21
Time of Reckoning

A time came in the life of most fur traders when they had to make a choice about where they intended to retire. After a person had spent so much of his life in the wilderness, wintering year after year in the cold heart of the continent, he had to wonder if it would be his lot to remain. Would he live out the rest of his years in the raw society that was emerging on the frontier, or would he cash in his earnings in the fur trade and go back to a more genteel life? It was a stark choice. If he had an Indian family, the choice could be a shattering one. More often than not, fur traders decided to return to white society and leave their family behind.

The abandonment of family was seldom total and unmitigated. Depending on the circumstances, the trader might determine that his wife and children would go back to her native people. Alternatively, he might assume that his family would remain at the fort and come under the guardianship of another trader. Sometimes a marriage to another trader was arranged before the husband left. A few traders chose to take their families with them back to white society, bracing against the culture shock and racial prejudice that would inevitably beset them. Starting around the time that McLoughlin entered the fur trade, a growing number of traders avoided all of these unhappy choices by choosing to retire with their families in Indian country. Known as “freemen” because they were no longer attached to the company, they eked out a living as subsistence farmers and hunters.¹

McLoughlin was completely torn about his options. To his business associates, he displayed a somewhat outsized devotion to his mixed-blood family. He fought stubbornly to give his family a stable home at Fort William, and he declared his intentions to give his sons a formal education. Woe be to anyone who brought any insult or injury to Marguerite or the children. Stern, righteous, and hot-tempered, the doctor did not shy from using his towering frame and brute strength to browbeat or inflict corporal punishment on any “damned rascal” who deserved it.² Many years later, in Oregon, he would give a clergyman a severe caning for making racial slurs against his wife.

But in letters home, McLoughlin gave full play to his desire to return to civilization. The Northwest was a dreary wasteland, he insisted, and the fur trade was a rough and dirty business from which he would retire at the earliest possible moment. He never wrote a word about his wife and children to his family in Quebec. Just days before his trial in York began, McLoughlin wrote to his uncle Simon in Terrebonne: “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.”³ Was McLoughlin privately contemplating a break with his mixed-blood family? His insistence on secrecy may have been purely to protect his position in the North West Company. One wonders, though, if it related in some way to his domestic affairs.

Nothing further came of the business offer McLoughlin confided to his uncle. Possibly a “want of capital” was, as he claimed, the primary reason it never materialized. After a decade and a half in the fur trade, he still did not possess the nest egg he had long sought. If he had made partner a few years earlier, he might have expected an annual income of around £400, plus another £1,000 or more upon retirement when he tendered his share to the other partners. But as the Nor’ Westers entered into economic warfare with the Hudson’s Bay Company at the very time that McLoughlin acquired his single share, profits disappeared and McLoughlin received not a penny in annual dividends from 1815 onwards. A surviving ledger book of the North West Company, in which McLoughlin’s account takes up a single page, seems to indicate that he received nothing more by way of compensation than to be reimbursed year after year for living expenses. These expenses were paid to his account by McTavish, McGillivrays and Company. One historian, in examining this account, concluded that McLoughlin “would probably have been better off financially if he had remained on a salary with the North West Company, and refused to become a wintering partner.”⁴ No doubt the doctor himself was tormented by that prospect.

Yet there was more to McLoughlin’s decision to stick with the fur trade than mere impecuniousness. It would seem he had come to that fork in the road that many fur traders found so agonizing. His actions over the next two years suggest that his mind was in just such a dark place and that he was appealing to his better angels to keep his commitment to Marguerite and accept a lifelong career and retirement on the frontier.

Moreover, loyalty to Marguerite was not the only issue weighing on him. Maybe it was no coincidence that McLoughlin leaned into his marriage at the same time that he prepared to break with the arrogant William McGillivray and his ham-fisted leadership of the North West Company. To McLoughlin and a growing number of wintering partners, McGillivray appeared more and more reckless and vain in his desire to vanquish the Hudson’s Bay Company. Increasingly, the others looked to the doctor as the one man in their group with the courage to stand up to McGillivray. In February 1819, a close observer of the situation wrote that there was none among the wintering partners “possessing firmness of character” except McLoughlin and perhaps one or two others. “A good dinner, a few fair promises would waltz the remainder about, to any tune the McGillivrays chose to strike up.”⁵ Sometime during that year, McLoughlin began to conceive a plan for how to accomplish a radical break with McGillivray and the Montreal agents.

