EPILOGUE
Mackinac, 1824—and After

Nineteenth-century travelers found Mackinac Island an exotic, even enchanting, place. Three miles long and a mile wide, it rises precipitously out of the clear, blue waters of Lake Huron. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, a geologist and ethnographer who served for many years as Indian agent in the Michigan Territory, said that the Ottawas named the island Mish-i-nim-auk-in-ong for its resemblance to a great turtle rising from the lake. In Ottawa legend its original inhabitants were a race of little men, or “turtle spirits,” who had dropped from the sky. On moonlit, wind-still, summer nights, it was said, fishermen could see the turtle people’s lodge shining atop the white cliffs and hear them singing and dancing on the island’s summit. Schoolcraft walked the whole circumference of Mackinac Island in one day and found its rugged interior a “labyrinth of curious little glens and valleys.” Most of it was covered by cedar, juniper, and pine, but there were grassy openings where the Indians had once cultivated the soil, gathering up the rocks in stone circles that had long since grown over with moss.¹

Elizabeth Thérèse Baird, the granddaughter of Thérèse Schindler, to whom Tanner had entrusted his infant daughter, Lucy, remembered the village on the south end of the island the way it appeared around 1814. “How vividly I still see the clear, shining broad beach of white pebbles and stones, and clear blue water of the ‘Basin.’ The houses were of one story, roofed with cedar bark. . . . True, the houses were quaint and old; however, they were but few, not enough to mar the beauty, but rather to add to the charms of the little crescent-shaped village.”²

In a less nostalgic vein, an American Fur Company clerk by the name of Gurdon S. Hubbard recorded his first visit to Mackinac in the summer of 1818. “This island was then in its gayest season. All the traders attached to the American Fur Company were assembled there, having brought in their furs, and were preparing to receive their outfits to depart again to their several trading-posts.” Hubbard thought the island had about 500 inhabitants excluding the fort’s garrison of three companies. Most of the villagers were Métis and French Canadians who lived by fishing and trading with the Indians. “With few exceptions,” he wrote, “they were poor and improvident.”³

An American woman named Myra Peters Mason who spent the summer of 1824 on the island found little in the village to admire. She informed her sister that the Métis were “a grade below any other species of the human race I have ever seen.” Mackinac, she proclaimed, was a “half-way place in every sense of the phrase between civilization & barbarism.”⁴

Although Tanner did not record his feelings about Mackinac, he probably looked to it as a haven. Perhaps the placement of a fort, a trading house, an Indian agency, and a largely Métis village all in such close proximity gave him hope of blending into the polyglot community. Possibly, too, the pleasant island setting rekindled old memories of the springtime idyll on Isle Royale he had once enjoyed in his early youth. In any case the strong Métis presence, with its proud embrace of mixed-race families and dual Indian-European heritage, must have appealed to him. He would not have used the terms “civilization” and “barbarism” to describe the juxtaposition of Anglo-American and Métis elements in the community, but he would have agreed with the American woman’s assessment that Mackinac was a “half-way place.”

Yet this unique social environment was not to last. With the United States consolidating its hold on the fur trade in US territory and the Hudson’s Bay Company coming to serve as the instrument of colonial rule in British territory, frontier communities like Mackinac, Sault Ste. Marie, Prairie du Chien, and Red River were being forcibly restructured. In Mackinac the process of Americanization began with the opening of boys’ and girls’ boarding schools around 1814 and intensified with the establishment of a Presbyterian mission in 1823. A new Anglo-American elite was born, which spearheaded the transformation. The elite included Indian agent George Boyd, the American Fur Company’s Robert Stuart, missionary William Ferry, leading businessmen and fort officers, and the wives of these men—altogether some twelve to fifteen families, all of whom hailed from the eastern United States or Britain. They introduced American law, pushed American forms of local government and commerce, made English the dominant language, preached evangelical Protestantism, and expected the Métis to accept American customs.⁵ All of which made it impossible for Tanner to adjust and fit in with the community even though that was his hope.

Tanner’s first experience with the new regime was also perhaps his most devastating. Returning to Mackinac in the early summer of 1824 after an absence of almost two years, he discovered that his three children by Therezia had been bound out to American families. In a practice dating back to colonial times, local authorities bound out needy children to prevent their being a burden on the county’s taxpayers. Binding out was a pauper apprentice system whereby the child’s labor was given to the master in return for the child’s keep and the promise that the child would be taught a craft. Usually the system was restricted to orphans and illegitimate children. When the local authorities bound out Tanner’s children, it showed that they had decided Therezia could not care for them and, furthermore, that they regarded the children as fatherless, since they considered Tanner and Therezia to be unmarried. The oldest child, Martha, was bound out to the fort commander’s family. The youngest, James, just two years old, was placed with the Indian agency’s blacksmith. The middle child, Mary, was put in yet another household. When Tanner learned of their situation, he was furious. He felt betrayed.⁶

Before leaving Mackinac in the fall of 1822, he had arranged for Martha and Mary to attend the new boarding school for girls. The first of its kind in the territory, the school was intended for the daughters of American Fur Company employees. Robert Stuart had seen to its establishment a few years earlier, employing Schindler’s daughter, Marienne, as headmistress. The girls were taught to read and write, keep house, and make their own clothes. Although Tanner’s Narrative says nothing of his children being bound out, it does disclose that while he was away for two years the authorities seized what little property he had in Mackinac to pay for the girls’ board. It appears that the authorities hounded Therezia for the debt, and when she had nothing else to give them they made her surrender the children.⁷

Tanner’s mistake was that he had entrusted the children to the company’s care even though his personal affairs might detain him in Indian country longer than the one-year term of his employment contract. Of course, had he not been attacked by Little Clear Sky he would likely have gotten back within twelve months. Returning to Mackinac fully a year later than planned, he finally collected the pay the company owed him for the previous year. Ironically, he had to use every last penny of his income to get his children back. Afterwards he had nothing. “I have no money, no clothing, & nothing to eat,” he informed the Indian agent. “I am in such a situation that I am unable to go anywhere.” All he had left, he claimed, was “one old Blanket.”⁸

