I loved growing up in the shadow of Fort Vancouver in my home town of Vancouver, Washington. We all knew of Dr. John McLoughlin’s exploits. I felt inspired to research his less-known half-native wife, Marguerite, and found gold. Wilderness Wife is based on her early life. Here are facts regarding this real-life heroine so savvy and courageous that Dr. John McLoughlin would marry no one but her.
At age seven, she and her Canadian First Nations mother saw their brave father and husband, Swiss fur-trader, Jean Etienne Wadin, murdered by a jealous competitor.
Marguerite’s first husband, explorer Alex MacKay, abandoned her and their four children after seventeen years of frontier marriage to go to Montréal to seek his fortune and choose a society wife.
Marguerite’s second husband, the love of her life, Dr. John McLoughlin, volunteered to join and defend fourteen men falsely charged of the 1816 Seven Oaks Massacre to defend them. All were sent to Montréal on trial for their lives.
The high official arresting them sent the prisoners east too late in the season. When one overloaded canoe capsized in a fierce storm on Lake Superior, eight prisoners drowned and McLoughlin was pulled from the water unconscious. At age 34, that ordeal instantly turned his head of thick dark hair snow white. He won the court case and was forever after called the White-Headed Eagle.
Marguerite was the second woman after Sacajawea to cross North America by foot and canoe.
Soon after John and Marguerite established Fort Vancouver, American Oregon Trail wagon train immigrants arrived sick, starving, with rotted seed and no money. McLoughlin’s employer, the Hudson’s Bay Company, ordered him to close the fort to immigrants if they could not pay saying, “If the settlers succeed, the Pacific Northwest will become American territory, not Canadian.”
But John McLoughlin was also a doctor. Instead of turning settlers away, he and Marguerite spent their life savings. When those were gone, he opened fort supplies to settlers was fired. Marguerite’s garden is still maintained at Fort Vancouver as she kept it for family and those in need.
After being fired, John and Marguerite moved twenty miles south to Oregon City in Oregon on the Willamette River and built a home, store, and sawmill. Their home had beds in every hallway and porch for the sick.
John asked the US Government to repay their life savings. That did not happen in his lifetime. Marguerite survived John and eventually received thanks and restitution.
Together they are called the Mother and Father of the Pacific Northwest and she the kindest woman in Oregon.
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What qualities do you consider most essential in a true hero or heroine? Why?
This is truly an interesting story. Starting Wilderness Wife tonight.