Stephen Woolworth

"The School Is Under My Direction"

The Politics of Education at Fort Vancouver, 1836–1838

Mr. Beaver and Dr. McLoughlin now do not speak to each other and the gentlemen of the Fort have not attended the services for several Sabbaths. The difficulty is about the school and the doctrines that should be taught.

— Narcissa Whitman, 1836

As the young students of Fort Vancouver arrived for school in the gray, damp of late winter on the Columbia River, they spoke in Cree, Nez Perce, Klickitat, Chinook Jargon, and French. ¹ Their teacher, an American named Solomon Smith, attempted to calm the "bedlam" by calling them to order. "Having come from a land of discipline," and therefore believing in the necessity of order in the schoolroom, Smith explained to the students how he planned to manage the school. To his surprise, the one student who understood English challenged his authority. ² At some point during the standoff between Smith and the boy, Dr. John McLoughlin appeared in the doorway. Standing at about six foot four with long white hair and a set of broad, muscular shoulders, McLoughlin was a physically imposing figure. As chief factor of Fort Vancouver, the most western depot of the Hudson's Bay Company in the Oregon Country, McLoughlin was well known throughout the region. Visitors to the fort had described him as fair, generous, and courteous, but he had also earned a reputation for being strong-willed, dictatorial, and short-tempered. It was this last trait, along with McLoughlin's belief in corporal punishment, that spelled trouble for the defiant young student. ³ After McLoughlin was informed of the boy's disrespectful manner, Solomon Smith later reported, he "made such an example of the boy that I never afterward had any trouble in my governing." ⁴

Fort Vancouver, looking across the Columbia River at Mt. Hood

OHS neg., OrHi 4290

If there were any questions about the chief factor's intention to direct the management of the fort's school, it seems likely that they were answered with his thrashing of the defiant young student. McLoughlin had started the school in the remote settlement, and he intended to watch over it closely. This would become even more apparent in the years ahead with the arrival of Herbert Beaver, the fort's first chaplain, who claimed that he — not McLoughlin — was the resident authority on schooling. The subsequent contest that developed between the two men to control the school at Fort Vancouver was the first recorded formal conflict over education in the Pacific Northwest. It began because McLoughlin and Beaver could not come to terms on the school's mission and what it was that they wanted the Native and métis children in the fort to learn.

While the contest between McLoughlin and Beaver received considerable attention in the Oregon Historical Quarterly and other Northwest publications during the first half of the twentieth century, there are several compelling reasons to revisit the dispute. To begin with, the examination of the conflict has been more descriptive than analytical.⁵ In addition, little has been written about how each man perceived his own authority vis-à-vis the fort school. For instance, on what grounds did McLoughlin and Beaver base their formal claims of authority with regard to the management of the school? How were those claims of authority influenced by religion, culture, and profession? Some writers have tended to reduce the complexity of the conflict to the personalities of the two principal actors while overlooking the structure and organization of the Hudson's Bay Company. Put simply, how did the Company figure into the dispute?

In March 1821, the Hudson's Bay Company merged with its former competitor, the North West Company, enabling the HBC access to some three million square miles — roughly one-quarter of North America — stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. "The HBC retained exclusive trade privileges in Rupert's Land. A royal grant of December 1821 extended these privileges, rent free, to land outside the Canadian provinces and to the Pacific slope. By deed of covenant, the Company agreed to abide by the terms embodied in an 1821 Act of Parliament 'regulating the Fur Trade and establishing a Criminal and Civil Jurisdiction within certain parts of North America.'" ⁶ In 1825, HBC headquarters was moved from what is now Astoria, Oregon, to a location some eighty miles upriver on the north bank of the Columbia. The move — made under the direction of George Simpson, the governor of the HBC's Northern Department — reflected the Company's interest in gaining access to agricultural land and to the fur country along the Columbia and Snake rivers, both of which symbolized the Company's intent to strengthen British claims to the Oregon Country. Company officials assumed that the Willamette region south of the Columbia River would one day belong to the United States. ⁷

According to historian Richard Mackie, "Simpson's Columbia policy of the 1820s had two phases, corresponding to his two visits of 1824–5 and 1828–9." The first phase consisted of an "extension of the fur trade" to the "North West Coast and to the Southern interior to meet American competitors." The Company created numerous trading posts north of the Columbia, while fur brigades (mobile trapping parties) were sent to the south and east. During the second phase, Simpson "called for economic diversification and market expansion to make the most of the new territories." In an effort to further develop coastal trade, the Company began to export lumber and salmon "to Pacific markets in Honolulu and California."⁸ In time, agriculture and cattle also became cornerstones of the commercial enterprise, so that by 1830 the Hudson's Bay Company

represented the culmination of two decades of efforts to organize the Columbia country. It was more than just an economic system to be measured by profits and losses, it was a strategic system — with forts, garrisons, and logistic lines, and contested, unstable frontiers a system to be evaluated also in terms of success and failures in control of the area.⁹

William Cogswell's painting of John McLoughlin gives a sense of the chief factor's presence and confidence as an administrator at Fort Vancouver.

OHS neg., OrHi 49848

In addition to its significance as a commercial corporate enterprise, Fort Vancouver was also a gathering place and trading post for members of local Native villages and groups who populated the Columbia River Basin. Those groups included the Clatsops, Chinooks, Cowlitzes, Clatskanies, Cathlamets, Cathlapotles, Multnomahs, Wahkiakums, Wascos, and Wishrams — all of whom were part of what Richard White has identified as "one of the most densely populated areas of aboriginal North America."¹⁰ By the early 1830s, however, the population of Native peoples south of the Columbia River Plateau had been decimated by the ravages of smallpox, measles, and malaria brought on through contact with whites. Malaria, which had been carried north from California by HBC fur brigades, particularly decimated Native communities, reducing them to what Donald Meinig reports was "perhaps ... a tenth of [their number] before 1829."¹¹ McLoughlin reported that 75 percent of the Native population around the fort had died from disease by as early as 1831.¹²

By the late 1820s, in the midst of this human devastation, Fort Vancouver had become home to several hundred people, including British, Scottish, and Irish HBC employees; Hawaiian laborers, referred to as "Kanakas" or "Owyhees"; French Canadian trappers and traders; and Native peoples, some of whom had worked their way west with the fur trade. At one point, the fort was even a temporary home for shipwrecked Japanese sailors whose ship, the Hojun-maru, had drifted across the Pacific after it lost its rudder in a typhoon. While many different languages were spoken at the fort in the fall of 1836, French was the "prevailing language," according to Narcissa Whitman, and English was "spoken only by a few" — namely, HBC officers.¹³