A month later Tanner found employment as an interpreter for Indian agent Boyd. As an employee of the field service of the US Office of Indian Affairs, he became part of a far-flung bureaucracy within the War Department. The Indian field service had seventeen agencies and twenty-three subagencies in operation that year. Mackinac Agency had a staff of five when Tanner came on board: besides Boyd, there was another interpreter, an assistant interpreter, a blacksmith, and a striker.⁹ Interpreters were typically paid a dollar per day, making it one of the best-paid positions within the laboring class in fur-trade society. So, the outlook for Tanner would seem to have brightened: he had secured a steady government job in one of the two occupations, interpreter and missionary, most often taken up by repatriated white Indians like himself.

Yet a good job could not save Tanner from sinking further into disillusionment and loneliness. His adversities were not economic but cultural and psychological. His strange manners, his emotional intensity, his “quick and piercing blue eyes”—character traits that bespoke not just his Indian upbringing but the markings of trauma—put white people off. He could not form lasting relationships. One perceptive observer said that he lacked the submissive and compliant manner that would have helped him get along in his new station as a government interpreter.¹⁰ Governor Cass met with him a dozen years after their first acquaintance and found him “a forlorn, heart broken man.”¹¹ Unable to find acceptance, Tanner grew increasingly hard and mean toward his own wife and children, losing their affections one by one. Whites who wrote about him in his lifetime almost invariably cited the disintegration of his family as proof that he was either insane or hopelessly maladjusted after his return to white society. What they failed to see was that their own society was deeply implicated in the family’s undoing.

On July 30, 1830, Michigan’s territorial legislature enacted a bizarre little law aimed specifically at taking Tanner’s eighteen-year-old daughter Martha away from him. Entitled “An act authorizing the sheriff of Chippewa county to perform certain duties therein mentioned,” the first section authorized the sheriff to remove Martha from her father’s custody and place her in a missionary establishment; the second section provided that if Tanner should threaten Martha or her new custodians, it would constitute a misdemeanor punishable by fine and imprisonment. One Michigan jurist later commented that the act was “probably the only law ever passed in America attaching criminal consequences to injuries to a single private ­person.”¹²

The background to that law is naturally somewhat complicated. Two years before the law was passed, Tanner had taken a job as interpreter for Indian agent Henry Schoolcraft at the Sault Ste. Marie Agency, moving his children to Sault Ste. Marie. The following year Schoolcraft had had to reduce Tanner’s hours and pay; consequently, Tanner had taken a second job as interpreter for the Baptist mission there. He began to assist his second employer, the Reverend Abel Bingham, in translating the Gospels. Schoolcraft and Bingham soon entered into a bitter feud in which Tanner’s shared employment was at first just one irritant among several. However, when Tanner took Bingham’s side in a vicious controversy surrounding one Sophia Cadotte, a pupil at the mission school who was also a servant legally bound to Schoolcraft, it led to a falling out between him and the Indian agent. Schoolcraft was a thug who used the power of his office to settle scores. Besides heading the Indian agency, he also served as a member of the territorial legislature. When he went to Detroit to attend the summer session of the legislature, he not only influenced Governor Cass to remove Tanner from his post, he vindictively pushed that law through the chamber as well.¹³

Even before Tanner was betrayed by his employer, other pressures came to bear on his marriage to Therezia. In the mid- to late 1820s, the Presbyterian missionaries in Mackinac entered into a “religious war” with the Roman Catholic laity. Both sides began to measure their strength by how many converts they could make each year, and both sides took their proselytizing to nasty extremes. When the local authorities caught Catholic Métis inducing Indian children to run away from the Presbyterian mission school, they had them stripped and flogged on the public street. In that charged atmosphere, Therezia converted to Catholicism.¹⁴

According to Elizabeth Thérèse Baird’s recollection, when Tanner moved from Mackinac to Sault Ste. Marie he asked Therezia to join him there, but she refused to go unless he would marry her in the Catholic Church. Denying her request, he insisted (once again) that they were already married in the Indian way and she was fully his wife. One wonders if Therezia’s desire to be legally married had less to do with religious conviction than it did with preventing the local authorities from seizing her “illegitimate” children again. In any case, when Tanner would not consent to be married in the Catholic Church she remained in Mackinac, and that was the end of their relationship.¹⁵

A few years later, Tanner himself converted to the Protestant faith at Sault Ste. Marie. The Baptist missionary Bingham performed his baptism in the St. Mary’s River on August 21, 1831. Unfortunately, there is no explicit record of what Tanner thought or felt about his conversion to Christianity. One could imagine that it was in some way an act of desperation, a last bid for acceptance by the white community. When Tanner gave his story to Edwin James, he told him a pertinent anecdote. It was a tale about a baptized Indian, a man who had followed the beseechings of a missionary, renouncing his own people’s religion and adopting that of the whites. After death, the spirit of this man journeyed to the gates of the white man’s heaven and demanded admittance, but the gatekeeper would not let him in, for he was an Indian. “Go,” the gatekeeper said to him, “for to the west there are the villages and the hunting grounds of those of your own people who have been on the earth before you.” So the dead man’s spirit journeyed some more and came to the villages where the dead of his own people resided, only to be met by the chief, who barred him from entering there as well. “You have been ashamed of us while you lived,” the chief told him. “You have chosen to worship the white man’s God. Go now to his village, and let him provide for you.” The Indian having lived by two creeds, his spirit had nowhere to rest. Now Tanner was that Indian.¹⁶

