The glowering presence on the left was manifestly a leader of men, accustomed to giving orders and having them obeyed—instantly. Canadian-born, he parlayed a career as director of British fur trading in the American Northwest into a place of importance in the history of the United States. He died a citizen of this country; his statue graces the South Small Rotunda of the nation’s Capitol; and he is known today as “the father of Oregon.” His name was John McLoughlin— Doctor John McLoughlin, as he would have insisted.

He was born in 1784, on a farm on the lower St. Lawrence River. An apprenticeship to a Quebec physician led to employment at nineteen as an assistant surgeon at Fort William, the North West Company’s fur-gathering post on the shore of Lake Superior. He remained proud of the title of physician for the rest of his life, but in truth he was a good deal more successful as a trader. The Indians dealt readily with him, impressed by his quick mastery of their languages and by his enormous physical stature—his massive frame towered six feet four inches in a land where most tribesmen were comparatively short.

In 1814 he became a partner in the North West Company, then engaged in bloody competition with the Hudson’s Bay Company. Appalled by the violent struggle—and by the dwindling profits accompanying it—McLoughlin took part in negotiations that led to an amalgamation of the two rivals. The giant doctor was then named one of the twenty-five Chief Factors, or district managers, of the continent-wide Hudson’s Bay Company monopoly that resulted, and he was placed in charge of the Columbia Department. Thereafter, McLoughlin ruled some 600,000 square miles stretching from Spanish California to Russian Alaska, with twenty-two posts manned by about 460 employees. From his headquarters at Fort Vancouver on the north bank of the Columbia River near present-day Portland, Oregon, he supervised land and marine trade with the Indians of the entire Northwest; inaugurated commerce in salmon and timber with California and Hawaii; and, after 1839, supplied Russian Alaska with produce. And he managed all this under considerable pressure: no boundary yet separated British and American possessions west of the Rockies; under jointoccupancy agreements, Americans were entitled to equal rights of trade and commerce throughout the Northwest, but any sizable incursion of Yankees would necessarily jeopardize his domain.

In spite of this, he ruled like a not-always-benevolent dictator. The officers’ mess gleamed with fine china and silver, and visitors at his table agreed that McLoughlin presided graciously, was a scintillating conversationalist, and could be grandly generous. But he also had a frantic temper. He quarreled so intemperately with one friend that the offended man, who was ill, left Fort Vancouver during a storm and died of exposure. When the fort’s chaplain cast slurs upon McLoughlin’s half-Indian wife, the outraged doctor caned the smaller man.

He seemed temperamentally unable to brook any inter- ference with his policies—even