Religious practices in the fort had followed the Episcopal ritual prescribed by the church of England until 1835, when McLoughlin led Sunday services with a French Bible for the Catholic French Canadians who made up the majority of the fort's servants and laborers.¹⁴ McLoughlin had been baptized a Catholic as a child in Quebec, Canada, but he had left the church under the influence of his Anglican grandfather and uncles. Even though he remained somewhat indifferent about his own religious orientation for some time (he would formally return to Catholicism in 1842), at Fort Vancouver he expressed great sensitivity to the spiritual needs of the Catholics. This may have been due to the influence of his sister, Marie Louise, also known as Sister St. Henry, who was a superior in the Convent of Ursulines in Quebec. Her letters persuaded McLoughlin to take an active role in protecting Catholicism in the Northwest.¹⁵ In 1834, for example, he urged former French Canadian HBC employees living in the Willamette Valley to petition the bishop at the HBC's Red River settlement in central Canada to send priests. In expectation of the priests' arrival, the Willamette settlers built the first Catholic church in the region, which McLoughlin later directed them to re-build closer to Champoeg, the quasi-capital of the Willamette settlements.¹⁶

Given McLoughlin's Catholic leanings and his frustration at being unable to procure any priests for the Company's laborers, he may have been less than enthusiastic about the pending arrival of a missionary from the Church of England.¹⁷ With news of the establishment of a school at Fort Vancouver, however, along with the appearance of several American missionaries in the region, Governor Simpson and two members of the Company's board of directors (who also sat on the board of the Church Missionary Society) decided it was time to appoint an Anglican minister to the fort. In 1835, the Reverend Herbert Beaver of the Church of England was "chosen personally by Simpson" to be the chaplain and missionary for a term of five years.¹⁸ Simpson's intent was for Beaver to take on a role similar to that of the missionaries in the Red River settlement — teaching school, conducting religious services, and performing the general work of a fort chaplain (baptisms, marriages, funeral rites, and so forth).¹⁹

The irony of Beaver's appointment cannot be fully appreciated, as Hollis Slater pointed out many years ago, until one considers Simpson's previous communication on the issue of a chaplain at Fort Vancouver. A decade earlier, Simpson had believed it would be wise to

place the Clergyman in a certain degree under the protection of the Coy's representative (say the Chief Factor in charge of the District) and direct him to look up to that Gentleman for support and assistance in almost every thing as a superior; on the contrary if he attempts to dictate or act independently of, or in opposition to the views & wishes of the Gentlemen it is to be feared they will not draw together. The Missionary ought to be cool and temperate in his habits and of a Mild conciliatory disposition even tempered and not too much disposed to find fault severely with any little laxity of Morals he may discover at the Coy's Establishment.²⁰

Simpson added that it was particularly important for the chaplain not to interfere with marriage practices in the fort. Any effort to disrupt the "uncivilised custom" of marriages between white men and Native women, Simpson suggested, would "be in vain." As he was well aware, such arrangements were considered an accepted part of life in the fur trade, and he believed that to interfere with them would jeopardize Company morale. Herbert Beaver, the man Simpson supposedly handpicked for the position at Fort Vancouver, could not have been more different from the ideal clergyman the governor had described.²¹

So it was that a company headquartered in London sent a Protestant minister of the most powerful church in England to work in a small trading post in the Oregon Country that was under the management of John McLoughlin, whom Simpson once described as

Very Zealous in the discharge of his public duties ... a man of strict honour and integrity ... a great stickler for rights and priviledges [who] sets himself up for a righter of Wrongs ... Very anxious to obtain a lead among his colleagues with whom he has not much influence owing to his ungovernable violent temper and turbulent disposition ... would be a Radical in any Country — under any Government and under any circumstances.²²

In time, Reverend Beaver would come to experience firsthand the wrath of McLoughlin's "ungovernable violent temper," but only after the matter of what to teach the children of Fort Vancouver had embroiled the two men in an irreconcilable dispute.

The school at Fort Vancouver was the first of its kind in the Pacific Northwest. It was started in the late autumn of 1832 when John McLoughlin asked Dartmouth graduate John Ball, who traveled west with Boston merchant Nathaniel Wyeth, to teach his son and the other métis children at the fort. Ball wrote in his journal that McLoughlin invited him "to teach his [McLoughlin's] son and other boys in the fort, of whom there were a dozen." He added: "Of course I gladly accepted the offer. So the boys were sent to my room to be instructed. All were half-breeds, as there was not a white woman in Oregon." ²³ The students included David McLoughlin, William McKay, Ranald MacDonald, and Andrew Pambrun, who were sons of English and Scottish merchants, as well as "Louis Labonte, a servant's son, and Benjamin Harrison, a Chinook orphan who had been adopted by McLoughlin when he was found to be the only survivor of malaria among his people on Wapato Island." ²⁴ Ball left Fort Vancouver the following spring and was succeeded by Solomon Smith, who had also come west with the Wyeth expedition. Others followed Smith in the mid–1830s, including Cyrus Shepard of Jason Lee's Methodist Episcopal mission. All of the school's early teachers remained in the fort for only a short time and taught subjects ranging from reading and writing to arithmetic and geography.

When Herbert Beaver arrived at Fort Vancouver in 1836, students at the school were under the tutelage of John Fisher Robinson, an officer in the Company's coastal trade work.²⁵ At that time, there were between fifty and sixty boys and girls attending the school, which was located inside the fort in a twenty-by-twenty-foot room with a large stove in the middle of the floor.²⁶ Connected to the schoolroom was a room that the teacher and about ten students used as sleeping quarters. American missionary Narcissa Whitman, who arrived about a week after Beaver did, recorded in her diary that she "visited the School to hear the children Sing. It consists of about 50 scholars, children who have French Fathers & Indian mothers & many orphans."²⁷ McLoughlin had enrolled the orphaned children of former Company employees in the school as well as Native children who had been freed from the slave system of the coastal tribes.²⁸

A relatively short man with light brown hair and a high-pitched voice, Herbert Beaver was thirty-six years old when he arrived at Fort Vancouver. He was, as Thomas Jessett described him, "a product of early nineteenth century English aristocratic tradition, where the squire and the parson ruled the social order, directed the education of the children, and the relief of the poor." He had come of age during the struggle for Catholic liberation in Ireland and England and, like many of his clerical contemporaries, deeply resented Catholicism. Beaver earned a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Oxford in 1821 and was ordained a priest in 1823. His missionary experience included eight years as an army chaplain and service as the rector of Castries on St. Lucia in the West Indies.²⁹

McLoughlin's frustration with Beaver began when the minister walked off the Nereide, the transport ship, and asked that the "half-breed women" be moved out of his way so that he and his wife Jane could pass in safety. One of the women was McLoughlin's wife. On arriving at the fort, Beaver found that no church had been erected in preparation for his arrival, even though church supplies and equipment had been sent ahead. No living quarters were reserved for the Beavers — at least none suitable for what they believed a chaplain and his wife deserved. Thomas Jessett writes: "They were assigned to part of a house, separated by only a thin partition from the noisy inhabitants of the other section, and were obliged to allow men of the Fort access to the attic. They were required to assemble their own crude furniture ... one can imagine the couple resolving to secure redress for their humiliation."³⁰ From the perspective of the fort's first resident missionary, McLoughlin had provided anything but a cordial welcome.