In the year of his religious conversion, Tanner went to Detroit to search for his daughter Martha. Though he did not find her, he met a white woman there whom he married, brought back to Sault Ste. Marie, and introduced to the Baptist church fellowship. Schoolcraft wrote disparagingly in his diary that the bride was formerly “a chamber-maid at old Ben Woodworth’s hotel.”¹⁷ Bingham’s daughter, Angie Bingham Gilbert, a more sympathetic source on Tanner, recollected years later that Tanner’s new wife was a widow by the name of Mrs. Duncan. People in Detroit, Gilbert said, became interested in Tanner and recommended the widow to him. “He probably did not give any exhibition of temper while there, and she finally consented to marry him.”¹⁸ The marriage lasted less than a year. By the following summer it was rumored that Tanner abused her and threatened to kill her and that when he was away she entertained soldiers from nearby Fort Brady in their home. In the midst of these domestic problems, Tanner’s son James ran away from home. One day, Tanner encountered his ten-year-old son in the village and gave him a severe beating, for which he was arrested and put in jail. When his wife heard that he was incarcerated, she took the opportunity to make her escape. Her church friends took up a collection and bought her passage on the next vessel bound for Detroit. When Tanner was released from jail and learned what had happened, he felt betrayed yet again; his fellow parishioners had spirited away his wife while he was locked behind bars.¹⁹

After that episode, Tanner’s relations with the community rapidly deteriorated. People feared that in retaliation for the removal of his wife he would harm somebody. In Gilbert’s words, he became “a source of worry to nearly every one.” Although the Reverend Bingham still valued Tanner’s skill as an interpreter and translator, he could no longer pay his salary. In October 1833 Bingham reluctantly dismissed him from employment. At the same time, acceding to the wishes of his parishioners, Bingham banished Tanner from the church fellowship.²⁰

Ostracized by the community, robbed of his daughter Martha, and deserted by his son James and his wife from Detroit, Tanner had no one. His daughter Mary had left him sometime before, though the circumstances of her departure are not known. Around this time, word came to him that she had been shot dead by an Ojibwa man somewhere up north. She was twenty years old.²¹

Tanner lived out the rest of his years in Sault Ste. Marie as a semirecluse. He mostly withdrew to his house, which stood on the bank of the St. Mary’s River near the Indian agency. Increasingly given to fits of rage, he was jailed from time to time for making a public disturbance. The children of the village came to regard him as the “bogeyman.”²²

As he approached old age he still craved friendship. It seems he found a small measure of what he was looking for in the Reverend Bingham’s two young daughters. They were of a size and manner to remind him of his own two daughters by Red Sky of the Morning. The girls often passed by his house while he sat in the door gazing toward the sunset. Sometimes they came to visit him. On other occasions, just as they came into view, they would suddenly join hands and scurry past his house. Maybe they saw something in his look that made them take fright. The younger of the two, Angie, would later remember, “When he was pleasant we were interested in seeing him but when angry, we were very much afraid of him.”²³

Nearly seventy years later, Angie Bingham Gilbert presented her recollections of Tanner to the Michigan Pioneer and Historical Society. Notwithstanding her childhood fear of him, it was a surprisingly sympathetic, admiring portrait. He was a “remarkable man,” very intelligent, with “many beautiful ideas.” Her father had informed her that Tanner had once been an excellent interpreter and missionary. When Tanner was not in a rage, she remembered, he could be pleasant, interesting, and even “gentlemanly.”

She recalled his striking appearance. “He was a very strange and in some ways a noble looking man. He was tall and spare, with long white hair which he wore parted in the middle and drawn back behind his ears like a woman’s. He had a fierce eye, and his countenance was most forbidding.”²⁴

Gilbert was not alone in forming a strong impression of Tanner’s “fierce eye.” One Dr. Charles A. Lee of New York met Tanner late in life when he tried to interview him about Indian medicine. He found in his eyes “the most savage, vindictive, suspicious and I may add demoniac, expression I ever saw.” He was too frightened to go through with the interview.²⁵

Henry Schoolcraft dwelt on Tanner’s eyes, too, when he wrote about him in his diary following a tense confrontation the two men had several years after Tanner lost his job at the Indian agency. Going into a canoe-house on the agency grounds, Schoolcraft turned around to find Tanner had followed him in. They stood facing each other in the confined space between the raised canoes. “He began to talk after his manner,” Schoolcraft wrote. Then, looking him in the eyes, Schoolcraft “saw mischief . . . in their cold, malicious, bandit air.” Schoolcraft shook his cane at him. Tanner backed out.²⁶

On the evening of July 4, 1846, Tanner’s house was engulfed in flames. People assembled to try to put out the fire, but they kept their distance after someone discovered gunpowder had been placed around the perimeter of the property as if to ignite an even bigger conflagration. As the crowd stood back and watched the house burn to the ground, people speculated that “Old Tanner” would be found dead inside. Picking through the charred ruin the next day, however, they found no human remains.

Two days after the fire, on July 6, another village alarm was raised when James Schoolcraft, the Indian agent’s younger brother and the sutler for Fort Brady, was found dead on his property with a bullet through his heart. Witnesses heard the gunshot but did not see the shooter. Dressed in a robe and house slippers, James Schoolcraft had been walking down a garden path that led away from the house and was evidently taken by surprise by someone hiding in the bushes. The killing occurred in the afternoon; it seemed he had risen late after sleeping off the effects of a hard night of drinking with army officers on July Fourth, one and a half days earlier.²⁷

Suspicion fell immediately on Tanner. To most of the excited townspeople, it now seemed that Tanner had burned down his own house, committed the murder, and fled. His resentment of Henry Schoolcraft was well known. Presumably upon discovering that the Indian agent was out of town he had waited a day for him to return and had then killed the brother instead. The townspeople imagined that he was now lurking nearby, crazed and homeless and potentially still murderous. They promptly organized a manhunt. The men did not venture too far into the woods, however, as they knew Tanner was a good marksman. After a few days, they gave up the search.²⁸

