Under a brooding late-summer sky, two men made their way up a path toward the tall wooden gate of a Hudson’s Bay Company trading post. One of the men walked with difficulty, clutching his right arm to his chest. We will call him John Tanner. To the fur traders he was known as the white Indian, for he had been taken captive by Indians as a child and had lived with them for nearly thirty years. British traders referred to him as the American, since he had been born in that territory and had made two journeys back in recent years. The Ojibwas knew him as Shaw-shaw-wa ne-ba-se, the Swallow, and more lately as Gichi-mookomaan, the white man. Now he hobbled slowly up the path to the trading post, for every jostle of his arm made him shiver with pain. Until that afternoon, he had lain in bed for more than a month, since the day of the shooting, when his arm had been shattered by a musket ball fired at close range.
Despite the wracking pain, Tanner’s mind was focused on recovering his two young daughters. He believed the men in the fort were holding them against their will—bullying them, threatening them, and probably worse. He had heard the men’s taunts and seen them leer. Once, a few weeks earlier, the trader in charge had trapped the two teenage girls inside the stockade and ordered them to sleep in the men’s quarters. But the girls had slipped through the gate and fled to the nearby farmstead of Old Roy, a retired company servant and friend, with whom they found safety. Old Roy had brought the girls back to their father, even though Tanner, in his lame condition, was hardly able to come to their defense if they once again fell into the Hudson’s Bay men’s clutches. And now he perceived that just that had happened.
Tanner stood at the fort’s gate and called out to his missing daughters. His companion rang the bell and bellowed for the men to let them in. Someone opened the tiny aperture in the picket wall next to the gate, a hole barely big enough for a man’s hand, and peered through it. Other men’s faces appeared through a narrow crack in the gate. Tanner fixed them with his cold, blue eyes and stated his business in Ojibwa while his companion translated. He wanted to search the servants’ quarters for the two girls. If they were not there, then someone inside must know where they could be found.
The handful of French Canadian employees who gathered behind the gate insisted they had not seen the girls. Speaking through the narrow opening, they refused to let the two in. Tanner began to shout at them in a mix of French and Ojibwa, and they shot back a barrage of insults. Tanner’s daughters had probably grown weary of tending his stinking wound, they jeered. Most likely they had deserted him and run away to their mother. C’est la vie! The girls were old enough to choose for themselves.
Nearby on that same late-summer evening, Major Stephen H. Long sat at his field desk in his tent making notes by the light of a candle. An officer in the US Topographical Engineers, he was exploring the northern prairies from the upper Mississippi to the forty-ninth parallel as well as the wooded borderlands west of Lake Superior. The northern expedition was an encore to his famous expedition to the Rocky Mountains in 1820. He and his men had arrived at Rainy Lake House on the Rainy River, on the boundary between US and British territory, today’s border between Minnesota and western Ontario.
In the waning light of the evening, two men appeared at the door of his tent: the expedition interpreter, Charles Brousse, and the American, John Tanner. It was the fourth time the wounded American had visited him that day. Only a short time ago, Long had finally agreed to take Tanner and his daughters to Mackinac in the expedition’s canoes. He thought, Now what could the matter be?
Tanner began speaking to him in broken English, but he was so agitated his words came tumbling out, incomprehensible. Brousse broke in to explain that Tanner’s daughters were missing—perhaps being abused by the men in the fort. The Hudson’s Bay men had not only refused Tanner entry into the fort, they had provoked him with vile insults. Tanner wanted the American commander to intervene.
Long was skeptical. The girls had probably run off when Tanner told them they would be going with the American expedition. Still, with all the depravity Long had seen in other fur traders’ establishments, he could not be too certain. In any case, he had made his decision: the expedition was going to help Tanner search for his missing daughters.