Only a few days after this tense beginning, McLoughlin transferred to Beaver the duties of school governance. McLoughlin would later write that his decision was "as a matter of course" and that he was "fully satisfied that whatever improvement might be effected in the subordinate parts of the system, there would be no departure from its former general principles." The purpose of the institution, in McLoughlin's view, was to promote "moral and religious knowledge without reference to sectarian tenets." He did not want the school to become an instrument of sectarian influence because he thought it would "produce discussion or exasperate prejudice" and thus undermine the commercial interests of the Company. "These general principles," McLoughlin would soon find out, "did not coincide with Mr. Beaver's views." Beaver apparently understood McLoughlin's instructions as an explicit directive "not to interfere with the religious instruction of the Roman Catholic children" in the school.³¹

As the head of the school, Beaver's first directive was to ask John Robinson (a Protestant) to list all of the students and to put either a P for Protestant or a C for Catholic next to their names. Many of those identified as Protestant were, in Beaver's mind, too young to "benefit from the services of a clergyman," and he was struck that most of the children were Catholic. Disturbed, Beaver decided to "analyze the pretensions of each child to be educated as a Protestant, or as a Roman Catholic." He concluded that only three or four students had sufficient claim to a Catholic identity. The others, Beaver reasoned, were being raised Catholic

for the most frivolous reasons; such as, because the father, who was dead, or had deserted his offspring, had professed it, though the child was maintained by the company; or because the mother of the child, in the absence of the father, from one of those causes, or from some other, was living with a Roman Catholic; or because the child had relations in Canada, upon whom it had no claim, and who were probably ignorant of its very existence. The mothers of these children were INDIAN, and of course, from their ignorance of both forms of religion, not to be consulted as to either. Neither they nor the children had any bias in favor of either.³²

Dismayed at the lack of religious influence in the school, Beaver believed he had an opportunity to change what he called the school's "defectiveness." He reportedly checked with the fathers of the identified Catholic children and attained their consent (with one exception) to provide religious instruction in the school.³³

Once McLoughlin learned that Beaver was not only distributing Bibles and the Book of Common Prayer but also was teaching the catechism of the Church of England, he instructed some of the children to come to his residence during the evening for instruction in the Roman Catholic faith. The children of Fort Vancouver were involved in an escalating power struggle between an Anglican minister who assumed clerical authority in his governance of the school and the fort's chief factor, who worried not only about the effect of the minister's teachings on the imperial interests of the Company (that is, employee relations) but also on the state of Catholicism among the French Canadians.³⁴

The initial dispute between McLoughlin and Beaver has been preserved in five letters written on September 30, 1836. It is strange today to think that in a small, contained settlement where Beaver and McLoughlin had only to walk a few minutes to speak with one another that they would adhere to the formalities of written correspondence five times in a single day. In doing so, however, they established a written record that explains much about both men, how and why they each claimed control of the school, where they saw the source of their authority, and how they responded when their authority was challenged.

The correspondence between the two began when Beaver wrote McLoughlin to ask whether it was "proper" for students to study with the chief factor during the evening. Beaver was concerned that the students' minds would be "distracted by the various systems of instruction" and that, coupled with their attendance at school, it could lead to more than "the infant mind is capable of sustaining." Beaver's real motivation for writing was revealed, however, when he suggested that McLoughlin's teaching was "incompatible" with the "Psalmody of the Established Church."³⁵

Beaver requested clarification about who was responsible for the school's management.

I beg leave further to request that you will be pleased explicitly to state, whether the School is under my sole superintendence, in which case I have to express my willingness to hold myself responsible for its success, as well as my readiness to have communicated whatever unobjectionable instruction you may desire; at the same time distinctly to observe, that it is totally unusual for Clergymen of the Church of England to admit unauthorized instruction in schools committed to their charge.³⁶

He wrote that he wished to see the school adopt his method of instruction, the same method used in the parish schools of England — namely, the Anglican National School System. Beaver insisted that the Anglican system, which relied on a monitorial method where the older, more advanced students taught the younger ones, was best suited to the social conditions of Fort Vancouver because there were so few teachers available.³⁷

A marriage registry book from Fort Vancouver and a page with an entry from 1834 signed by Herbert Beaver

Courtesy of the Archives of the Anglican Diocese of British Columbia

McLoughlin responded that he would be "extremely happy" to have Beaver's "valuable assistance" in running the school. Still, he wanted it to be "clearly understood, that I cannot, at present, admit of any alteration, in the system of Education, which has been hitherto, so successfully pursued."³⁸ McLoughlin was referring not only to the nonsectarian nature of the curriculum but also to the agricultural and vocational aspects of the school. He had incorporated instruction in farming and the trades as a result of the influence of Methodist missionaries who used such practices in their mission schools in Oregon to inculcate moral and industrious behavior among Native and mixed-blood children.³⁹ Unlike Beaver, McLoughlin also "saw no harm in a practical and mixed elementary schooling for boys and girls," and he paid "only cursory notice ... to class, race or religious differences." This was an especially unusual arrangement with regard to teaching manual-labor skills, instruction commonly adopted for the education of Native, poor, and working-class children. Because of McLoughlin's influence, all students at Fort Vancouver, "regardless of whether they were Indian or Métis, gentlemen or laborers' children," worked in the fort's garden.⁴⁰

Beaver wrote back and suggested that what he really wanted was for the students to receive instruction "authorized" only by him. He again pushed McLoughlin to comment on whether or not Beaver had primary control over the school, reiterating that it was unusual "for the Clergy to take the partial management of any school."⁴¹ This time, traces of irritation were evident in McLoughlin's response:

I feel pained to have the question of supremacy again forced upon me. I beg therefore explicitly to state that the School is under my direction, and if you should under these circumstances, feel it improper to afford me your valuable aid, though I must lament its withdrawal — yet I will relieve you from any charge of it, as I conceive it a duty to continue in the pursuance of the views and objects to which the School owes its origin.⁴²

McLoughlin informed Beaver that not only was the school under his "direction" but that Beaver was, in essence, his employee to be assigned to and relieved from any duty suitable to a fort chaplain. The chief factor, therefore, relied on the imperial authority invested in his position to rebuff Beaver's claim. From McLoughlin's perspective, the institutional power of the established church, at least in the context of the Columbia Department, was second to that of the Company.