Cooler heads suggested another theory about the murder of James Schoolcraft. A one-ounce ball and three buckshot found in the victim’s body matched the contents of a government cartridge fired from an army musket. A young officer at Fort Brady by the name of Lieutenant Bryant Tilden was said to have a motive for the killing: he and James Schoolcraft had been vying for the attention of a young lady. At the officers’ party on the evening of July Fourth the two men had quarreled. Tilden was overheard to say “cold lead would fix it.” However, before he could be formally charged with murder the army whisked him away to fight in the Mexican-American War.²⁹

Not long afterwards, Tilden was charged with another crime, court-­martialed, convicted on counts of murder and burglary, and sentenced to be hanged. The sentence was commuted, and he resigned from the army. Though he was never formally charged in the Schoolcraft case, he felt the need to proclaim his innocence. He died in New York in 1859. After he died, rumors surfaced that on his deathbed he confessed to killing Schoolcraft. The most compelling story of the deathbed confession was offered by Gilbert, who recalled a conversation she had with Martha Tanner in Mackinac some forty years after the murder. Martha Tanner told her that she had had a letter from Tilden’s wife stating that her husband had confessed to shooting James Schoolcraft. Martha stated further that being a Roman Catholic she had shown Mrs. Tilden’s letter to her bishop, who had taken it from her saying that it must be destroyed.

Although the suspicion of Tilden lingered, the prevailing view was that Tanner killed Schoolcraft. Many worried that he might be hovering about, waiting to kill again. One Indian woman claimed she had seen him darting through the forest with dead grass and pine boughs tied to his arms and legs, dressed for hunting. Other Indians who came down the St. Mary’s River reported seeing his campfire through the trees and hearing him singing Indian songs. When, after a few weeks had passed, smoke was observed rising in a dozen places around the surrounding country, it was said he was setting fire to the woods. Nervous parents kept their children in at night. A guard was posted around Henry Schoolcraft’s house as well as around the Reverend Bingham’s house. The local authorities offered a reward for Tanner’s capture, while the governor of Michigan announced he would do all in his power to bring him to trial. The fear that he would return and commit more murders went on for weeks. The excitement would long be remembered as the “Tanner summer.”³⁰

He was never heard from again.

In the spacious Far West, Dr. John McLoughlin had full rein to exercise his ambition and skill as an administrator. There he built an empire on a scale few nineteenth-century traders could have imagined. For twenty years he served as chief factor of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s sprawling Columbia District. From his headquarters at Fort Vancouver on the lower Columbia River, he oversaw a vast trade network that stretched up and down the Pacific Coast from Alaska to California, penetrated inland to the Great Salt Lake, and followed sea lanes to Hawaii, Tahiti, and the Far East. He managed a complex infrastructure of trading posts, trapper brigades, company ships, sawmills, and farms. He advised his superiors on how the company could best compete with its American and Russian rivals. He conducted diplomacy with Indian tribes. He forged his own policy for dealing with the arrival of American settlers. He was patriarch over the whole unorganized territory.

McLoughlin developed a reputation among the Pacific Northwest Indians as a just and powerful white chief. He was proud of the name that Indians gave him: “The White-headed Eagle.” He supposed the name alluded to his impressive authority over his men as much as it did to his giant physique and white mane of hair, or the eagle-like glower he wore when addressing a council. He delivered a stern message to his own people on how they must treat Indians. As Hudson’s Bay Company servants, they were obliged to cultivate good relations with their trading partners. Anyone under his charge who maliciously harmed an Indian would be punished the same as if the attack was made on a white person. Anyone who murdered an Indian would be subject “to the penalties of a capital indictment in the criminal courts of Canada.” He hoped for similar vigilance and restraint by the tribes. He expected them to punish their own bad men, and he wanted to leave them to their own affairs as much as possible. “In dealing with the Indians we ought to make allowance for their way of thinking,” he said.³¹

While McLoughlin talked of respecting natives’ way of thinking, he did so with the tribes’ political rather than cultural autonomy in view. When missionaries came to the Oregon country with the hope of converting Indians to Christianity, he applauded their efforts. Always a humanitarian, he believed the missionaries could benefit Indians most by introducing them to agriculture. He argued that teaching them how to read and write and instructing them in Scripture ought to be secondary concerns at best. In his view, if a few Indians gathered around the missions, learned how to farm, and took their new knowledge back to their people, then it would free them all from dependence on the hunt. “Teach them first to cultivate the ground and live more comfortably than they do by hunting, and as they do this, teach them religion,” he advised the missionaries. McLoughlin believed the Indians’ customary way of life could not last in Oregon any more than the fur trade could long endure there. Both would disappear under the approaching tide of white settlement.³²

A man once asked the doctor if he thought Oregon would become a settled country. His response was that wherever men could raise wheat the land would become settled. As McLoughlin found Oregon’s fertile soil and mild climate to be much more favorable for farming than any other place he had known, he expected the land to fill with farms relatively quickly. As early as 1829, he started a claim at the falls of the Willamette River twenty-five miles south of Fort Vancouver. He erected mills next to the falls. Eventually he moved to his valuable claim after retiring from the company. He always anticipated that Oregon would grow and prosper. He naïvely expected to have more influence on the new state than the way it played out. While he was chief factor he encouraged freemen (retired company servants) and Métis to immigrate to the Willamette valley from Red River and elsewhere in the Hudson’s Bay Company’s territories. He told them that Oregon would be a good place to raise their mixed-blood children “as white and Christians.” Furthermore, he thought that a strong Métis presence would tend to promote peace between settlers and Indians. In looking to Oregon’s future, he vainly hoped that Indians would be well treated by whites when the latter came to outnumber them.³³

