Janet Hale's "Bloodlines"; McLoughlin and fort demographics

[The McDonald Family]

At 07:56 PM 4/16/2001 -0700, you wrote:
>Here is a page of links to more info about Janet Hale and her books.
>The first two links lead to brief bios, which also include
>photographs of her.  http://www.ipl.org/cgi/ref/native/browse.pl/A36
>As to how many generations away from McLoughlin she would be, Ms.
>Hale relates being told she was the great-great granddaughter of
>McLoughlin, and she is in the right age bracket for that number of
>"great's."
>
>I see my county library has two copies out in branches of
>"Bloodlines," so it might be available in most local libraries.
>
>I was surprised to see she described McLoughlin as Irish (and
>consequently herself as part-Irish), as I had always thought him to
>be a Scot (though born in Canada).  I found an article in the [online
>version of the 1908] Catholic Encyclopedia which describes his
>background. There I discovered he was Irish on his father's side and
>Scottish on his mother's.  The impression of him as a Scot is
>probably reinforced by the facts that John was raised by his maternal
>grandfather (his father died young), and he was sent for a to study a
>while in Scotland.  http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09504b.htm
>
>On the topic of the predominant religion in the Fort, I was
>interested to also see there that McLoughlin himself was Anglican but
>converted to Catholicism in 1842.  I would imagine the fort
>population and HBC employees were mostly Catholic due to the
>preponderance of French Canadians among them.
>
>(Per the CIA Fact Book online, Canada is today divided about 42%/40%
>Protestant/Catholic, as compared to 56%/28% in the U.S. I can't work
>an equation, but using my trusty percent-key calculator to factor out
>the one-quarter of Canada's population who are French-speaking seems
>to account within a couple percent for the difference.
>http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ca.html .)

Pardon my interjection, but hmm.

I'm not sure that you can project those figures back into Canadian history,
or that the modern Canadian figures on religion are comparable to the United
States ones.

For the US: Protestant 56%, Roman Catholic 28%, Jewish 2%, other 4%, none
10% (1989) 

For Canada: Roman Catholic 42%, Protestant 40%, other 18%

The American figures look like they were based on religious affiliation at
birth, given that the US is more religious than, well, the rest of the First
World. Conversely, the Canadian figures seem to be based on religious
_practice_ and active identification, which are considerably lower. I don't
think that those figures are directly comparable.

More to the point, here, I would call it safe to say that circa 1870, before
the beginning of large-scale net immigration into Canada, almost the entire
French Canadian population of Canada (then, 30% of the total) were Catholic,
along with between a quarter and a third of the English Canadian population.

I have no idea, though, how those figures would play out in western Canada.
If someone asked me (or I just went and told y'all), I'd guess that the
predominance of the French-influenced Catholic Métis would have left the
Prairies substantially more Catholic than, say, Ontario, though there was in
1870 a strong Scottish Protestant minority in southern Manitoba. Perhaps a
2-1 split in favour of the Catholics?

In British Columbia, well, I give up. Maybe Catholics predominated in the
interior, and various breeds of Protestants concentrated on the coast, but
with no clear heartland?

>Regards,
>
>Jeff

Later,
Randy McDonald