Beaver's response was the fifth and final correspondence of that day. He expressed his regret that he had misunderstood McLoughlin, and he admitted that he had "overlooked the expression 'My School'" in McLoughlin's first letter. Beaver had been given the impression, he wrote, that the school was under the chaplain's supervision and that McLoughlin had stated as much in front of John Robinson and the students. Beaver's sole interest in the school, he wrote, was to see "the advancement of the Children in religious knowledge according to the principles of the Church of England," in which he found them "lamentably deficient." He regretted how difficult it would be for him to transfer the knowledge of the church to students in a school that was not under his "exclusive charge."⁴³

Beaver appealed again to the authority of his professional status and his role as a chaplain for the Company. He told McLoughlin that he was surprised that an HBC school, with classes conducted in a room owned by the Company, "should not be under the charge of the Chaplain sent hither by them for that very purpose." He added that neither he nor the Company had any interest in starting a private school, especially since the Company had directed him to "perform the full duties of a parochial Clergyman, of which attendance upon a public school ... he has the Sole Charge." Beaver reminded McLoughlin that the reason he had been sent to Fort Vancouver was to form a Church of England congregation and that he was "at a loss" about how to do that without a school to reach the people — namely, the children of mixed parentage — whom he perceived as "almost entirely sunk in ignorance and barbarism."⁴⁴

By appealing to his own status as a representative of both the church and the Company, Beaver attempted to undercut McLoughlin's authority as chief factor. He claimed that his ecclesiastical jurisdiction within the fort was determined by the Company's directors in London and was thus not subject to regulation by McLoughlin's local political authority. Acting as if he was exempt from McLoughlin's supervision, Beaver concluded the letter by informing McLoughlin that he was "requesting to be furnished with a Schoolmaster, Schoolroom, and other necessary appurtenances" that would be needed for him to carry out the Company's intentions. He informed McLoughlin that Robinson, the school's teacher, was "willing to take the office under me" and that he hoped McLoughlin would follow through with his intention to improve the school so that the site would not have to double as sleeping quarters.⁴⁵ Beaver had ignored McLoughlin's instructions, and he went about making plans as if he was the one in charge of the school.

After receiving the letter, McLoughlin promptly dismissed Beaver from the position he had held for only a matter of days. He would later tell Governor Simpson and the Committee that, based on his interpretation of the "state of feeling" among the Catholic servants in the fort, many of the Catholic students would have left the school if the system of instruction had changed. He explained that Beaver had

insisted upon the necessity of teaching exclusively the Doctrines of the Church of England and would in no other manner take any Interest in its direction or management. Perceiving his scruples which I could not reasonably oppose and sensible of the impolicy of yielding a point involving results of a most serious nature, I released him from the charge and he withdrew not merely his personal aid but also a few elementary treatises with which he had furnished the school.⁴⁶

Historian Thomas Jessett has called McLoughlin's motives into question on this point, noting that Beaver would go on to baptize many of these same children in the following two years, an indication that the "state of feeling among Catholics" was not quite what McLoughlin had suggested it was.⁴⁷ In fact, near the end of his stay at the fort, Beaver reported 118 baptisms of adults and children.⁴⁸ Jessett suggests that McLoughlin may have been attempting to delay formal religious instruction until the Catholic priests that he and the French Canadians in the Willamette Valley had petitioned for arrived in the region. It is also possible that many of the students' Catholic fathers were willing to settle for anyone teaching their children, regardless of sectarian bias. While many of them were illiterate, "the servants admired those who could read and write and were favorably disposed to their children receiving an elementary education."⁴⁹

Many of the students' fathers were engagés and trappers and may not have rigidly allied themselves with Catholic doctrine. With that orientation, they may have believed that any instruction was better than no instruction at all for their children. This ambivalence about religious doctrine was clearly evident when McLoughlin removed Beaver as the school superintendent. Beaver had already let it be known that he intended to return to England when he received a petition signed by thirty-four Protestant and twenty-four Catholic residents of Fort Vancouver requesting that he remain as fort chaplain. Because of the petition, he decided to stay, even though those who signed it probably did so less because of who Beaver was as a person than because of his position as an ordained clergyman. If Beaver returned to England, then the residents would once again be left without an official religious leader in the settlement. This was cause for concern for both Protestants and Catholics. Catholics who had signed the petition, for example, asked to have Beaver conduct his services in French. While not a Catholic mass, the services were apparently still considered better than no service at all.⁵⁰

After McLoughlin dismissed Beaver, he asked Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Spalding, the wives of American Board missionaries Marcus Whitman and Henry Spalding, to temporarily assume teaching duties at the school. The American missionaries had arrived at the fort shortly after Beaver had, and they were making plans to identify a permanent location for their mission station when McLoughlin approached them about assisting in the school. The missionaries were Congregationalists affiliated with the American Board missionaries, which suggests that McLoughlin was perhaps less sectarian than Beaver believed.⁵¹

Beaver expressed his displeasure with this decision in a letter to "Mesdames Whitman and Spalding":

Mr. Beaver presents his compliments to Mrs. Whitman and Mrs. Spalding, and as, he is aware that various customs prevail in different Countries, begs respectfully to inform them, that it is unusual in England for any person to take part, without his permission and Request, in the parochial duties of the minister, in which capacity Mr. Beaver is placed here by the Honble. Hudson's Bay Company. He would, therefore, hope that after this explanation, the ladies, whom he has thus presumed to address, will refrain from teaching, in any respect, the children of the School at Vancouver, over which he has charge in virtue of his office.⁵²

When McLoughlin saw the letter, he sent an employee to ask Beaver to come and see him. Beaver responded in writing, asking McLoughlin to write out his communications "in order that it may the more clearly be referred, if necessary, to Superior Authority."⁵³

Two days later, McLoughlin wrote back asking to see Beaver about the letter he had written to Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Spalding. McLoughlin wanted him to retract the negative impression he had given about the Company, and he wanted Beaver to defer to his authority, which was "demanded by the state of the settlement and due through his office to the Honble. Company."⁵⁴ Later that same day, Beaver informed McLoughlin that there was no need for the two of them to meet because he had not intended a "deliberate insult."⁵⁵ At this point, according to Narcissa Whitman, the repercussions of their feud were noticeable in the fort. She observed: "Mr. Beaver and Dr. McLoughlin now do not speak to each other and the gentlemen of the Fort have not attended the services for several Sabbaths. The difficulty is about the school and the doctrines that should be taught."⁵⁶

Despite McLoughlin's directives, Beaver simply could not accept him as his superior. Beaver thought himself answerable only to Governor Simpson and the Committee in London. ⁵⁷ Not long after Beaver was dismissed from the school, he sent a sealed report to Governor Simpson complaining about the situation. Because all correspondence had to go through the office of the chief factor, McLoughlin noticed the sealed report and sent notice to Beaver that any report written by an officer on Company business had to be, as he later wrote to the Governor and committee, "made through the officer in charge of the place." ⁵⁸ Six months later, Simpson affirmed McLoughlin's position vis-à-vis Company policy and informed Beaver that his reports would have to be presented "open to Chief Factor McLoughlin" so that he could respond to Beaver's report in his own words. Simpson told Beaver that because of the irregularities in the way the report was sent, neither he nor the council could address Beaver's claims until the person in charge at Fort Vancouver had responded. ⁵⁹