Two of McLoughlin’s own Métis children were among the few hundred Canadians who answered his call and took up farms in the Willamette valley. His oldest son, Joseph, served as a trapper on expeditions to California for a number of years and then retired from the company and established a farm about forty miles south of Fort Vancouver. His stepson, Thomas McKay, also settled in the valley, where he married a woman of the Chinook tribe, made a farm, and continued to serve the company as an occasional guide and trapper. McLoughlin’s younger daughter, Eloisa, grew up in the “big house” at Fort Vancouver, married a company clerk, and eventually settled in the area as well.³⁴

McLoughlin urged his younger two sons, John Jr. and David, to get an education and make a life for themselves outside of farming and the fur trade. Both sons did a turn at medical school in Paris under the watchful eye of his brother David, while from the other side of the world McLoughlin paid their expenses. Both young men circled back to farming and the fur trade in the Pacific Northwest in spite of their education and their father’s wishes. McLoughlin’s son David later left Oregon for the California gold fields, then went to the mines in British Columbia, and finally settled on a farm in northern Idaho, where he married a Kutenai woman and lived on into old age in obscurity. John Jr. was less fortunate. After a troubled youth in Terrebonne living with his great uncle, followed by a restless passage through early manhood in Paris and Montreal, he started to show some promise as a Hudson’s Bay Company clerk in the Far West. Tragically, while superintending a remote post in coastal Alaska in 1842, his life was cut short when he was shot and killed by one of his own men in a drunken brawl.³⁵

There was a curious parallel between McLoughlin’s older son’s unhappy life and John Tanner’s. Both were separated from their parents’ home and thrust into an alien culture while in the same early stage of life. McLoughlin took his son John Jr. from Fort William to Terrebonne to live with his uncle Simon when the boy was eight years old. Although McLoughlin’s aim was to get his son a formal education, he was at a tender age to be deposited so far from home. McLoughlin saw little more of him after that, and Marguerite had even less contact. John Jr. seems to have been psychologically damaged by the separation in much the same way Tanner was traumatized by his captivity. There is a chilling hint of it in a missive Simon Fraser wrote to his great nephew in 1836, when John Jr. was a troubled young man of twenty-three. “I have so bad an opinion of you that I think you equal to any species of meanness,” the letter began, and then it made oblique reference to John Jr.’s childhood uprooting:

When a boy of about eight years of age I was obliged to take you from the Reverend Mr Glen on account of the habit you had of soiling your breeches and remaining in that condition for days. . . . I blamed your mother for the filthy habit—I am now convinced I was wrong—the blame lay solely on your innate perversity at school in Terrebonne—Messrs Glen Walker and Gill repeatedly urged me to take you away alleging that you corrupted the morals of the other boys. . . . You appear to me born to disgrace every being who has the misfortune to be connected with you. . . . If you have any the least affection for your father mother or brothers you will retire to some distant far country that you may never more be heard of. . . . You have nothing left besides being a day labourer in civilized society or an hunter among savages.³⁶

Dr. McLoughlin never learned of the circumstances of his boy’s early failing at school, nor did he know how his uncle abused the boy’s feelings toward his mother and Métis heritage. Though John Jr. begged to join his parents in Oregon, McLoughlin insisted that he stay in the East to get an education. Years later, when John Jr. was a young man adrift in Montreal running up debts, he joined with other disaffected Métis sons of the fur trade on an escapade to the Red River country to start a rebellion among the Métis and Indians. The adventure turned into a debacle, bringing John Jr. to one of the low points in his short, turbulent life. Clearly John Jr.’s psychological problems stemmed from feelings of abandonment as well as ambivalence over his Métis heritage. Yet father and son never discussed those matters between them in all of their pained correspondence over the years. Though McLoughlin was a doctor, he did not have the insight of modern psychology for comprehending his son’s problems. Indeed, McLoughlin never expressed doubts about having parted with his son at such a young age; he only admitted to regrets that he himself did not live “close to the Civilized World” so as to “superintendent the Education” of his children.³⁷

McLoughlin came from a proud family in which heritage and higher education were esteemed above all else. As a fur trader and leader in the Hudson’s Bay Company, he held fast to the value of a good education while insisting that respect for heritage had to be liberalized to include the Métis culture that he had married into. He envisioned a future for his empire on the Columbia, as well as for his family, that would be inclusive of whites, Indians, and Métis. Historical forces far beyond his control overwhelmed his efforts both in the public arena and in what he attempted to do for his sons.

Until the early 1840s, Oregon’s small settler population of under a thousand people was composed of roughly equal numbers of Americans and British subjects. The United States and Britain jointly occupied the Oregon country under an international convention. In the early 1840s, American immigration increased and the settlers’ numbers began to tip heavily in favor of the United States. When the new settlers arrived in the Willamette valley, they looked askance at the polyglot population of French Canadians, Scots, Métis, Hawaiians, and eastern Indians (mostly Iroquois and Delawares) who made up the British portion of the resident settler population. The Americans harbored racial attitudes that were not at all inclusive; most of them were anti-Indian, antiblack, and opposed to marriage between whites and Indians or blacks. They looked upon the many cross-cultural marriages and Métis offspring as a degenerate population.³⁸

Far from becoming an inclusive society, Oregon trended the other way in the 1840s. Willamette valley residents met in the summer of 1843 to organize a provisional government. Some put forward a proposal to push out all settlers who had taken an Indian wife, and others suggested a constitutional provision to prohibit “half-breeds” from owning land. The constitution as adopted did not include either of those provisions, but it did come to exclude blacks from the territory. An unusual, racially integrated party of white and black Missourians on its way to the Willamette valley halted in dismay when it received the news and then made course for the future Washington Territory instead.³⁹

