Archibald McDonald

Review ArchibaldMcDonald BRUCE W. HODGINS Jean Murray Cole. Exile in the Wilderness: the Life ofChief Factor Archibald McDonald, 1790-1853. Don Mills, Burns and MacEachern, 1979, 268 pp. This is a delightful book. It is exhaustively researched , well-written, engaging and important. It tells the tale of an earnest Scottish fur trader of wit, erudition and religious faith who spent nearly all of his adult life moving about Rupert's Land and the Pacific slope, in the service first of Lord Selkirk and then of the Hudson's Bay Company. He lived with and then married a remarkable Metis woman, Jane Klyne, and by her he had a large tragic-ridden family to which he was deeply dedicated. Archibald left the Northwest in 1844-45, and in 1847 he, his wife and younger children settled in the Lac de Deux Montagnes area of the Ottawa valley. There, Jane outlived her husband by 26 years. The author is a great-great-granddaughter of Archibald and Jane. The book is particularly valuable on three counts. First, McDonald was a younger but senior official, from 1811 to 1820, for the ill-starred Selkirk settlement on the Red River. The description of early travel to Red River from York Factory and of life and tension surrounding the settlement from this perspective is extremely detailed, fascinating and illuminating. Often, through his letters and journals, McDonald is allowed to speak for himself. Secondly, Jean Cole skillfully describes and analyzes life and trade at the various posts to which McDonald was stationed in what was then the Oregon Country, present-day British Columbia, Washington and Oregon. The pace of the story quickens. No longer can the Pacific slope be seen as an insecure appendage to the eastern-controlled fur empire and, therefore, the nation's future. The Pacific was an integral part of the whole, and the loss of the Columbia south of the 49th parallel, in 1846, was a serious blow to both. Thirdly, the author is particularly concerned with 116 the family and cultural life of Archibald and Jane McDonald. Like his supervisor, Sir George Simpson, McDonald can be seen as a transitional figure between the old ways and the new ways of fur trade life. But their private and family lives were played out in marked contrast. Archibald was permanently committed to Jane. Furthermore, McDonald was a devout but knowledgeable and tolerant Christian. He kept up a heavy routine of broad reading. Books and articles had to be carried to him by canoe, toboggan, and pack animal across a continent or occasionally picked up off a Pacific supply ship. At his various posts he investigated or experimented with agriculture, fishing and lumbering; believing in the inevitability of change, he took particular interest in mineral sampling. The assertive Jane, wise in the ways of her maternal ancestors, grew in European sophistication and came to be comfortable in later life with the local gentry of her Ottawa valley neighbourhood. One hopes that the author, who knows so much about the wives and the literary habits of the post-1821 fur traders, will write more on these subjects. Jean Cole refrains from judging the wisdom of McDonald's determination to set out with his family from Fort Colville in late September 1844 for his final voyage east. Jane was pregnant with her eleventh child, and she also had five boys under seven and a daughter of ten to look after. When they left the Columbia at Boat Encampment, they had to travel through heavy snow in the mountain passes of the Athabasca route, conditions which persuaded them to undertake many days of snow-shoeing as preferable to riding the horses. "It was difficult enough for the strong, able-bodied voyageurs. That it should be attempted at all by a woman in the final stages of pregnancy seems incredible." After boarding canoes in Jasper, the infant was born in late November before they reached Fort Assiniboine. After a pause and with ice forming on the river, Archibald finally abandoned his plan to reach Red River, and the party rode south overland to Edmonton House for the winter. There, in early May, before departure, the McDonalds in one week...