13.7 Identity Crisis
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.
One 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 centuries, 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.
Take the example of Marguerite Waddens (1775-1860) who was born in Montreal. Her father, Jean Étienne Waddens, was Swiss and a founding member of the NWC; her mother, Marie Josephe DeGuire, was Cree. Marguerite was a product of a fur trade marriage à la façon du pays, a late-18th century métis born in the East.[1] Two of the men in Marguerite’s life would meet their ends in spectacularly violent ways. Her father died at the hands of fellow NWC trader and cartographer Peter Pond when an argument overheated. Marguerite’s first husband, Alexander MacKay (1770-1811) died under even more exceptional circumstances.
MacKay 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 American fur trader and entrepreneur John Jacob Astor (1763-1848) signed MacKay to work with the Pacific Fur Company — an emergent American rival to the British HBC and the Canadian NWC. Sailing on the Tonquin to the West Coast, MacKay was killed along with all but two of the ship’s crew when it stumbled into a political stew in Clayoquot Sound in 1811. Wikaninnish’s 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. If so, it failed: perhaps as many as a hundred of the Tla-o-qui-aht raiders perished when a Tonquin crew member detonated the ship’s gunpowder.
Marguerite and Alexander’s son, Thomas, narrowly missed sharing the horrors of the Tonquin because his father chose to leave him behind for a few days at the PFC’s new fort on the Columbia.[2] The widow Marg