate, at a place called Murray Bay about thirty miles upriver and on the opposite shore from Rivière-du-Loup. Malcolm Fraser spoke English, Gaelic, and French, was an avid reader of books on ancient and modern history, and loved to regale his grandchildren with colorful stories about their Highland Scot forebears and his own bygone days as a soldier. His father—John’s great-grandfather—had fallen at Culloden, the storied battle that finally brought to heel the rowdy and independent clans of Highland Scotland. Malcolm, who like his father was loyal to the English King, joined the 42nd Highland Scots Regiment in the British army and came to North America during the French and Indian War. His own day of valor came in the Battle of Quebec, when he and his men scaled a cliff and subdued a French picket before dawn, permitting the rest of the British troops to engage and defeat the main French forces on the Plains of Abraham. After the conflict the Crown rewarded him with a large land grant, the Mount Murray Seigneury, a 160-square-mile tract of wilderness, which he transformed into a thriving country estate over the next two decades. By the time he was a grandfather, Seigneur Fraser was a person of considerable wealth. Proud and domineering, he gave his Catholic daughter and son-in-law more land at Rivière-du-Loup on the condition that they recant their Catholicism and raise their children as Presbyterians.⁴

John’s uncles on the Fraser side—his mother’s two younger brothers—were also important influences on the young boy. The older of the two, Alexander Fraser, apprenticed to the North West Company when John was still quite small. Although this took his uncle far away, stories of his exploits probably formed John’s earliest impressions of the fur trade. In 1801, when John was sixteen, Alexander returned to Quebec on a one-year furlough. Having risen to partner in the company, his next assignment was to the King’s Post, a very old fur-trade establishment across the St. Lawrence from Rivière-du-Loup at the mouth of the Saguenay River. This assignment enabled Alexander to remain close to his property at Rivière-du-Loup, to which he retired in 1806.⁵

Simon Fraser, John’s favorite uncle, studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, returning to the colony to start a medical practice in Terrebonne near Montreal. In 1795 he became a surgeon in the British army. As John entered his teens and began his apprenticeship with Dr. Fisher, he heard occasional reports of his uncle Simon’s exploits in the wars of the French Revolution. While fighting Napoleon’s army in Egypt, Simon received a wound in the hand and was discharged from the army. Returning to Terrebonne in 1801, he somehow managed to resume his practice as a surgeon in spite of his maimed left hand.⁶

In the spring of 1803, John McLoughlin completed his apprenticeship and prepared to follow in his uncle Simon’s footsteps, expecting to start his own medical practice. But just then he committed a misstep that forced him to abort this plan and follow his uncle Alexander into the fur trade instead.

According to family lore, his transgression was a gallant but foolish brush with the law. As recounted by a nephew long after McLoughlin’s death, John was escorting a young lady over some planks laid in the mud of a Quebec street when a British military officer approached from the opposite direction and haughtily pushed the young lady aside. McLoughlin, who at age eighteen was already a big, strong fellow and possessed with a volcanic temper, lifted the British officer off his feet and threw him down in the mud. No sooner had he done this than he realized the gravity of his offense and fled in short order to the frontier to avoid punishment.⁷

The story sounds apocryphal, but McLoughlin once conceded in a letter to his uncle Simon that “it was entirely by my own want of conduct that I came up to this Country.” In another lament he wrote, “I am sorry I ever came to it however this was perhaps not a matter of Choice but of Necessity on my part.”⁸

Whatever the precipitating misstep was, McLoughlin barely had time to secure his medical credentials before fleeing to the frontier. It appears that he sought temporary refuge with his uncle Simon in nearby Terrebonne. There, on April 1, 1803, the young man prepared his petition for a medical license, hoping that the trouble would blow over, or at least not catch up to him, until he had obtained his license. In his anxious state he must have confided everything to his uncle, for Simon Fraser helped him plan his escape while they nervously awaited action on the petition. His uncle first proposed that he sail to the West Indies and then, on further reflection, that he go to the Indian frontier. Perhaps Alexander Fraser’s connection with the North West Company made the latter escape seem preferable. At last, more than three weeks after submitting the petition, young McLoughlin was summoned before a board of commissioners in Montreal to take his medical examination. He passed the exam, but now he faced an excruciating wait for the government to issue his license. According to protocol, the petition together with the examiners’ certificate would be forwarded to Dr. Fisher in Quebec with a request that the doctor attest to the apprentice’s good conduct. Ultimately, Mr. Fisher’s letter divulged nothing about any “want of conduct,” and the lieutenant governor issued McLoughlin’s license without more ado on May 3, 1803. But by then McLoughlin had already cast his lot with the fur trade.⁹