In order to find a way of "getting at the young people," Beaver changed his family prayer service into a lecture in the schoolroom each evening. Even this effort was stymied when he found out he could not have the room until eight o'clock, when many of the children were too tired to benefit from his instruction. Although he was no longer permitted to direct the school, Beaver conducted prayer services, baptisms, marriages, and burial services in his role as fort chaplain.⁶⁰ Still outraged by McLoughlin's actions, Beaver later wrote HBC's deputy governor:

I have nothing to do with the school. How Mr. McLoughlin can answer to God and his own conscience for depriving sixty children of the only spiritual instruction they can receive I know not. At the same time I will not compromise the dignity of an English Clergyman by partially managing a school, which he at present call his.⁶¹

Apart from his attempts to gain control of the education of young people in Fort Vancouver, Beaver apparently did little to engage the Native peoples who lived near the fort. He had written the Company early on that the Indians moved around too much to be reached by a permanent clergyman. He also believed that Chinook Jargon, the most commonly understood trading language among Native groups and traders, was not sophisticated enough to convey the complexity of Christian ideas. What good could be done for them, he concluded, "must be chiefly, if not wholly, confined to the children; but even these could not attend a school; for the purpose of learning English, unless they were entirely maintained at our expense."⁶²

During his stay at Fort Vancouver, Beaver went out of his way to express his dissatisfaction with many elements of Company life. He complained about his living quarters and about the insufficient amount of wine he was provided. Both he and his wife complained about the preparation of the food. Beaver also continued to complain about the way McLoughlin conducted religious services for Protestants and Catholics together, believing such practices could only accentuate the potential for a "schism." His most serious objection about the social conditions of Fort Vancouver, however, was over the unordained relationships between white men and Indian women. McLoughlin refused to set the example Beaver hoped he would by having Beaver solemnize his marriage with his wife Marguerite. When McLoughlin read a Company report that Beaver wrote criticizing the chief factor's unsanctioned marriage and referring to his wife as "a female of notoriously loose character," he flew into a rage and physically assaulted Beaver in the courtyard of the fort.⁶³ The next day, McLoughlin made a public apology that went unaccepted by an unforgiving and bruised Herbert Beaver, who attributed the attack "as much to the hatred of my office as of my person."⁶⁴

Inside the palisade at Fort Vancouver in 1860

OHS neg., OrHi 55089

When McLoughlin left for England on a Company furlough in 1838, his deputy, James Douglas, returned the superintendency of the school to Beaver. Douglas even wrote a report complementing Beaver for conducting some services in French, even though he was not fully fluent in the language. When Douglas read Beaver's final report, however — which charged, among other things, that children were forced to work in the fields, that corruption tainted the Company's "Orphan Fund," and that an officer had taken advantage of women in the Douglas house — he was indignant. Beaver refused to retract his statements, and Douglas informed Company officials that Beaver's remarks were "malicious and slanderous" and that the superintendent tried to confide "in professional immunity" since he would never take responsibility for the "sweeping assertions" that "grossly reflect[ed] on public and private character."⁶⁵

In response to Beaver's charges, Douglas systematically addressed the chaplain's criticisms. He denied working children in the fields, explaining that he only had them work in the garden gathering small crops such as peas. He refuted Beaver's claims about the Orphan Fund and pointed out that Beaver had never taken any interest in its management nor had he ever donated anything to it. Douglas did agree with Beaver that it was a good idea to have a married couple run the school, "as ... in a National School in England." Beaver thought that a "Master and Mistress," if they were "plain, moderately educated people" dedicated to the school and its mission, would work well under the supervision of a chaplain. Douglas concluded his report to the Company by calling Beaver's ideas for improvements in the fort's affairs "visionary schemes." A clergyman "in this Country," Douglas observed, "must quit the closet & live a life of beneficent activity, devoted to the support of principles, rather than of forms: he must shun discord, avoid uncharitable feelings, temper zeal with discretion, illustrate precept by example."⁶⁶

In the end, the disagreement between Douglas and Beaver went nowhere. Shortly before Beaver had written his report, he had heard that McLoughlin was preparing to return to Fort Vancouver. There is some evidence that Beaver hoped to arrive in England before McLoughlin departed so that he could file charges against him with the Company, but McLoughlin was already on his way to the fort when Beaver arrived in England. ⁶⁷ Soon after, Beaver wrote the bishop of Montreal advising that his successor would be able to "do nothing unless his powers vastly exceed mine." ⁶⁸ As it turned out, it would be more than a decade before the Company assigned a new Protestant chaplain to Fort Vancouver, and the school reportedly suffered from a lack of consistent and conscientious supervision during that time. ⁶⁹

In 1841, after he returned to England, Beaver wrote a piece for the Church of England Protestant Magazine entitled "Experiences of a Chaplain at Fort Vancouver, 1836–1838." He called attention to how the religious differences between him and McLoughlin had limited his ability to carry out tasks that he believed were within his professional duty as fort chaplain. Beaver made it clear that he held McLoughlin in the lowest regard as a human being, but he also situated his struggle with the chief factor within the larger conflict between Catholics and Protestants. The difficulties he experienced at Fort Vancouver, he charged, were a "case of Popish persecution." Beaver explained that he had the support of many Catholic children and their parents at the fort, but it was McLoughlin "who endeavored to persuade the Roman Catholics under his command" that, among other things, "baptism at the hands of a Protestant Clergyman was invalid and unsaving!!!" This "undue influence" had kept the Fort Vancouver settlement from becoming "one fold under one Shepherd." In a final statement notable for its rhetorical excess, Beaver dejectedly concluded:

I feel confident that I could, covered by the shield of faith, have taken the Papal bull by the horns; and, aided by the sword of the Spirit, have expelled the hydra-headed monster from the northeastern shores of the Pacific.... Popery now, for a time at least, reigns triumphant; and I confess myself unable to point out a plan to counteract its domineering progress. ⁷⁰

When McLoughlin returned to Fort Vancouver in 1839, he devoted less attention to the management of the school and more time to the development of Catholic institutions in the Willamette Valley. James Douglas, John Hussey has suggested, then assumed more permanent managerial responsibilities for the school, which was by most reports in a general state of disorganization from neglect. Some Company employees even removed their children from the school and enrolled them in the nearby Methodist mission to shield them from what they considered the hostile and immoral atmosphere surrounding the school. There is evidence, however, that by the time Charles Wilkes of the United States Exploring Expedition arrived at Fort Vancouver in 1841, girls and boys were being educated separately with a female teacher instructing the girls.⁷¹ Manual labor continued to be the pedagogical cornerstone of the institution, which suggests, as Juliet Pollard concludes: "the disputes between Beaver and McLoughlin made little difference in the students' lives because their objectives, like those of every other school promoter involved in the education of Métis children, were the same — to Christianize and civilize their pupils."⁷²

The conflict between John McLoughlin and Herbert Beaver can be viewed as a struggle for jurisdictional authority within the organizational structure of Fort Vancouver. In focusing on McLoughlin's and Beaver's claims or appeals to authority, there is evidence in their dispute of the application of administrative and occupational principles concerning the organization of schooling.⁷³ Viewed from this perspective, McLoughlin's and Beaver's dispute over the school was, in addition to a clash of personalities and differences in religious and educational ideologies, also a "turf war" between the administrative authority of the office of chief factor and the professional authority of the fort chaplain.