In the spring of 1819, the doctor returned to Fort William, rejoining his family after another long absence. Marguerite had somehow managed to care for the children through the period of Selkirk’s occupation of the fort. Their youngest child, Eloisa, was now two years old. Marguerite’s three daughters by her first husband were in various stages of becoming independent. One of these daughters, Nancy McKay, had married the captain of the North West Company’s schooner that ferried goods and men up and down Lake Superior. Another daughter, whose name has been lost, had probably married by this time as well. By one account, she married a lieutenant in the British army and went to India.⁶

Though the partners’ trials were now over, the war between the two great fur companies went on. The main theater of conflict moved from the Red River valley to the rich Athabaska district, the ultimate prize of the Canadian fur trade. Reports from that remote country told of more false arrests, more illegal imprisonments, more forts seized. Meanwhile, the rivals continued to do battle in the courts and in the public sphere, hammering one another with pamphlets and book-length tirades. The costly and embarrassing litigation bled both companies of their financial reserves and led politicians and governing officials in Canada and Britain to consider the need for a union of the two antagonists to end the strife.⁷

When all the North West partners convened at Fort William in the sum­mer of 1819, the company’s acute financial problems were laid bare. The wintering partners found the Montreal agents hard-pressed to keep them in supply for the coming year. For once, McGillivray was not so cocky. He could sense the old partnership coming apart. Most of the partners were signatories to a twenty-year agreement that was set to expire in three more years. Day after day McGillivray tried to talk the partners into renewing their commitments, but many of them balked. McLoughlin encouraged dissension. Speaking to the partners privately, he intimated that they might do better, when the time came, to negotiate with the Hudson’s Bay Company instead. According to intelligence passed between agents of the Hudson’s Bay Company, McGillivray went home from Fort William that summer in a terrible funk, convinced that if he could not get the agreement with the wintering partners renewed by the following year, then “the whole North West Company concern would be annihilated.”⁸

After the rendezvous McLoughlin made his opening move toward leading a revolt among the wintering partners. He wrote confidentially to George Moffatt, a prominent Montreal merchant and partner in a supply house with ties to the Hudson’s Bay Company. He asked Moffatt to inquire discreetly whether the wintering partners, if they stood together in refusing to renew their agreement with McTavish, McGillivrays and Company, would then be able to forge an alternative arrangement with the Hudson’s Bay Company. Moffatt communicated this question to Samuel Gale, a Montreal attorney, who conveyed its substance in a letter to Lady Jean Selkirk, the wife of the earl. Lady Selkirk forwarded Gale’s letter to Andrew Colvile, attorney for the Hudson’s Bay Company and a leading member of its governing London Committee. Gale’s letter kept McLoughlin’s identity a secret, describing him only as “a wintering partner now in the Indian Country.” Gale stated that this anonymous individual possessed “influence to withdraw almost every useful member of the North West Association” who was fearful of being cheated or abandoned by his Montreal suppliers.⁹ In other words, he thought McLoughlin could lead a revolt against Mc­Gillivray and end the conflict if only the Hudson’s Bay Company responded with the right overtures.

