Ranald, McLoughlin,Beaver

[peter webster]

Also the OHS quarterly, vol 92, #3 (Fall '91) has an article on "The Women
of Ft Vancouver," by John Hussey, p. 265...(wow, I feel so scholarly!) that
touches on Rev Beaver's misadventures at the fort; that's where I got the
quote attributed to Narcissa Whitman, about Margarite... Some nice comments
in there, too, about the caring between the McLoughlins...


At 9:27 PM -0400 4/15/01, George Lang wrote:
>Whoops, sorry about the slip: Ranald was in fact a *grand*son of Concomly.
>And sorry to go so long.
>
>Ranald’s trip to Japan was an adventure worthy of his lunatic predecessors,
>Scot and Chinook.  He had himself cast off in a rowboat off the north
>coast, making it look like he had been unjustly thrown out by a harsh
>captain.  The Japanese didn’t buy the story.  Japan was officially closed
>to all contact with the West, which Ranald knew, in fact that was his
>point.  The legend has it that he was inspired in his mission after a
>Japanese boat drifted up on the Washington shore when he was a boy,
>demasted, or whatever, and than caught in the Black Current.  In the months
>he spent in Nagasaki awaiting exchange as a hostage, he taught English to
>Imperial interpreters who later dealt with Commodore Perry.  I think we can
>indeed assume that he was the first speaker of Wawa to visit Japan (but
>does anyone know who was on Perry’s ship?).  It is not true, but often said
>that he was the first English teacher in Japan.
>
>John McLoughlin certainly spoke French.  His mother, Angélique, had him
>baptized (Lhush khakwa, Mike, uk bastEn tsEm) “Jean-Baptiste” on Dec 5,
>1784, a few months after his birth.  Before the arrival of Fathers Demers
>and Blanchet he was known to give Sunday services in French (in Rich’s
>Intro to the 1941 edition of the McLoughlin Ft Vanc. Letters to the HBC).
>“The only books [he used, per a letter to the Rev. Beaver, who clearly
>rotted his socks] “were a French Bible and a Penser Y Bien
having no French
>sermons my discourses were original compositions or translation from the
>English.”
>
>More fun for an Easter weekend: this touching on the Rev. Beaver, with whom
>at one point McLoughlin had fisticuffs.
>
>Beaver had a personal problem with McLoughlin’s country marriage with
>Marguerite Wadin McKay.
>
>“Unfortunately, Mrs McLoughlin’s history, details of which no doubt became
>known to Beaver, was such as to make her peculiarly vulnerable to narrow-
>minded criticism.  She had been first married, fur-trade fashion, to
>Alexander McKay, of the North West Company, who later entered the service
>of Astor’s Pacific Fur Company.  He was killed when the Tonquin was
>destroyed in Clayoquot Sound, in 1811.  For long it was politely assumed
>that it was only after news of McKay’s death reached the East that she
>became the wife, once again after the custom of the fur trade, of John
>McLoughlin.  But the records of the matter, though scanty, show clearly
>that this was not so.  Everything suggests that McKay had deserted her, or
>parted from her by mutual consent, before he left for the Pacific Coast;
>and there was therefore nothing irregular about McLoughlin’s relations with
>her, even before McKay’s death.  But the view the Rev. Herbert Beaver would
>take of the whole episode can readily be imagined.”
>
>There is a piece on “Marguerite Wadin McKay McLoughlin” in the Oregon His.
>Quarterly, No. 36, pp. 338-47.  An interesting woman.


peter