Because of the personal disdain McLoughlin and Beaver quickly developed for one another, it is tempting to explain, and perhaps even dismiss, their disagreements as a battle of strong wills and contentious personalities. Time and again, for example, historians of the Northwest fur trade have described Beaver as a man unsuited for the rigors and requirements of missionary life.⁷⁴ McLoughlin's violent temper and turbulent disposition has also been frequently described.⁷⁵ The sectarian hostilities expressed in Beaver's writings clearly demonstrate that religion was another contributing factor in the conflict over the management of the school. Beaver sought to institute Episcopal teachings that, in turn, prompted McLoughlin to promote Catholicism among the fort's children. It could be argued further that the conflict over the school occurred largely because McLoughlin and Beaver promoted different philosophies of education. While Beaver sought to establish the curriculum of the English national system, McLoughlin believed that manual labor would produce the disposition and character necessary for youth to carry forward the work of the Company in the Pacific Northwest.

All of these explanations, while integral to a thorough understanding of this particular conflict, overlook the significance of the organizational context of the Hudson's Bay Company and its rationalized structures of authority and expertise (for example, division of labor). Specifically, prior interpretations of this conflict fail to examine how the school was a site of competing jurisdictional claims. While each man believed he possessed the authority to govern the school, each also saw his power to do so rooted in different sources. McLoughlin appealed to the power invested in his position as the fort's chief factor. He claimed a type of corporate authority, where his power was drawn from his managerial position within the HBC's Columbia Department. Beaver's appeals to authority were rooted in profession and, hence, the cultural status derived from his position as fort chaplain. In England, ministerial authority over education was claimed on cultural and political grounds, and "the clergy had a clear place in a social–class structure.... Educational establishments of all kinds were under the control of the Church, from Oxford and Cambridge to the parish school." Beaver sought to reproduce those same jurisdictional arrangements at Fort Vancouver. He had been sent to the fort, he believed, to "perform the full duties of a parochial Clergyman, of which attendance upon a public school ... he has the Sole Charge."⁷⁶ Beaver believed that this authority — even at Fort Vancouver — superseded McLoughlin's managerial position within the Company.

Against McLoughlin's instructions, Beaver perceived the school at Fort Vancouver as a parish school. By teaching the Book of Common Prayer and attempting to establish the authority of the Church of England, he sought to reconstruct the institutional conditions of English life within the Columbia settlement. Historian Thomas Jessett has suggested that Beaver "conceived of the entire Columbia District as his parish, and within its confines felt he should exercise the same rights possessed by a clergyman in a parish in England."⁷⁷ Beaver's appeals to authority — and ultimately to the jurisdictional control of education in the fort — were therefore tied to his professional status as a minister and to an intricate combination of religious and state authority. Simply put, his profession was rooted in religion, and his religion was inextricably tied to the state. Moreover, because the separation of church and state was at the time an American ideal that was not recognized within the political and cultural milieu of English life, Beaver had no trouble integrating his sense of national responsibility with his claims of why the school belonged under his command.⁷⁸ As he wrote to McLoughlin, it was "totally unusual for Clergymen of the Church of England to admit unauthorized instruction in schools committed to their charge."⁷⁹

In his effort to direct the education of children in Fort Vancouver, McLoughlin articulated what can best be described as the administrative principle — namely, the exertion of managerial authority over the organization of teaching and learning in the school. Who taught the children of the fort, what that task consisted of, and how it was performed were determined by McLoughlin in his position as chief factor, for "the authority to appoint and supervise personnel clearly fell within the range of discretionary powers he was afforded in carrying out the general policies of the London Committee and Governor Simpson."⁸⁰ McLoughlin's application of the administrative principle was most forcefully expressed when he wrote Beaver: "I beg therefore explicitly to state that the School is under my direction, and if you should under these circumstances, feel it improper to afford me your valuable aid.... I will relieve you from any charge of it."⁸¹ By threatening to remove Beaver from his duties — a threat he would later make good on — McLoughlin demonstrated how his power to direct the school was rooted in his administrative position within the formal organizational structure of the Company.

Neither McLoughlin nor Beaver fit the characteristics of the "organization man" described by sociologist William H. Whyte — an individual who so fully internalizes the mission of a company that his dedication and sense of responsibility toward it are, for all intents and purposes, absolute.⁸² In their own way, both men were able to separate their personal interests and ideologies from those of the Company. McLoughlin was adept at negotiating the tension between his role as Company employee and independent actor. While he clashed with Simpson on a variety of issues, when disputes at the local level could not be resolved through the force of his own will he did not hesitate to draw on the formal power invested in his position with the Company.⁸³ In doing so, he sought to protect and, therefore, enhance the administrative jurisdiction of the fort's chief factor.

Both men, therefore, tried to legitimize their power to govern the fort's school through appeals to authority. While the forces of personality, religion, and educational ideology all clearly influenced and textured the nature of the conflict between McLoughlin and Beaver, the dispute can be further understood in the context of the formal organizational structure of the Company and the politics of jurisdiction. It is only by attending to this level of analysis that we see how McLoughlin and Beaver, through their respective claims of jurisdictional control, asserted competing rationales of authority — rationales rooted in the principles of administration and occupation.

Notes

I owe a special thanks to the OHQ reviewers for their helpful suggestions and insightful criticisms. I would also like to acknowledge Professor Nancy Beadie of the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Washington for her comments on an earlier version of this article.

^1.� The children of French fur traders and Native women are referred to here as "métis." See John C. Jackson, Children of the Fur Trade: Forgotten Métis of the Pacific Northwest (Missoula, Mont.: Mountain Press, 1995); Juliet T. Pollard, "The Making of the Métis in the Pacific Northwest Fur Trade Children: Race, Class, and Gender" (Ph.D. diss., University of British Columbia, 1990); and Peyton Kayne, "The Whatcom County Nine: Legal and Political Ramifications of Métis Family Life in Washington Territory," Columbia, the Magazine of Northwest History (Summer 2000): 39–44.

^2.� Pollard, "Making of the Métis," 285–6. The letter Solomon Smith wrote to Elwood Evans is cited in John Hussey, Historic Structure Report, Historical Data (Denver, Colo.: U.S. Department of the Interior, 1976), 2:291. There is some question about whether the teacher was John Ball or Solomon Smith, who went west with the 1832 Wyeth Expedition. On this issue, see Elwood Evans, in History of the Pacific Northwest: Oregon and Washington (Portland, Ore.: North Pacific History Company, 1889), 1:118; and Read Bain, in "Educational Plans and Efforts by Methodists in Oregon to 1860," Oregon Historical Quarterly 21:2 (June 1920): 65–6.

