NOTE: Enjoy this excerpt from The American Daily Reader, by CatholicVote president Brian Burch and Emily Stimpson Chapman. To order the complete volume, visit the CatholicVote store today!
Dr. John McLoughlin’s General Store was a site thousands of Americans once dreamed of seeing. To arrive at its doors was to arrive at the last stop on the Oregon Trail. McLoughlin, however, was more than just a general store owner in Oregon City.
Born in Quebec and baptized Catholic (but raised Anglican), McLoughlin worked for 11 years as the staff doctor at Fort William in Ontario before the North West Fur Company, which ran the fort, made him a partner. Ten years later, in 1824, after North West merged with the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), McLoughlin left Ontario to manage HBC’s operations in the Pacific Northwest.
For the next two decades, McLoughlin exercised almost absolute authority over the land west of the Rockies, north of California, and south of Russian America. Friend to natives and pioneers alike, McLoughlin ran the fur trade, inaugurated the salmon and lumber trade, built the Northwest’s first lumber mills, and constructed forts throughout the region, including Fort Vancouver.
When Americans began arriving via the Oregon Trail, he welcomed them, too, setting up schools and assisting missionaries. Eventually, two of those missionaries—Father Francois Blanchet and Father Modeste Demers—brought McLoughlin back to the Faith of his baptism. Later, in 1847, Pope Gregory XVI thanked McLoughlin for assisting the missionaries by naming him a Knight of the Order of St. Gregory.
Although McLoughlin was arguably the lone reason no armed conflicts broke out between British and American settlers in the Oregon Territory, some resented his power. That resentment showed in 1850, when the Territory’s legislature slipped a clause into the Oregon Donation Land Act, stripping McLoughlin of most of his personal land holdings. In 1857, McLoughlin died a financially broken man.
But in the end, he got his due. The Oregon Legislature apologized in 1862 and restored the confiscated land to his children. Then, about 100 years after his death, on May 17, 1957, the state officially conferred upon McLoughlin the title he’d more than earned: “Father of Oregon.”
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