McLoughlin refused to recognize the provisional government. Some of the American settlers countered him by threatening to confiscate the Hudson’s Bay Company’s property or deny certain British subjects rights of US citizenship when Oregon became American soil, which they presumed it would. Despite those tensions in the community, McLoughlin extended a helping hand to hundreds of American immigrants later that same year as they arrived in Oregon at the end of their exhausting overland journeys. By opening his stores and giving the Americans generous terms of credit (much of it never repaid) he was “simply converting necessity into virtue”—­keeping the needy immigrants from starving so they would not resort to storming the fort and seizing the supplies for themselves. Those calculated moves earned him a huge debt of gratitude among the new populace and were long remembered as acts of humanity.⁴⁰

As the settler population in Oregon swelled, Americans called for expanding the nation’s borders to the Pacific with the annexation of the Oregon country. Events rapidly moved beyond McLoughlin’s control and influence. By the Oregon Treaty of 1846, the United States and Britain agreed to partition the Oregon country along the forty-ninth parallel. The Hudson’s Bay Company vacated Fort Vancouver and moved its headquarters north to Vancouver Island in today’s British Columbia; meanwhile, McLoughlin left the company and moved from Fort Vancouver to his claim at the Willamette Falls. By an act of Congress in 1848, Oregon became an organized territory. Two years later, Congress enacted the Donation Land Claim Act, an early homestead law promoted by and for the white settlers of Oregon. The law authorized the survey of Oregon lands without regard to Indian title, and it provided for the distribution of land claims to eligible settlers. Eligibility requirements under the law affirmed white privilege over other racial groups. Thus, Indians were pushed out of the way, Métis thrust into the shadows, Hawaiians persuaded to return to Hawaii, and blacks excluded. It was not the inclusive society McLoughlin had desired.

The Donation Land Claim Act also targeted McLoughlin’s valuable claim at the Willamette Falls, conveying what it called the “Oregon City claim” to the Oregon Territory for use as an educational endowment. This narrow provision in the law preempted McLoughlin’s just claim and was nothing but a vindictive blow against the former British patriarch now that his twenty-year reign over the Oregon country was ended. It did not dispossess him of his house, but it did deprive him of a considerable part of his rightful estate. Moreover, his foes did not stop with passing the law but also challenged his application for US citizenship, since US citizenship was a necessary condition for obtaining a land grant under the law. Although he did eventually achieve US citizenship, the holdup in his application kept him from pressing his claim before much of the land was parceled out to others. Ironically, McLoughlin’s declaration of intention to become a US citizen took away whatever recourse for protection of property he might have had as a British subject under the Oregon Treaty of 1846.

McLoughlin did not see the political knives come out against him until it was too late. Embittered by this perceived treachery on the part of a few bigoted politicians, he found it was not enough for the Americans to take the Indians’ land and establish a government of white men for the white man, they had to work out their anti-British fervor as well, and he was their victim. In an open letter to the citizens of Oregon, he protested that he was not even an Englishman. “I am a Canadian by birth, and an Irishman by descent,” he wrote. Their shady politics had left him “in the decline of life, and in the decrepitude of old age, to the companionship of adders.”⁴¹

McLoughlin died of natural causes at the age of seventy-two on September 3, 1857, at his home in Oregon City, his Marguerite and daughter Eloisa nearby. At the time of his death, the Oregon Constitutional Convention was in session in nearby Salem, preparing the territory for statehood. While McLoughlin lay dying, he summoned one of the convention delegates, a young man by the name of LaFayette Grover, a future governor of Oregon, to come into his chamber so he could make a last request: he wanted Grover to promise him that after he was gone the state of Oregon would return the land to its rightful owners, his family. The old trader had fire in his belly to the end. “You are a young man and will live many years in this country,” he rasped to his visitor. “As for me, I might have been better shot like a bull”—and he spit out the words, according to Grover’s account—“I might better have been shot forty years ago!” McLoughlin paused, looking for an acknowledgment that he had been wronged. Getting none, he went on, “than to have lived here and tried to build up a family and an estate in this government.” Then he concluded, almost in a whisper, “I planted all I had here.”⁴²

After his death, McLoughlin’s historical reputation rose as anti-British sentiment receded. By the late nineteenth century, old pioneers hailed the memory of the Hudson’s Bay Company chief factor, recalling his humanitarian aid to arriving settlers and insisting that he was the early friend of the American cause. Many years after he was gone, he became known as the “Father of Oregon.”

Retiring from western exploration after his 1823 expedition, Stephen H. Long turned to various nation-building endeavors in the settled part of the United States for the remainder of his career with the US Topographical Engineers. His latter activities, which came to span the whole antebellum period, included surveying for a national road, building railroads in Maryland and Georgia, and improving navigation on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. He headed the Office of Improvements of Western Rivers for a de­cade and a half. He supervised dredging of sandbars and removal of snags on the Mississippi and its tributaries and oversaw construction of a small fleet of steam-powered snagboats, each vessel operated by a crew of thirty to forty men. Late in life he was promoted to the rank of colonel and was appointed chief of the Corps of Topographical Engineers.

Long’s nearly half century of military service spanned the years 1814 to 1863, coinciding almost exactly with the life of the Topographical Engineers as an elite unit in the army. During Long’s early career as an explorer, nationalists pressed for a federal role not only in safeguarding the nation’s frontiers but also in strengthening the nation’s transportation system. Nationalists wanted army engineers to deploy not only to build fortifications but also to survey major roads and improve waterways, the nation’s arteries for communication and commerce. The General Survey Act of 1824 authorized federal assistance for those so-called internal improvements. A further act of Congress in 1838 elevated the Topographical Engineers from a branch of the Corps of Engineers to a corps by itself. For the next quarter century, the Corps of Topographical Engineers flourished as the work of the “topogs” came to span an even wider array of nation-building projects, from dredging harbors and charting coastlines to surveying routes for transcontinental railroads. During and after the Mexican-American War, the topogs devoted more and more of their time to the trans-Mississippi West.⁴³

