{"id":6685,"date":"2016-11-02T15:05:08","date_gmt":"2016-11-02T15:05:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/opentextbc.ca\/preconfederation\/?post_type=chapter&p=6685"},"modified":"2016-11-02T15:05:08","modified_gmt":"2016-11-02T15:05:08","slug":"13-7-identity-crisis","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/opentextbc.ca\/preconfederation\/chapter\/13-7-identity-crisis\/","title":{"raw":"13.7 Identity Crisis","rendered":"13.7 Identity Crisis"},"content":{"raw":"

National histories tend to draw straight and uncomplicated lines. If one of the functions of a national history is to define or distill a national identity, then simplicity is of the first order. Loyalties ought to point in one direction, though occasionally a character in the past may be torn somewhat. But we have come to think of national and ethnic loyalties as instinctive and not all that negotiable. This is part of a tendency to essentialize people in the past: they behave as they do because of what they are in essence.\n\nOne of the virtues of West Coast history is the ease with which those narratives may be broken up and thrown aside. People from around the globe collected on the West Coast in the 18th and 19th\u00a0centuries, in assortments that were, for their time, unique. What's more, the individuals themselves reveal interestingly complex backgrounds. The ways in which their lives bump up against those of others and then ricochet off in an unexpected direction remind us that stories are not highways but threads that bind and fray.\n\nTake the example of Marguerite Waddens\u00a0(1775-1860) who was born in Montreal. Her father, Jean \u00c9tienne Waddens,\u00a0was Swiss and a founding member of the NWC; her mother, Marie Josephe DeGuire, was Cree. Marguerite was a product of a fur trade marriage \u00e0 la fa\u00e7on du pays<\/em>, a late-18th century m\u00e9tis born in the East.[footnote]One of Marguerite's\u00a0sisters, Veronique, would marry the Rev. John Bethune; two of their descendants are Dr. Norman Bethune (the Canadian physician who achieved legendary status in the Chinese Revolution) and the accomplished actor, Christopher Plummer.[\/footnote] Two of the men in Marguerite's\u00a0life would meet their ends in spectacularly violent ways. Her father\u00a0died at the hands of fellow NWC trader and cartographer Peter Pond when an argument overheated. Marguerite\u2019s first husband, Alexander MacKay (1770-1811) died under even more exceptional circumstances.\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_3054\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"300\"]\"""\"<\/a> Figure 13.20 Marguerite Wadin McLoughlin in her twilight years.[\/caption]\n\nMacKay was a child when his Loyalist parents became refugees in the Canadas. Entering the fur trade as a youth, he joined Alexander Mackenzie's expedition to the Pacific coast (and was thus one of the first Euro-North Americans to cross the continent). MacKay amassed a fortune in the service of the NWC, married Marguerite, and retired to Montreal at 38 a wealthy man -- probably without Marguerite. In 1810 the\u00a0American fur trader and entrepreneur John Jacob Astor (1763-1848) signed \u00a0MacKay to work with the Pacific Fur\u00a0Company -- an emergent American rival to the British HBC and the Canadian NWC. Sailing on the Tonquin<\/em> to the West Coast, MacKay was killed along with all but two of the ship\u2019s crew when it stumbled into a political stew in Clayoquot Sound in 1811. Wikaninnish\u2019s fleet made short work of the American crew, killing as many as they could lay their hands on. This may have been one of Wikaninnish's attempts to obtain a European-style vessel. \u00a0If so, it failed: perhaps as many as a hundred of the Tla-o-qui-aht raiders perished when a\u00a0Tonquin\u00a0<\/em>crew member detonated the ship\u2019s gunpowder.\n\nMarguerite and Alexander\u2019s son, Thomas, \u00a0narrowly missed sharing the horrors\u00a0of the Tonquin<\/em> because his father chose to leave him\u00a0behind for a few days at the PFC\u2019s new fort on the Columbia.