The day after sitting his exam, he went with his uncle to the office of McTavish, Frobisher & Co., Montreal agents for the North West Company. There, he signed the indenture that bound him for five years of service as a surgeon and apprentice clerk for the lowly sum of £100, or just £20 per year. That was hardly a good return on investment for the three-and-a-half-year apprenticeship he had just completed with Dr. Fisher. It was a contract entered under duress.¹⁰

The terms of the labor contract were harsh but no different from the terms set for most North West Company employees. The company would provide transport from Montreal to the Northwest and back to Montreal at the end of his five-year indenture. During that time he would obey all company officers’ lawful commands and go wherever they chose to send him. (In this instance, “Northwest” referred to all of British America west of the St. Lawrence River valley, a vast, unmapped territory that the Nor’ Westers themselves had just begun to explore.) The company would provide for all his needs, and he would receive no wages until his return to Montreal. Embezzlement of peltries or goods was strictly forbidden and was grounds for both dismissal and forfeiture of wages. In other words, the company did not allow its employees to engage in any trade with Indians except under its auspices. At £20 per year, McLoughlin’s wages as apprentice clerk were marginally inferior to those of the North West Company’s laboring class—the engagés who worked at the trading posts and who also manned the canoes—but unlike those men McLoughlin had the possibility to advance to the rank of clerk and ultimately to partner. This placed him in the upper echelons even though he first had to serve his apprenticeship.¹¹

As for McLoughlin’s credential as a licensed physician, it appears that he and his uncle incautiously bargained that away. The white-haired Simon McTavish, the semilegendary figure who had largely created the North West Company more than two decades earlier, coolly informed Simon Fraser that the company already had one physician, Dr. Henry Munro, among its several hundred employees. This man was a clerk on the way to becoming a partner. Should the company eventually require young McLoughlin’s services as a physician, then he would be compensated as Dr. Munro was; that is, he would be paid an additional £100 per year. Moreover, McTavish held out the prospect that the young McLoughlin, with his unusual training as a surgeon, might expect rapid advancement following his apprenticeship. At least that was how McLoughlin later remembered it. But McTavish’s promise was not put in writing, and it appeared nowhere in McLoughlin’s contract.¹²

Such were the seeds of his later disillusionment. To no one’s surprise he began to practice medicine almost as soon as he took up his duties and, within a year or two, took over Dr. Munro’s practice as well. McTavish died unexpectedly in 1804, which left McLoughlin with no other recourse than to ask his uncle Simon to bear witness to the agreement that they had made with the deceased concerning his early promotion and higher rate of pay. Simon Fraser procrastinated. He apparently concurred with McLoughlin that there had been some sort of gentleman’s agreement but finally advised his nephew that “the promise dies with Mr. McTavish.”¹³

McTavish’s nephew William McGillivray succeeded him as head of the company. McGillivray’s ascension to leadership not only demonstrated Mc­Tavish’s skill in promoting the interests of his own clan, it also marked a shift in power from the Montreal agents to the younger men like Mc­Gillivray, who generally spent the entire year in the wilderness—the so-called “wintering partners.” As a result, the administrative center of the company shifted from Montreal to Fort William on the northwest shore of Lake Superior, where the partners convened each summer to count their returns, bring in new partners to replace those who were retiring, and plan operations for the coming year.

McLoughlin could not let go of the idea that the North West Company owed him substantial back pay for his service as a doctor. It was an injustice that darkened his whole view of the enterprise. In the summer of 1808, as his five-year apprenticeship drew to a close, one of the wintering partners asked him confidentially if he would be “going down”—that is, did he intend to leave the business and take his passage back to Montreal? McLoughlin answered that he was undecided. The partner then advised him to say he was going down so that the partners would offer him better terms to stay. A few days later McGillivray sent for him and made him an offer: McLoughlin could take a promotion to physician and clerk for £150 per year. McLoughlin hesitated, then boldly asked what prospects he had for becoming a partner. McGillivray answered instantly, “those of other young men of character.” His voice rising, McLoughlin told McGillivray that he had been led to expect more when he engaged with the company. Otherwise, “I would not have given five years of my time after studying a profession for the paltry sum of £100.” Referring to McTavish’s original promise, he stated flatly that he would not have served those five years had he not understood that his medical training assured him “a certain right” to rapid advancement. At this McGillivray shot back a withering reply: “No promise of the kind could be made by any body.”¹⁴

Three days later McGillivray raised his offer to £200 pounds, and Mc­Loughlin accepted. But despite coming to a compromise, neither man would forget their earlier blunt exchange. They soon came to despise one another. McLoughlin resented the way McGillivray had ridden his uncle’s coattails to the head of the company. Moreover, as McTavish was now dead, he had nobody to blame except McGillivray for swindling him out of his doctor’s pay. McGillivray, for his part, found the tall, lean, young doctor insufferably uppity and irascible.¹⁵