Long was immensely gratified to see the topogs take on the work of internal improvements. Although his own assignments after 1824 did not take him west of the Mississippi River ever again, he remained a westward expansionist at heart. His political hero was Henry Clay of Kentucky, the longtime US congressman and speaker of the house. An ardent nationalist, Clay championed internal improvements as one of three major components of his “American System” for growing the national economy (along with protective tariffs and a national bank). Improving the nation’s roads and waterways would stimulate commerce between the North, South, and West and bind the three sections together.⁴⁴

American nationalism turned inward in the 1820s as efforts toward nation building focused less on territorial expansion and more on internal improvements and economic growth. US Indian policy reflected the trend. Around the time that Long completed his western expeditions, the frontier of American settlement stood on a ragged north-south line down the length of the Mississippi valley. A few fingers of white settlement reached across the Mississippi and up the major tributaries draining from the west. East of the line of settlement, there were several large pockets of Indian-held lands where whites were discouraged from settling. The American populace fixated on getting access to those remaining Indian lands in the east. It demanded that the US government force all eastern tribes to cede their lands and move westward. The dispossessed tribes were to “remove” to unorganized territory lying beyond the Mississippi. Since the Great Plains constituted a Great American Desert unsuitable for white settlement, proponents of “Indian removal” claimed the tribes would find those lands to be a safe haven from further white encroachment, a “permanent Indian frontier,” an agreeable place for the tribes’ subsistence. In 1830, Congress enacted the Indian Removal Bill and President Andrew Jackson signed it into law. Although the federal policy of Indian relocation was not new, but rather a continuation of forced relocations that had already occurred in the states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois over the preceding decades, it nonetheless took on a more draconian cast under the Jackson administration. A series of forced emigrations ensued for tribes still residing east of the Mississippi. The major tribes who were targeted for relocation were the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole tribes, known collectively as the “Five Civilized Tribes” for their decades-old effort to adopt the white man’s forms of land tenure, government, and religion in order to avoid this very outcome.

Although Stephen Long was not consulted during the final debate over the Indian Removal Bill, his legacy of western exploration from 1816 to 1823 helped prepare the ground for Indian relocation. In particular, his description of the Great Plains as a wasteland for white settlement, which would serve as a haven for nomadic tribes and a buffer against foreign invasion, provided intellectual cover for the US government’s big lie in the 1830s that the central and southern plains would be set aside as a permanent Indian territory.⁴⁵

Americans in Long’s day were of two minds about Indian peoples. Some thought they should be absorbed into the American nation through a process of acculturation, that is, they had to be raised from “savagery” to “civilization” as nineteenth-century Americans understood those terms. Others thought the goal of assimilating Indian peoples into the nation was unachievable; therefore, tribes had to be removed from the nation or else face destruction by the overwhelming numbers of white settlers pressing on their lands. “Removal,” according to the latter view, was the tribes’ only alternative to extinction. Concepts of nation and culture in Long’s day did not admit other possibilities. Outside of the fur trade, the idea of cultural mixing was generally abhorred. The further notion that Indian peoples might retain part of their own traditions within a culturally diverse nation was scarcely imaginable then. Long’s often dark and pessimistic pronouncements about western tribes were, unfortunately, consistent with mainstream opinion in his time.

By the time Long reached old age in the mid-nineteenth century, the fur trade in the United States had faded into obscurity. Americans mostly went west in search of other riches: gold in California, free land in Oregon, freedom from religious persecution in Brigham Young’s Mormon West, and boundless timberlands in the Ojibwas’ homeland in northern Wisconsin and Minnesota. In the Illinois country, where Long’s western explorations began and where he planned to retire, the white population grew to over a million by the mid-1850s. Long marveled over the transformation. “The region so wild, solitary and dreary in 1816,” he told an interviewer in 1854, “is now occupied by a numerous and widespread population, and checkered with counties, towns, villages, and cities scattered in every direction over its broad and fertile surface.” Chicago had been the site of a minor frontier military post when he had visited the place in 1816; now in 1854 it was a booming western city of 80,000 residents. Practically his whole route through Illinois in 1816, he recalled, had been through “a trackless wilderness, known and frequented almost exclusively by savages.” He neglected to add that in the 1820s and ’30s the US government forced all those “savages” to leave the state. The small number of Illinois Indians who were still surviving in the mid-1850s lived in exile and degradation in the western territories. Yet so pleased was Long that the Illinois country had become settled by white people, he seems to have been callous to the fate of the Indians.⁴⁶

The old western explorer probably gave no more consideration to the legacy of Indian dispossession when, a few years later, he decided to speculate in Chicago real estate. He bought a five-acre lot in a subdivision at the western edge of the growing city. The land speculation was strictly a money-making proposition, and it succeeded for him splendidly. Long made a killing on a small piece of the tribes’ ceded lands. His wife, Martha, who outlived him by several years, eventually sold the property for many times the investment price, clearing nearly $40,000. That sum was equal to about $700,000 in today’s dollars, and it lifted Stephen and Martha Long into the top 1 percent of American households by property wealth. Although Long would never have admitted it, in truth the estate he bequeathed to his heirs rested in large part on the nation’s gobbling up of the Indian estate.⁴⁷

When one considers Stephen H. Long’s accomplished life next to the hard life of John McLoughlin and the tragic fate of John Tanner, Long easily appears to have been the most fortunate, the most personally fulfilled of the three. As each man came from a different background and identified with a different people, Long comes across as the one who got to play with the winning team. The comparison tends to put Long in an unflattering light by today’s standards, and that is not quite fair to him. The lessons to be taken from looking at Long in this context are less about him than they are about the place of privilege he occupied. If Long was blind to the huge advantages that race and nationality gave him, he was no more blind than millions of his countrymen.

In one respect Long was the least fortunate of the three men. He lived to see his nation descend into bloody civil war under the curse of slavery.

