14
Marriage à la façon du pays

Marguerite Wadin McKay was the daughter of a Swiss Protestant man by the name of Jean Etienne Wadin and an Ojibwa or Cree woman whose name has been lost to history. Wadin probably came to North America with the British army during the French and Indian War. By 1772, he was trading with Indians west of Grand Portage, and seven years later he was among some two dozen traders who joined together to form the nucleus of the North West Company. He had a French Canadian wife and children back in Saint Laurent near Montreal. About 1775, his native wife gave birth to a baby girl, Marguerite. Some five years later, Wadin was shot to death at a remote trading post in the depths of winter, allegedly by another Nor’ Wester. His demise left Marguerite fatherless at a young age, and she seems to have been reared by her Indian people in the vicinity of North West Company forts.¹

At about age nineteen or twenty Marguerite married her first husband, a North West Company trader named Alexander McKay. In Canadian fur-trade society, marriages between fur trader and Indian were described as à la façon du pays, or “after the custom of the country.” Marriage rites were a blend of Indian and European forms. When a trader wanted to marry an Indian woman, he was expected to approach her parents for permission. The parents then decided on a bride price for their daughter, such as a horse or a stock of blankets and kettles or other items of comparable value. After the required items were presented, a simple marriage ritual might conclude with the smoking of the calumet by the trader and the bride’s family together with other members of her clan. This sealed the alliance between the trader and his wife’s people. When the trader brought his new bride into the fort, his first act was to deliver her into the hands of the native women there, who put her through a cleansing ritual, taking away her Indian clothes and scrubbing off her face paint to signify that she now lived among white men. Reattired in European fashion, she was then escorted by her husband to his quarters and henceforth they were considered man and wife.²

If marriage à la façon du pays lacked the Christian ideal of lifetime commitment, it still involved a high level of commitment by both partners. Fur traders generally shunned polygamy and assumed that sexual fidelity was part of the marriage contract. As with husbands in Christian marriages, they accepted the role of sole provider within the monogamous relationship. Indian women, for their part, took their husbands’ surnames and strove to adopt their husbands’ culture and raise their children according to the norms of fur-trade society. The fur companies treated these unions as bona fide marriages and accorded the wives certain privileges as well as duties. The women made their homes with their husbands inside the trading post, and sometimes (more often in the case of officers’ wives) they were allowed to travel with their husbands from post to post in the company’s canoes. The women contributed to the general provisioning of the forts by gathering berries, catching small game, making moccasins and snowshoes, and performing numerous other tasks.³

Marguerite gave birth to Thomas, her first child by McKay, reputedly in 1796 at Sault Ste. Marie. Three daughters followed in succession over the next ten years as her first husband rose from clerk to partner, assuming overall direction of the English River Department. In 1805, after they had been together for ten years, Alexander McKay received his first “rotation,” or twelve-month furlough, and went off to Montreal. For Marguerite, this was an anxious time, for among North West families the husband’s furlough often led to the wife’s abandonment. Although McKay returned to Fort William in 1806 for the rendezvous, he soon chose to retire from the business, tendering his shares in the company for £1,000. At that time he did abandon Marguerite and their three daughters in Indian country for good, taking twelve-year-old Thomas with him.⁴

Marguerite McKay and John McLoughlin formed their alliance in 1811. Their courtship probably occurred when he was on medical duty that summer at Fort William. No details of the courtship were ever recorded, but they may be imagined in the context of the summer rendezvous. The great annual gathering at Fort William was not only a time for renewing old friendships but also an opportunity to meet new people. White men and ­native women seldom were so free to mingle as they were during the rendezvous. They flirted with one another in idle moments during the work day, came together for the men’s football games in the long summer evenings, and joined in dancing—a very popular pastime among both sexes. The fur traders’ dances were truly a blend of cultures, the men high-stepping to the fiddle’s fast tempo, the native women shuffle-stepping to their own internal rhythm.

Marguerite and John each entered the marriage somewhat seasoned in the ways of love, loss, and parenting. When they took each other as common-law husband and wife, she was about thirty-six years of age and he was twenty-six. He became a father to her three young girls and she became a mother to his boy, who was barely more than an infant. She had long dark hair, strongly Indian features, and a petite figure, which must have appeared even more so when she stood with her towering new mate.⁵