^3.� The student may have been McLoughlin's youngest son, David. See Nancy Wilson, Dr. John McLoughlin: Master of Fort Vancouver—Father of Oregon (Medford, Ore.: Webb Research Group, 1994), 53. Wilson does not share her sources with readers.

^4.� In Hussey, Historic Structure Report, 2:291. See also Evans, History of the Pacific Northwest, 118.

^5.� The two exceptions I could find are Pollard, "Making of the Métis." and Thomas Jessett, ed., Report and Letters of Herbert Beaver, 1838–1838 (Portland, Ore.: Champoeg Press, 1959), xi–xxiv.

^6.� Dorothy O. Johansen and Charles M. Gates, Empire of the Columbia: A History of the Pacific Northwest (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 122.

^7.� John S. Galbraith, The Hudson's Bay Company as an Imperial Factor, 1821–1869 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 178. See also Joseph Schaffer, "The British Attitude toward the Oregon Question, 1815–1846," American Historical Review 16:2 (January 1911): 273–99.

^8.� Richard Somerset Mackie, Trading beyond the Mountains: The British Fur Trade on the Pacific, 1793–1843 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1997), 44–5.

^9.� D.W. Meinig, The Great Columbia Plain: A Historical Geography, 1805–1910 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968), 95.

^10.� Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 21.

^11.� Meinig, Great Columbia Plain, 172. See also Robert Boyd, "Smallpox in the Pacific Northwest: The First Epidemics," B.C. Studies, no. 101 (Spring 1994): 5–40; Boyd, "The Pacific Northwest Measles Epidemic of 1847–1848," Oregon Historical Quarterly 95:1 (Spring 1994): 8–9.

^12.� White, Organic Machine, 26.

^13.� Quoted in T.C. Elliott, "The Coming of the White Women, 1836, Part II," Oregon Historical Quarterly 37 (September 1936): 181.

^14.� Jessett, ed., Reports and Letters of Herbert Beaver, xviii.

^15.� See, for example, Herbert Beaver, "Experiences of a Chaplain at Fort Vancouver, 1836–1838," ed. R.C. Clark, Oregon Historical Quarterly 39:2 (March 1938): 22–38. Beaver claimed that McLoughlin told him he was being instructed by his sister "in her letters, to do all that lay in his power to preserve the integrity of the Roman Catholic faith throughout his command" (24).

^16.� Jessett, ed., Reports and Letters of Herbert Beaver, xiii.

^17.� Ibid., 24.

^18.� W. Kaye Lamb, introduction, The Letters of John McLoughlin, from Fort Vancouver to the Governor and Committee, First Series, 1825–38, ed. E.E. Rich (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1941), cxvii. See also Pollard, "Making of the Métis," 308–9n15.

^19.� The Company was criticized in London for paying "lip service to religious teaching" See Dorothy O. Johansen and Charles M. Gates, in Empire of the Columbia: A History of the Pacific Northwest (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 160. See also Lamb, introduction; R.C. Clark, ed., editorial comment, "Reverend Herbert Beaver," Oregon Historical Quarterly 39:1 (March 1938): 22–38; Thomas E. Jessett, Pioneering God's Country: The History of the Diocese of Olympia, 1853–1967 (Seattle: Diocese of Olympia Press, 1967); Jessett, ed., Reports and Letters of Herbert Beaver, xiii, xvi; Thomas E. Jessett, "Origins of the Episcopal Church in the Pacific Northwest," Oregon Historical Quarterly 48:3 (September 1947): 225–44.

^20.� Quoted in G. Hollis Slater, "New Light on Herbert Beaver," British Columbia Historical Quarterly 6 (January 1942): 16.

^21.� Ibid., 16, 17.

^22.� In Glyndwr Williams, ed., Hudson's Bay Miscellany, 1670–1870 (Winnipeg, Manitoba: Hudson's Bay Record Society, 1975), 176.

^23.� Kate N.B. Powers., ed., "Across the Continent Seventy Years Ago; Extracts from the Journal of John Ball of His Trip across the Rocky Mountains, and His Life in Oregon, Complied by His Daughter," Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society 3:1 (March 1902): 100. See also John Ball, Born to Wander: Autobiography of John Ball, 1794–1884, comp. Kate Ball Powers et al. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Grand Rapids Historical Commission, 1994), 60.

^24.� Pollard, "Making of the Métis," 285–6. Ranald MacDonald once wrote that he attended "the school to learn my A.B.C. and English. The big boys had a medal put over their necks, if caught speaking French or Chinook, and when school was out had to remain and learn a task. I made no progress." Quoted in William S. Lewis and Naojiro Murakami, eds., Ranald MacDonald; The Narrative of His Early Life on the Columbia under the Hudson's Bay Company's Regime; of His Experiences in the Pacific Whale Fishery; and of His Great Adventure to Japan; With a Sketch of His Later Life on the Western Frontier, 1824–1924 (Portland: Oregon Historical Society Press, 1990), 25.

^25.� Herbert Beaver, "Chaplain's Report, Fort Vancouver, October 10, 1837," in Jessett., ed., Reports and Letters of Herbert Beaver, 56. Two years later, Robinson, a reputed drinker, was found guilty of sexually assaulting some of his female students and was flogged for his offenses. The incident ended co-education at the fort. See Pollard, "Making of the Métis," 299–300.

^26.� Some have assumed that the first school was housed in the Owyhee Church, but as Hussey points out, this church, which doubled as the school, was not constructed until about 1836. See Hussey, Historic Structure Report, 2:289.

^27.� Quoted in Elliott, "Coming of the White Women," 181.

^28.� See Hussey, Historic Structure Report, 2:292, and Pollard, "Making of the Métis," 229.

^29.� Jessett, ed., Reports and Letters of Herbert Beaver, xi, xiii, xvi; William R. Sampson, ed., John McLoughlin's Business Correspondence, 1847–48 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973), 125–6; Slater, "New Light on Herbert Beaver," 17–18.

^30.� Jessett, ed., Reports and Letters of Herbert Beaver, xix.

^31.� Dr. John McLoughlin, C.F., to the Governor, Deputy Governor & Committee of the Honble. Hudson's Bay Company, November 15, 1836, in Rich, ed., Letters of John McLoughlin, 161–2; See Beaver, "Experiences of a Chaplain," 23.

^32.� Jessett., ed., Reports and Letters of Herbert Beaver, xix; Beaver, "Experiences of a Chaplain," 23–4.

^33.� Ibid., 23–4. Beaver does not say how many fathers he actually contacted.

^34.� Beaver later reported that one "noble boy, Baptiste Jeaudoins,... persisted while I knew him, in defiance of chastisement by the Chief Factor's own hand, in refusing to attend what he called the French Prayers." See Beaver, "Experiences of a Chaplain," 25.

^35.� Herbert Beaver to Dr. John McLoughlin, September 30, 1836, in Jessett., ed. Reports and Letters of Herbert Beaver, 7.

^36.� Ibid.

