Rainy Lake House Read online

  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.

  I LEAVE-TAKINGS

  1

  The Explorer

  On all his western explorations, Major Stephen H. Long began each day’s march before the crack of dawn. Morning reveille sounded before five o’clock, and the expedition got underway in almost complete darkness or by the light of the moon. Whether traveling by horse, foot, bateau, or canoe, he was exceedingly disciplined about making those early starts. For one thing, it was a defensive measure, since the Indians liked to attack a sleeping camp in the hour before sunrise. For another, it allowed his men to cover a lot of ground before the warmest part of the day. The predawn departure increased the overall speed of the expedition, and greater speed translated into more distance covered for the same government expense. Dollars-and-cents efficiency mattered a great deal to Long because he took up exploring in a decade of waning government support for army exploration of the West. At the end of his career he boasted that his five expeditions, which took place from 1816 to 1823, covered an aggregate distance of more than 26,000 miles—many more miles than either Lewis and Clark or Captain Zebulon M. Pike had traveled on their western explorations in the years 1804 to 1807. In Long’s view, his expedition to the Rocky Mountains in 1820 and his treks through the upper Mississippi and upper Great Lakes regions produced as much cartographic and scientific information as the more celebrated expeditions of his predecessors.1

  Four months and 3,000 miles into what would be his final expedition, Long and his men started from camp at the usual early hour, paddled up the Rainy River for five miles, and arrived at the falls known as Koochiching (the rain) well before sunrise on August 31, 1823. Dimly they could see the horizontal white streak of the falls blocking their way a half mile ahead, mist rising over the falls, and the British and American trading posts on opposite banks of the river below, facing off across the border. They landed at the small American Fur Company trading post first, but finding its solitary proprietor unable to help them, they crossed to the British side. There they learned that the Hudson’s Bay chief factor, Dr. John McLoughlin, had not yet returned from Hudson Bay with his brigade of voyageurs and fresh supplies for the coming winter.

  Long asked the Hudson’s Bay trader in charge, Simon McGillivray, for permission to encamp for a few days while his canoemen repaired their canoes. One of their three canoes had taken considerable punishment coming through rapids on the Winnipeg River, and all three needed to be repitched. The expedition also needed supplies. McGillivray granted permission for the men to make camp beside the fort and use the canoe yard for as long as necessary. They could purchase supplies from him when they prepared to depart. Cordially, he invited Long and his officers and the expedition’s scientific gentlemen to join him at his table for dinner that night.2

  McGillivray then put in a request of his own. A man they called the American, John Tanner, lay in a tent outside the Hudson’s Bay post recovering from gunshot wounds. For more than a month and a half he had barely stirred from his bed. Though the Hudson’s Bay Company had taken him under its protection, McGillivray had not been able to provide him much medical care. In fact, he had mainly left that matter to Tanner’s two daughters, about fourteen and sixteen years of age. The girls tended their father’s fire, prepared his food, fetched his water, washed his clothes, gathered berries, snared rabbits, and performed other sundry tasks around their camp. But even after his long convalescence, Tanner still rarely came out of his tent. Would the expedition’s surgeon please examine his wounds?

  Long took Thomas Say, the surgeon and zoologist, and his interpreter, Charles Brousse, and proceeded to Tanner’s tent. They found the invalid lying on a good, comfortable bed with his daughters beside him. Tanner showed the surgeon where the musket ball had entered his right arm above the elbow, shattering the bone and passing on into his breast. The ball had torn into his breast muscle, barely missing his right lung. There was an incision next to his breastbone where the ball had been extricated. The incision had mostly healed. The wound under the armpit had scarred over. The broken upper arm bone had set properly. The hole in the arm had not yet closed up, but
it was clean and appeared to be improving. Though his injured arm still had no strength or movement, he could stand up and move about.3

  That evening, Long, Say, and a handful of other officers and scientists joined the Hudson’s Bay men in McGillivray’s house for dinner. Their meal would have been simple—fish caught that day, peas and potatoes from the garden, perhaps a helping of scorched dumplings that McGillivray proudly styled as “damper,” wine, coffee, and tea. McGillivray was a convivial host, and he would have set a fire in the fireplace or illuminated the table with an oil lamp to be certain that their little party continued into the night. From the expedition’s journals it appears that following the meal the men talked at length about the fate of the wounded American. (It also seems apparent, from an account left by another traveler who dined with McGillivray a month prior to this evening, that McGillivray relished the opportunity to share Tanner’s lurid story with them.)4

  Tanner had been traveling through the country in his canoe with his two daughters and their mother when he was ambushed while paddling up a stretch of rapids. His attacker had shot him from a hiding place on the river bank. In McGillivray’s recounting, Tanner was pitched out of the canoe, and clinging to a rock in the rapids, he called out to his wife to come rescue him. But the woman left him there, taking the girls with her. Tanner managed to drag himself out of the river and hide in the bushes, lying still as his attacker went up and down the riverbank in search of him. If he had yet had his knife, he would have jumped his adversary. Instead he stayed quiet till the man left the area. For three days he lay by the river, bleeding and delirious, suffering the torment of the biting flies. He was about to fling himself into the rapids to end his misery when a Hudson’s Bay canoe happened along.