Gale’s letter was explosive, for it arrived in London at the very time when William McGillivray and his brother Simon were pursuing back-channel negotiations with the Hudson’s Bay Company to resolve the conflict in their own way. With the help of their London contacts, the McGillivrays offered to buy Selkirk’s controlling interest in the Hudson’s Bay Company. They reasoned that if Selkirk were removed from the equation, the Nor’ Westers would be rid of their enemy while the London-based company would be unburdened of the distraction of Selkirk’s colonization scheme. More important, the Nor’ Westers would at last gain access to the Hudson Bay supply route, and the competitors could join as one. Unbeknownst to McLoughlin and the other wintering partners, several members of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s governing committee had mutinous designs of their own as they looked for a way to throw over Lord Selkirk and accomplish a union of the two companies. But when they received Gale’s letter, they suddenly dropped all talk of conveying Selkirk’s controlling interest to the Nor’ Westers. Why negotiate with the enemy when the enemy was itself on the verge of surrender? The Hudson’s Bay Company rejected its rival’s offer, adopting the policy that by standing firm for another year or two it could bring the North West Company to its knees. Selkirk died a few months later, in April 1820, but it made no difference for the negotiations; the governing committee retained its resolve.¹⁰

McGillivray suspected McLoughlin of betrayal, for it was clear from the way the Hudson’s Bay Company officers had suddenly broken off negotiations that they had learned of the dissension among the wintering partners. Who else might have given them their intelligence but the nettlesome doctor? His suspicions grew when McLoughlin hosted George Simpson, a rising officer in the Hudson’s Bay Company, at Fort William the following spring. What really rankled McGillivray about this meeting was that the British government had tasked Simpson to deliver a communiqué to the North West Company and Simpson had handed the communiqué to McLoughlin as the company’s representative officer in the interior instead of bringing it to McGillivray as head of the company. Clearly, Simpson’s action was intended to build up McLoughlin and undermine McGillivray, and McLoughlin had played along with it. The junior partner and the powerful Montreal merchant had always been wary of each other; at last their antipathy was out in the open.¹¹

At the rendezvous that summer of 1820, McGillivray’s waning influence over the wintering partners was evident. He could only prevail upon a handful of them to renew their contracts with McTavish, McGillivrays and Company. Vindictively, and as a test of his remaining power, he called for a vote to remove McLoughlin from his longtime post as proprietor of Fort William. He knew how attached the doctor was to that place for the sake of his family. With his tight hold on the Montreal merchants’ shares in the company, McGillivray could just muster the votes to punish his rival. The vote was taken, and McLoughlin was removed from his post. But in taking that action, McGillivray pitted the doctor against him. And the rendezvous was not yet over.

Now stripped of his post, McLoughlin called the wintering partners together in a separate meeting to discuss his idea that they collectively join the Hudson’s Bay Company. It was a mutiny against the Montreal merchants that he now incited. Although the Montreal house of McTavish, ­McGillivrays and Company owned a majority share in all of the company’s far-flung assets, everyone knew that the company’s real strength lay in the energy and experience of the men who dwelt in the interior. The wintering partners were ready. They elected McLoughlin and one other of their number, Angus Bethune, to go on a secret mission to London and represent them at the Hudson’s Bay House. Eighteen men assigned powers of attorney to those two, and handed the documents over to the doctor.¹²

As the rendezvous broke up, McLoughlin made arrangements for his family. For the time being, Marguerite would remain at Fort William with their youngest, little Eloisa, while he would take the older two, John Jr. and Elizabeth, ages eight and six, to Montreal to begin their formal education. Each of the older children would be assigned to a separate guardian, and he would establish an account with his uncle Simon to cover their expenses. He and Marguerite prepared for their third long separation in four years.¹³

Arriving in Montreal in September, McLoughlin and Bethune went to the trading house of George Moffatt. A former clerk in the North West Company, Moffatt now held a controlling interest in the firm of Gerrard, Gillespie, Moffatt, and Company. Eager to support the two North West partners’ scheme, he provided them with a generous expense account for their mission to London. He then introduced them to Samuel Gale, the Selkirks’ former attorney in Montreal, who gave them the necessary contacts in London. McLoughlin still insisted on the secrecy of their mission, but it was ever more apparent that he and Bethune were being treated as envoys to negotiate terms with the opposition. After their meeting, Gale wrote a letter to Andrew Colvile, the attorney on the Hudson’s Bay Company’s London Committee, to inform him about the nature of McLoughlin’s and Bethune’s forthcoming visit.¹⁴