[footnote]Jean Morrison, \u201cMacKAY, ALEXANDER,\u201d in Dictionary of Canadian Biography<\/i>, vol. 5 (University of Toronto\/Universit\u00e9 Laval, 2003). Accessed January 18, 2015, http:\/\/www.biographi.ca\/en\/bio\/mackay_alexander_5E.html .[\/footnote] <\/span>The widow Marguerite remarried around 1810, which suggests that she had been abandoned by MacKay (a common enough experience for \"country wives\"). Her new husband was\u00a0another fur trader, John McLoughlin (1784-1857). Born Jean-Baptiste in Trois-Rivi\u00e8res in 1784, McLoughlin came from Irish immigrant stock (his father) and Canadien ancestry (his mother). Raised by his Scottish uncle, McLoughlin\u2019s spiritual life charted a course\u00a0from Catholicism to Anglicanism and back. His marriage to Marguerite was not McLoughlin's first: he was himself a widower, having been married briefly to a Chippewa woman who died giving birth to their son Joseph in 1809.\n\nWithin a year of marriage (again,\u00a0a la fa\u00e7on du pays<\/em>),\u00a0Marguerite and John\u00a0had a son, John Jr. The family continued to grow while they were stationed just west of Lake Superior. During this period McLoughlin senior\u2019s relationship with his stepson Thomas deepened. Indeed both men were at Selkirk in the employ of the NWC during the Battle of Seven Oaks. McLoughlin was even implicated in the killing of Governor Semple, although the charges were later dismissed. He was a key player for the NWC side at the negotiations that led to the merger of the two fur trade giants in 1821.\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_3053\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"300\"]\"""\"<\/a> Figure 13.21 Fort Astoria (also known as Fort George), ca. 1813-1818.[\/caption]\n\nAbout seven years later,\u00a0Marguerite Waddens\u00a0MacKay McLoughlin relocated with her husband and both sons to the Columbia District where McLoughlin built Fort Vancouver, across the river from Fort\u00a0Astoria (the PFC\u00a0base in which\u00a0Alexander MacKay played a small role). Fort Vancouver was as cosmopolitan as any HBC post and then some. Trade between the Columbia and the Hawaiian (or Sandwich) Islands brought Kanakas (Hawaiians) to Fort Vancouver in large numbers. Trade with Guangzhou occasionally brought Chinese men as crew to the West Coast, and Marguerite's nephew, Angus Bethune, travelled to China on behalf of the HBC. Marguerite would have been on hand in 1834 when news of three shipwrecked Japanese sailors on the Olympic Peninsula reached Fort Vancouver. Enslaved by the Makah on Juan de Fuca Strait, the three men included a 15-year-old named Otokichi, who -- thanks to the intervention of McLoughlin -- was brought to Fort Vancouver. Otokichi would go on\u00a0to play a small part in diplomatic efforts to open Japan to Western trade. (And, like Marguerite, Otokichi\u2019s wide-ranging life would be marked by complete disregard for racial or national categories: his first wife was English, his second Malay.)\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_3055\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"138\"]\"""\"<\/a> Figure 13.22 A drawing of Otokichi on his return to Japan, wearing his disguise as a Chinese traveller.[\/caption]\n\nMarguerite was well acquainted with James Douglas, McLoughlin\u2019s junior at Fort Vancouver. Born in the British colony of Demerara (Guyana), Douglas had both Scottish and African ancestors. He worked his way through the NWC into the HBC and at 25 years of age he married Amelia Connolly, a m\u00e9tis<\/em> woman. Shortly after the Douglases were reassigned to Fort Vancouver where James worked under McLoughlin. Douglas observed in these years on the \u201crespect and affection\u201d that McLoughlin held for Marguerite.[footnote]Margaret A. Ormsby, \u201cDOUGLAS, Sir JAMES,\u201d in Dictionary of Canadian Biography<\/em>, vol. 10 (University of Toronto\/Universit\u00e9 Laval, 2003). Accessed August 7, 2014, http:\/\/www.biographi.ca\/en\/bio\/douglas_james_10E.html .