By coincidence, the year that they married was also the year that Marguerite’s first husband, Alexander McKay, died in one of the deadliest acts of violence associated with the fur trade. Two years after retiring from the North West Company, McKay joined the Pacific Fur Company of John Jacob Astor and, with his son Thomas, boarded the Tonquin for a voyage around Cape Horn to the company’s faraway outpost of Astoria at the mouth of the Columbia River. Fortunately, he left the boy at Astoria before reboarding the Tonquin for its ill-fated first run up the Pacific Coast. A few weeks later, this three-masted, ten-gun trading vessel was anchored in Clayoquot Sound, on the outer coast of Vancouver Island, when Indians, intent on avenging an insult made to their chief the previous day, talked their way aboard ship under the guise of wanting to trade but then attacked the ship’s crew. After a bloody struggle, a wounded crew member, finding all his mates either slain or gone overboard, retreated to the powder magazine and blew up the ship. News of this incident could not have reached Marguerite until several months after she and John McLoughlin married, but whatever grief she felt at the death of her former husband must have been mixed with relief over the fact that her son was not among the victims. Young Thomas remained in Astoria until 1813, when the failing Pacific Fur Company sold out to the North West Company. Thomas then joined the Nor’ Westers and returned to the Canadian prairie. And so John McLoughlin acquired a stepson.⁶

McLoughlin was not yet thirty years old and already he was responsible for five children. His situation was not uncommon. By the time McLoughlin entered the fur trade, children were as numerous as adults at many North West Company forts. Fort Vermilion on the Saskatchewan River in 1809, for example, had a resident population of thirty-six men, twenty-nine women, and sixty-seven children. Unlike the Hudson’s Bay Company, the North West Company showed no interest in providing schools or teachers for this growing population of mixed-blood children. The company assumed that any traders who wanted to give their country-born offspring a formal education could send them down to Montreal. Few did, in part because of the great expense but also out of concern that they would not flourish in civilized society. In the absence of schools, parents were solely responsible for educating their children. Consequently, the influence of the mother’s native culture featured strongly in the children’s upbringing. Fathers generally hoped for their daughters to marry traders and for their sons to find employment as guides, interpreters, or clerks in the fur trade. John McLoughlin was no different, for at this point in his life he could not even think of financing a formal education for his children. He had no other choice than to contemplate their growing to maturity on the frontier.⁷

Based on the few surviving observations left by family, friends, and associates, it seems that McLoughlin and Marguerite were loving and tender companions. Both partners were noted for their moral rectitude, each adhering to the tenets of their own cultural traditions. People praised Marguerite for her generous spirit and sweet, mild temper. One man who was close to the McLoughlins later in life lauded Marguerite for “her numerous charities and many excellent qualities of heart.” Her children would later remember the remarkable calming effect she had on her husband’s stormy moods.⁸

McLoughlin, for his part, took a growing pride in providing Marguerite with what was, for a fur trader’s family, an exceptionally stable domestic arrangement. Each fall, after the rendezvous, the McLoughlins packed their things and shipped out on the North West Company’s main-trunk canoe route, crossing over the Height of Land (the divide between the Lake Superior and Hudson Bay watersheds) to McLoughlin’s winter post at Rainy Lake. There they made their home either at the main trading house on the Rainy River just below the outlet of Rainy Lake or at a small, auxiliary outpost located at Vermilion Lake.⁹ Each June or July, the family packed their things again and returned to Fort William, where McLoughlin saw to the health of hundreds of voyageurs and the few dozen partners attending that year’s rendezvous. Eventually the McLoughlins were given their own private residence at Fort William, so valued were his medical services. Located just inside the large fort’s main gate, it doubled as the apothecary.¹⁰

Twice in his seventeen years with the North West Company, McLoughlin maneuvered his way out of assignments that would have ended this happy arrangement and taken the family much farther afield. The first time, in 1811, he declined an offer to go to the Columbia River in Oregon. Then, in 1815, he refused a request by the partners to take over administration of the company’s most valuable asset, the Athabaska Department. If McLoughlin gave his reasons for refusing the appointments, they are not known, as the minutes of council for those years have not survived. It seems clear, however, that his primary motivation was to maintain a stable home for his large family.¹¹

McLoughlin’s marriage à la façon du pays brought him the additional advantage of more direct links to native people. With his wife’s help, he became fairly proficient in the Ojibwa language, and as the years passed he became an increasingly sensitive observer of Ojibwa culture, too. This was, of course, one of the main reasons the fur companies supported cross-cultural marriage, because these alliances were generally beneficial for the business. Marguerite had no kinship ties to the local Indian bands; by some accounts her own kin lived farther east around Sault Ste. Marie. Still, in the inter­actions between white and Indian that so permeated the fur trade, Marguerite’s native background must have aided her husband in countless small ways. When Indians came to their winter post to barter, McLoughlin made it his business to learn a little about each one. By the time the McLoughlins left for the Columbia in 1824, he was acquainted with hundreds of Indians throughout the region stretching from Fort William to Lake of the Woods.