Long summoned the expedition’s surgeon, Dr. Thomas Say, and the four men started back up the path to the fort. Night had fallen, and with low clouds hiding the moon and stars they fumbled along the path through inky darkness. Admitted through the gate, they made their way across the muddy courtyard to the officer’s house, where a faint light from oil lamps shone dimly through moose-skin windowpanes—the only source of light in an ocean of darkness.
That night, the proprietor of Rainy Lake House, Dr. John McLoughlin, arrived home at a late hour, having pushed his twenty canoemen to paddle the last few miles of their journey after dark. As a chief factor in the great Hudson’s Bay Company, McLoughlin was in charge of the whole area of borderlands west of Lake Superior, tasked with opposing the petty traders who operated out of US territory. He was returning from his summer-long trip to Hudson Bay, where he had delivered twenty packs of furs, attended the Northern Department’s annual meeting, and secured more trade goods for the resupply of his post. Now, leaving the men to unload the cargo, he hastened up the path to see his wife and children after a separation of more than ten weeks.
Going through the gate and approaching the house, he heard raised voices within the officers’ quarters. He wondered, What in the devil is all the commotion about? He stooped through the door—at six feet, four inches, he was a head taller than most men in the fur trade—and burst in on a heated conference. The room fell silent. The tall, broad-shouldered doctor, with his stern visage and wild mane of hair, often had that effect on men.
McLoughlin did not need introductions. He recognized Major Long, having been informed that the famous US army explorer was in the neighborhood. He also recognized the man with the wounded arm, the one they called the American. Years ago he had doctored him through some broken ribs. A good, honest, intelligent fellow, he once jotted in the post’s journal. McLoughlin made a mental note such as that for every Indian who ever traded at Rainy Lake House. But his interest in this man ran a bit deeper than it did for most Indians. Might have made a fair interpreter had he been willing to serve the company. But he kept to himself and the Indians, devoted to the old Ottawa woman who raised him. A few years ago, McLoughlin knew, the old Ottawa woman had died and the American had gone in search of his white kinfolk in the United States. Before leaving the country, Tanner had paid him a visit. All of this McLoughlin had recalled earlier that summer, when word passed around that Tanner had been shot and was recovering from his wounds at Rainy Lake House.
Now he learned that Tanner’s daughters were missing—runaways, he was told by the fort’s summer caretaker. The Hudson’s Bay men stood accused by Tanner and the American officers of holding them captive in the men’s quarters. Nonsense, the doctor insisted, siding with his own people. The girls could be nowhere in the house; he gave the Americans his word on it. He would organize a search at daybreak. He would offer a reward to the local Indians for their safe return. Until then, everyone must get some rest.
Stephen H. Long, John Tanner, and Dr. John McLoughlin each made his own record of the events that occurred at Rainy Lake House on the late afternoon and evening of September 1, 1823. McLoughlin made an entry in the trading post’s journal, which was later preserved in the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives. Long and his men wrote in their expedition journals, and the expedition journalist, William H. Keating, later compiled all their notes and produced the official narrative of the expedition, which was published in 1824. Tanner, for his part, recalled the events from memory when he related the story of his life to an ethnographer, Edwin James, some five years later in 1828. Tanner’s autobiography was published in New York in 1830 under the title Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner. Long’s, Tanner’s, and McLoughlin’s written records of what happened basically corroborate one another. Moreover, the journal entries, which recorded the events right after they had occurred, support Tanner’s account pulled from memory. They help authenticate Tanner’s remarkable narrative as a true and unembellished testament of a life lived among Indians in an oral culture without writing.
Yet there are subtle variances in the three men’s accounts—differences not of fact but of perception. Each man had pressing questions on his mind to which the others were either indifferent or unaware. Long was perplexed by Tanner’s character as much as he was moved by Tanner’s circumstances. Long considered him to be an American citizen, or at least a former US citizen, yet in manner and speech he was more Indian than white. The onetime captive struck the American explorer as a tragic figure caught in a no-man’s-land between drastically different cultures. Half-civilized and half-savage, Long thought, a hopeless misfit. Long wanted to help him, but he felt at a loss how to save him.