[\/footnote] Douglas grew fiercely\u00a0loyal to McLoughlin, even against Governor Simpson right up until 1846 at which point their paths diverged. McLoughlin\u00a0decided to stay put on the Columbia and thus become an American after partition of the Oregon Territory.\n\nJohn Jr. carried on the family tradition for travel, moving to Paris to take up medical studies. In later years he\u00a0would acquire a reputation for drunkenness and violence (John Sr. had a temper as well, according to Governor Simpson), which might provide a clue to why he left Paris under a cloud.\u00a0Difficult to place in the HBC system, he found his way to Fort Vancouver for a spell, then to Fort McLoughlin (on the central coast and named for his father). Finally he was sent to Fort Stikine in the north. There, it was reported, he so terrified his colleagues that one of them shot him through the throat. He died from his wounds at\u00a0barely 30\u00a0years of age.\n\nThomas MacKay, for his part, had a better record, of sorts. Marguerite's son by Alexander McKay married well in the Columbia District, partnering with Timmee, the daughter of Chinook chieftain Comcomly.[footnote]Jean Barman, French Canadians, Furs, and Indigenous Women in the Making of the Pacific Northwest\u00a0<\/em>(Vancouver: UBC Press, 2014), 131.[\/footnote] He played a key role in realizing Governor Simpson\u2019s vision of a \u201cfur desert\u201d south of Fort Vancouver, a landscape completely denuded of commercial wildlife so as to block American trade in the region. This war against nature was for naught, as it simply made it easier for American settlers (rather than fur traders) to move into the region.\n\nNot much is known of David, Marguerite\u2019s second son by John McLoughlin, except that he received some training in Paris as an engineer, spent much of his life in the Columbia District, and married a Kutenai woman named Anne Grizzly. Less still is known about John McLoughlin\u2019s son from his first marriage, Joseph, and Marguerite\u2019s three daughters by Alexander MacKay. Marguerite and John\u2019s daughter Marie Eloisa McLoughlin, however, attained some prominence at Fort Vancouver. Born in 1817 at Fort William, Eloisa was educated in Canada and headed west in the 1830s. Young and energetic she took on many of the hostessing tasks that typically would have belonged to her mother. She and her husband opened Fort Stikine around 1841 and narrowly missed overlapping with her ill-fated brother John Jr. at that same location in 1842.\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_3481\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"300\"]\"A<\/a> Figure 13.23 Having spent his career trying to keep the Americans at bay, McLoughlin is celebrated in this 1948 U.S. stamp as a founder of Oregon.[\/caption]\n\nThe loss of British sovereignty south of the 49th parallel in 1846 was overseen by McLoughlin, the French-Irish-Scots Catholic-Anglican Canadian who went on to become an American and is celebrated in the United States as\u00a0the \"Father of Oregon.\"[footnote]W.\u00a0Kaye Lamb, \u201cMcLOUGHLIN, JOHN,\u201d in Dictionary of Canadian Biography<\/i>, vol. 8 (University of Toronto\/Universit\u00e9 Laval, 2003). Accessed January 18, 2015, http:\/\/www.biographi.ca\/en\/bio\/mcloughlin_john_8E.html .[\/footnote] Marguerite's final public role was that of mayor's wife in Oregon City, where the couple are buried side-by-side.\u00a0The Swiss-Cree Protestant-Catholic mother of seven children and stepmother to another (some of them, like their fathers, Scots-Irish or French or Loyalist), mother-in-law to women drawn from Aboriginal nations from the north coast to Idaho, and aunt to members of the Family Compact in Upper Canada, Marguerite\u2019s life took place on a stage of enormous distances and great risks, one that involved a multitude of actors from across the globe. Tug on any one thread and any number of narratives unfold.\n<\/p>

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Key Points<\/h2>\n