^37.� According to Pollard, "certain aspects of monitorial teaching had already been introduced into the school by the American teachers. For example, the monitorial system stressed 'shaming' rather than physical penalties for disobedient students and proposed a series of punishments, including the dunce cap, instead of the strap or rod, that teachers might employ with unruly pupils." Both John Ball and Solomon Smith used similar methods if they caught students speaking French or Chinook Jargon. Pollard, "Making of the Métis," 326.

^38.� McLoughlin to Beaver, September 30, 1836, in Jessett., ed., Reports and Letters of Herbert Beaver, 8.

^39.� Central to the Christianizing practices of the Methodists was the separation of the children from their parents, because it was believed that through schooling the Native children could, to some degree, still be saved. See Robert J. Lowenberg, Equality on the Oregon Frontier; Jason Lee and the Methodist Mission, 1834–43 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976), 85, 100–101.

^40.� Pollard, "Making of the Métis," 327. For a more thorough discussion of the manual labor component of the school, see 322–3, 357n11.

^41.� Beaver to McLoughlin, September 30, 1836, in Jessett., ed., Reports and Letters of Herbert Beaver, 8.

^42.� McLoughlin to Beaver, September 30, 1836, in ibid., 9.

^43.� Beaver to McLoughlin, September 30, 1836, in ibid.

^44.� Ibid., 10.

^45.� Ibid.

^46.� McLoughlin to the Governor, Deputy Governor & Committee of Hudson's Bay Company, November 15, 1836, in Rich, ed., Letters of John McLoughlin, 161–2.

^47.� Jessett, ed., Reports and Letters of Herbert Beaver, xx; Rich, ed., Letters of John McLoughlin, 162.

^48.� "Herbert Beaver's Fifth Report," in Jessett, ed., Reports and Letters of Herbert Beaver, 133.

^49.� Pollard, "Making of the Métis," 319.

^50.� Beaver, "Experiences of a Chaplain," 26–7. See also Narcissa Prentiss Whitman, The Letters of Narcissa Whitman (Fairfield, Wash.: Ye Galleon Press, 1996), 38–9.

^51.� For more on Narcissa Whitman's experience at the school, see Elliott, "Coming of the White Women," 187.

^52.� Beaver to Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Spalding, October 1, 1836, in "Mr. Beaver Objects," The Beaver: A Magazine of the North, Outfit 272 (September 1941): 12.

^53.� Beaver to McLoughlin, October 3, 1836, in ibid.

^54.� McLoughlin to Beaver, October 3, 1836, in Ibid.

^55.� Beaver to Whitman and Spalding, October 1, 1836, in ibid.

^56.� Quoted in Clark, "Reverend Herbert Beaver," 68.

^57.� Jessett, "Origins of the Episcopal Church," 232.

^58.� McLoughlin to Governor, Deputy Governor, and Committee, November 19, 1836, in Rich, ed., Letters of John McLoughlin, 184.

^59.� George Simpson to Beaver, June 30, 1837, in Rich, ed., Letters of John McLoughlin, 184.

^60.� Beaver, "Experiences of a Chaplain," 25.

^61.� Beaver to Benjamin Harrison, January 18, 1837, in Jessett., ed., Reports and Letters of Herbert Beaver, 30.

^62.� Beaver to Governor and Committee, H.H.BC, November 10, 1836, in "Mr. Beaver Objects," 11. After Beaver returned to England he wrote an extended account of the mistreatment of Natives by the Hudson's Bay Company in a letter to the Aborigines' Protection Society of London. See Nellie B. Pipes, "Indian Conditions in 1836–38," Oregon Historical Quarterly 32:4 (December 1931): 332–42.

^63.� Quoted in Dorothy Nafus-Morrison, Outpost: John McLoughlin and the Far Northwest (Portland: Oregon Historical Society Press, 1999), 258. For Beaver's account see Beaver, "Experiences of a Chaplain," 31–2.

^64.� Beaver, "Experiences of a Chaplain," 32. See also "Herbert Beaver's Fourth Report, March 19, 1838," in Jessett, ed., Reports and Letters of Herbert Beaver, 97.

^65.� Beaver to the Governor and Committee (Herbert Beaver's Fifth Report), October 2, 1838, in Jessett., ed., Reports and Letters of Herbert Beaver, 107–36; and "The James Douglas Report on the 'Beaver Affair,'" in ibid., 137–48. Beaver also called attention to the use of slave labor in the fort. See, for example, Beaver to Benjamin Harrison, November 15, 1836, January, 1837, in ibid., 20, 31. See also Mackie, Trading beyond the Mountains, 304–8.

^66.� Jessett, ed., "The James Douglas Report," 144.

^67.� Sampson, ed., John McLaughlin's Business Correspondence, 126.

^68.� Beaver to The Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of Montreal, Quebec, July 31, 1839, in Slater, "New Light on Herbert Beaver," 25.

^69.� See Hussey, Historic Structure Report, 2: 295–8.

^70.� Beaver, "Experiences of a Chaplain," 37, italics in original.

^71.� Hussey, Historic Structure Report, 2:295–9. Hussey reports that after 1843 there is little evidence available about the school, and he hypothesizes that it may have been shut down for a while. In 1844, Douglas and Simpson did discuss the possibility of hiring another clergyman and his wife to teach the officers' children exclusively, and Douglas did solicit funds from the officers. He even oversaw the initial construction of two schoolhouses that remained unfinished until the U.S. Army took them over years later. Hussey cites evidence that the education of orphan, métis, and Native children continued in some form throughout the mid- to late 1840s (2:299–303).

^72.� Pollard, "Making of the Métis," 329.

^73.� See Elliot Freidson, Professionalism Reborn: Theory, Prophecy, and Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 61–74. See also Andrew Abbott, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

^74.� Thomas Jessett, for example, makes this argument in Report and Letters of Herbert Beaver, xxii–xxiii.

^75.� See, for example, Johansen and Gates, Empire of the Columbia, 128.

^76.� Beaver to McLoughlin, September 30, 1836, in Jessett., ed., Reports and Letters of Herbert Beaver, 10.

^77.� Jessett, "Origins of the Episcopal Church," 232.

^78.� I am indebted to one of the OHQ reviewers for making this point.

^79.� Beaver to McLoughlin, September 30, 1836, in Jessett, "Origins of the Episcopal Church," 7.

^80.� For a list of McLoughlin's responsibilities as chief factor, see Johansen and Gates, Empire of the Columbia, 128–9.

^81.� McLoughlin to Beaver, September 30, 1836, in ibid., 9.

^82.� William H. Whyte, Jr., The Organization Man (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1957).

^83.� I am drawing on insights from H. Lloyd Keith's "The 'Dried Spider' and the Gadfly: The James Keith-John Clarke Confrontation at Mingan, 1831–32" in Jo-Anne Fiskeet al., eds., New Faces of the Fur Trade: Selected Papers of the Seventh North American Fur Trade Conference, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1995 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1998), 283–313.

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