Those concerns contrast with Tanner’s, who alone of the three men believed his daughters would be raped by the Hudson’s Bay men. Tanner saw, as the others apparently did not, the lustful, plotting looks that followed his young teenage girls wherever they moved around the fort.
McLoughlin, meanwhile, had the interests of the Hudson’s Bay Company in mind. As a doctor and a humanitarian, he was concerned about the welfare of the wounded American. Yet, his entry in the post journal reveals other concerns. Why had the Rainy Lake Indian called Little Clear Sky tried to kill Tanner earlier that summer? Would the attack put a damper on their trade in the coming winter? In the de facto law of the country, an Indian attack on a white man demanded blood for blood. Since the wounded American had been rescued by the Hudson’s Bay men, would the Rainy Lake Indians stay away from the Hudson’s Bay post, in fear of revenge? Would they go to the American trading posts instead?
Tanner, Long, and McLoughlin were not just witnesses to the events of 1823 but are sources on the wider world of the fur trade in the early nineteenth century. Their differences of perspective color many other mutual experiences beyond their encounter at Rainy Lake House. The three men all came together in the same place just once, but in their years of experience on the frontier before 1823, they saw many of the same things from different angles. All three were participants in the changing power dynamics between Europeans and Indians, Americans and British, Ojibwas and Sioux, and the rivalry of fur companies great and small. All three struggled with the meaning of race and culture in that place and time. Comparing their biographies side by side, and listening closely to their discordant voices, one finds a kind of frontier Rashomon tale.
In the 1950 film classic Rashômon, director Akira Kurosawa presents the rape of a woman and the murder of her samurai-warrior husband as told by four different witnesses to the crimes. Each faces the camera in turn, so that the audience takes on the role of a jury, measuring the truth of their stories. As each one starts to testify, the action shifts to the scene of the crimes so that the camera is now showing the audience what happened, in a flashback sequence, from that witness’s point of view. First, a bandit, who is charged with the crimes, offers his version of events. Then the rape victim gives a contradictory story. This is followed by the dead samurai’s account as told through a psychic medium, by which the audience learns that neither of the two previous accounts can be trusted. And finally, a woodcutter provides yet another version. It seems that as the woodcutter was merely passing by when the crimes were committed, the film audience has at last received a version that is detached and closer to the truth than the other three. Yet in a final twist, the audience learns that the woodcutter, too, had reason to shade the truth. Rashômon is about the subjectivity of perception and the challenge of constructing truth from multiple points of view.
By the time Tanner came to the Canadian prairie with his Indian family in 1795, the fur trade was already three centuries old. Gradually it had spread over much of the continent, taking form wherever Indians and Europeans exchanged animal hides for articles of European make. Indians mostly sought metal and cloth items to augment their material culture of bone, skin, wood, and stone. Europeans wanted furs to make into clothing products for Europe’s upper classes—above all, they desired beaver skins with their exceptionally fine undercoats, which they turned into stylish felt hats. Both parties had something the other coveted, and both had ideas of how to drive a bargain. To bridge the enormous gulf between Indian and European cultures, the parties devised trade rituals, patterns of intermarriage, simplified language forms, and other symbolic behaviors that eased negotiations. And while their conventions largely succeeded in forming a functional context for trade relations, misapprehensions abounded, making a Rashomon-like tapestry of competing truths.