In 1858, Stephen Long moved his western headquarters to Alton, Illinois, opposite St. Louis on the Mississippi River. At age seventy-three, he wanted to join his four younger brothers who had settled in Alton over the preceding decades, gather his family around him, and ease into a comfortable retirement from the army. Stephen and Martha were accompanied to Alton by their oldest son, William, who was mentally handicapped and had remained in their care since birth, and their second son, Henry Clay Long, who was an engineer like his father. Taking up residence in a stately and commodious house on a quarter section of land, they were soon joined by their daughter Lucy and son-in-law Marcus P. Breckenridge and four Breckenridge grandchildren. The four adults and four grandchildren all lived with Stephen and Martha in the big house.⁴⁸

Moving to Alton brought Stephen Long full circle, back to the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, the very place where all of his explorations of the Illinois country, the upper Mississippi, the Arkansas, and the Great Plains had started. Yet the great river rolling past his new home in southern Illinois was not the same river of his younger days. It was not the river he had imagined when he wrote “Voyage in a Six-Oared Skiff.” Nor was it the same stream he had referenced in his letters to President Monroe and Secretary of War Calhoun when he proposed an ambitious program of army exploration. The Mississippi River no longer lay at the threshold of the Great West, its western tributaries pointing off propitiously in the direction of unknown lands and national destiny. Now the Mississippi River thrummed with steamboats laden with southern cotton and northern manufactures. Its broad, gray waters separated the free state of Illinois from the slave state of Missouri, forming part of the line between North and South. Its muscular current pulled irresistibly at the riverbanks, hissing of another national fate in the offing.

Years before Stephen and Martha moved to Alton, Stephen’s younger brother Enoch took part in that town’s first bloodletting of the sectional strife that culminated in the American Civil War. In 1837, Enoch rallied to the defense of Alton’s abolitionist newspaper editor Elijah P. Lovejoy when his printing press—his fourth since taking up the antislavery cause—was attacked by a proslavery mob. Lovejoy’s few dozen defenders exchanged gunfire with the mob, and Lovejoy was shot and killed in the hail of lead, becoming a martyr to the abolitionist cause. When Stephen and Martha took up residence in Alton more than twenty years later, memories of that night were still intense. Alton remained a hotbed for abolitionist agitation and southern angst. Runaway slaves from neighboring Missouri were spirited through the town on the underground railroad, and slavecatchers from Missouri occasionally raided and clashed with the townspeople. A number of houses in Alton contained hideaways for fugitive blacks transiting through the community.⁴⁹

The year Stephen and Martha moved to Alton was also the year of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. The two statesmen met in Alton for their seventh and final debate. Proslavery Missourians flocked to the event from across the river to support Stephen Douglas, while Free-soil Republicans came down from northern Illinois by steamboat to cheer for Abe Lincoln. It is doubtful that Long was in the audience that day, as he did not complete his move to Alton until the following month; but he would have received a first-person account of the event from Enoch or another brother shortly afterwards. Douglas went first and held forth for an hour, wooing the proslavery members of the crowd with his insistence that the Founding Fathers had never intended that the rights of US citizenship would apply to people of all races. For this, the Missourians gave the senator from Illinois a big hand of applause. Lincoln thundered back that the Founders’ ringing phrase “all men are created equal” admitted no other interpretation. Then, elaborating on his declaration in an earlier debate that “a house divided against itself cannot stand,” he went on to make one of his strongest denunciations of slavery yet. American democracy would not endure, Lincoln said, without accomplishing slavery’s “ultimate extinction.” At the end of his ninety-­minute speech there were shouts from the crowd, “Hurrah for Abe Lincoln as next president!”⁵⁰

Stephen Long’s position on slavery by this time is not known, but he was certainly a staunch unionist and probably a supporter of the insurgent Republican Party. As a new arrival in Illinois, Long would not have been able to cast a ballot, for in those pre–Civil War days the state laws did not provide for soldier absentee voting. During the early months of 1859, as the election results slowly came in, Long saw the Republican Party win control of the US House of Representatives, while Lincoln lost in his contest with Douglas. In that era before popular election of US senators, voters of each state elected their US representatives, while state legislators elected the US senators. Illinois voters elected four Republicans and five Democrats to the 36th Congress, while the Democratically controlled state legislature re­elected Douglas to the US Senate by a vote of 54 to 46.

It is a reasonable guess that Stephen Long cast a ballot for Lincoln two years later in the presidential election of 1860. As an ardent supporter of the late Henry Clay, Long would have admired Lincoln’s high praise of Clay and likely would have followed Lincoln’s example in transferring his allegiance from the defunct Whig Party to the young Republican Party. During the winter of 1860–61, when southerners were in an uproar over the election, Long took the precaution of withdrawing federal funds from the US Assay Office in St. Louis and holding them in his home in Alton to prevent their falling into the hands of secessionist Missourians.

Long was overseeing snag removal on the Lower Mississippi around New Orleans when the southern states seceded from the Union one by one in the early months of 1861. After Louisiana seceded (in January), Long ordered his men to remain in the state long enough to complete a series of soundings near the mouth of the Mississippi before they pulled out. He knew the information that they obtained would be important for producing navigational charts for US naval commanders in the coming conflict.

In June 1861, he wrote to his superiors that in spite of his “advanced age and infirmities” he wanted to continue in public service. He applied for a promotion to colonel and was granted the higher rank, along with elevation to chief of the Corps of Topographical Engineers. Long took up his new duties in the nation’s capital in December 1861.

In war, the Topographical Engineers reverted to their original role of producing military maps for the army. As the topogs were no longer needed for nation-building surveys and civil engineering works, Congress abolished the Corps of Topographical Engineers in 1863 and Long at last retired. The old soldier was back home in Alton when Union forces took Vicksburg, the last Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi River. He died on September 4, 1864, at the age of seventy-nine, while the war still raged.⁵¹