By Tanner’s day, the fur trade was a far-flung but significant piece of a much larger trans-Atlantic economy. Insofar as the free-market law of supply and demand shaped the fur trade, Indian labor was often the item in short supply. Firms such as the Hudson’s Bay Company depended on Indian men and women to hunt and trap animals and dress hides for them. Although Indian men and women did not work for company wages, they did function essentially like a factory labor force from the company’s standpoint. They produced the original product for redistribution to distant markets. The fur companies found Indian labor to be indispensable because there was no other way they could obtain furs in large enough quantities for an affordable cost so far from home. Consequently, the companies’ traders put much effort into recruiting more Indian labor into the fur trade—persuading subsistence hunters and their wives to become part-time market hunters and tanners, as it were. The economic relationship between traders living at trading posts and hunters living nearby brought them into close, sustained contact. This is the feature of the fur trade of most interest today: it formed the principal context for the encounter between Indian and European cultures almost from first contact until around the mid-nineteenth century. The encounter was sometimes intimate, sometimes violent, seldom straightforward, and often uneasy.
Early efforts to understand the nature of Indian-European relations in the fur trade were based almost entirely on printed sources on the European side of the relationship. European traders viewed their experience through a powerful set of cultural lenses. They took for granted, for example, that they belonged to a superior, “civilized” race of people while their Indian trading partners were “savages.” They assumed, too, that trading soon drew Indians into a position of economic dependency as Indians incorporated items such as guns and metal pots into their material culture. Traders thought an Indian hunter with a gun was more advanced than one who used bow and arrows, even though the hunter now had to trade more furs in order to replenish his supply of ammunition or replace a worn-out gun. These two basic notions—that Indians were inferior to Europeans and that trade made the Indians dependent on European traders—pervaded everything the traders wrote about Indians in their record books and correspondence. The traders’ observations had a powerful influence on state policy as European powers and then the United States passed laws to regulate Indian affairs. The traders’ basic assumptions of Indian inferiority and dependency worked their way into congressional reports, parliamentary debates, and other contemporary records concerning the fur trade.
For a long time, histories of the North American fur trade followed more or less in the vein of the historical source material, taking for granted that the relationship between Europeans and Indians was an unequal one and that the fur trade drew Indian peoples into a state of dependency. Then, around the 1970s, historians began to reinterpret the Indian-European relationship from the Indian side in light of evidence offered by ethnohistorical and anthropological studies. These revisionist histories emphasized how some Indian tribes took more interest in the fur trade than others, how they held their own in this relationship at least through the mid-eighteenth century, and how Indian cultures adapted to their changing world rather than simply disintegrating under European influence. But in developing those new perspectives, historians still faced a major challenge in the fact that practically all of their primary sources were produced by non-Indians. The Indian experience in the fur trade had to be gleaned through a careful rereading of all the old material. Fur company records, which continued to form the core of primary source material, were not only distorted by cultural and racial prejudice, historians noted, but were tainted by the economic self-interest of the fur companies as well.
This book depicts the fur trade through the intertwined lives of three men, whose biographies are shaped around the notion of differing points of view. The reader is herein advised that much of the narrative to follow is constructed in a way to represent their three subjective realities, not necessarily objective fact. To take one stark example, the word “savage” will appear sometimes without quotes or other commentary. The idea is to approach these stories in a comparative framework in order to better appreciate why their values and motivations differed so. When one views these men’s experiences in the fur trade in close comparison, one can glimpse their world from its various colliding vantage points: American, British, and Indian; imperial, capital, and labor; explorer, trader, and hunter.
McLoughlin, Long, and Tanner were all born within four years of each other in the early 1780s, but they came from varied backgrounds. McLoughlin was born to Irish Catholic and Scottish Presbyterian–French Catholic parents in Lower Canada. Long came from Puritan New England stock and grew up in New Hampshire. Tanner’s parents were southern plainfolk who migrated across the Appalachian Mountains to the Ohio frontier when he was very young. Each man entered the fur trade at a different age. Tanner’s Indian upbringing began at the age of nine, and by the age of twelve he was participating in the fur trade in northern Michigan, trapping marten for his Indian family to trade at Fort Mackinac. The year was 1793. McLoughlin completed an apprenticeship in medicine in Quebec and joined the North West Company as an apprentice clerk in the Lake Superior country at the age of eighteen, in 1803. Major Long was not exposed to the fur trade until his first military assignment in the West when he was thirty-one, in the year 1816. By the time the three converged at Rainy Lake House in 1823, Tanner was forty-two and McLoughlin and Long were each thirty-eight.
Their collective experiences in the fur trade spanned two crucial decades, roughly the twenty years surrounding the War of 1812. These years saw resolution of two epic confrontations. The first involved the struggle between the North West Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company for control of the fur trade in British America (Canada). The bitter conflict finally ended with the merger of the two companies in 1821. The second involved the effort by the United States to “Americanize” the fur trade within US territory—to evict British traders operating in the Great Lakes, upper Mississippi, and upper Missouri, and supplant them with American traders. These were separate, parallel confrontations occurring on either side of the US-British border, but in a broader sense they were two sides of the same coin, being an effort to reorganize the North American fur trade in the face of rising American nationalism.
The early life stories of McLoughlin, Long, and Tanner provide three significant points of view on the fur trade experience during this pivotal time. John McLoughlin is known to history as the “Father of Oregon,” for it was in the Pacific Northwest that the capable and principled administrator served the Hudson’s Bay Company from 1824 to 1845, providing aid to a growing number of American emigrants who arrived in the Oregon country before it became part of the United States. In his less well-known early career, McLoughlin became deeply entwined in the struggle between the great fur companies in British America. Entering the North West Company in the capacity of apprentice clerk and physician, he spent nearly all the years from 1803 to 1823 either at Rainy Lake or Fort William, the company’s entrepȏt on the north shore of Lake Superior. At the latter place, he met and married his Métis wife, Marguerite McKay. Rising to partner in 1814, he was drawn into the escalating strife between the two companies. He took part in a plot that led to a deadly clash of Hudson’s Bay and North West Company partisans, a skirmish known to history as the Battle of Seven Oaks. Taken prisoner by Hudson’s Bay men, he eventually stood trial on charges of conspiracy to commit murder for his role in the one-sided battle. After his acquittal, he played a key role in fashioning a corporate merger, landing a good position in the reorganized Hudson’s Bay Company when it swallowed his former company. McLoughlin experienced the fur trade as a trader, as a husband and father ensconced in fur-trade society, and as a player in the rise of one of the first great corporations of the industrializing world.
Stephen H. Long was a leading explorer of the American West, remembered most for his ill-famed characterization of the Great Plains as the “Great American Desert.” A strong supporter of national expansion, he took a keen interest in how to advance the nation’s strategic aim to Americanize the fur trade in the upper Mississippi and Missouri valleys. Taking an intellectual and nationalistic interest in the American Indian, Long came to view the fur trade as an instrument for raising Indian peoples from their “savage” state and assimilating them into the American nation.
Tanner’s experience in the fur trade was mostly that of an Indian. Taken captive by a Shawnee-Ottawa war party at the age of nine, he was subsequently traded to an Ottawa chieftess. At thirteen, he migrated with his adoptive family from northern Michigan to the Canadian prairie and lived among the western Ottawas and Ojibwas for almost thirty years. Becoming a skilled hunter, he provided food for his family and frequented a dozen different trading posts from Lake Superior to present-day Saskatchewan. He joined war parties against the Sioux. He married twice and produced eleven children while living in Indian country. When Tanner eventually took steps to return to a white man’s life, he worked one year for the American Fur Company—just prior to his ill-fated attempt to rescue his daughters in the summer of 1823.
The humble trading post below the outlet of Rainy Lake where the three men came together was a “house” in every sense of the word. A post for carrying on the business of the fur trade, it was also a dwelling, way station, and emergency shelter for the mixed population of English- and French-speaking traders, Ojibwa hunters, and former engagés, or freemen, who lived within its ambit. Under its roof, in the shadow of its picket walls, beside the Rainy River, and in the cold, misty veil of the nearby falls that gave the river its name, people from different worlds entered that space to form bonds. And as in every house, those bonds could be fraught.