Beaver's 'drunk tweets' led to brawl with Dr. John McLoughlin

Earlier this year, as you may remember, country music singer Zach Bryan had a few too many alcoholic beverages before pulling out his phone and opening “X,” the app formerly known as Twitter.

“Eagles>Chiefs,” he tweeted tipsily. “Kanye>Taylor. Who’s with me?”

It’s not clear exactly what Bryan intended — most likely he was joke-trolling the Taylor Swift fan community, which, as he realized the next morning when he awakened with a penitent headache and looked at his phone, is about as good an idea as sneaking up behind a sleeping grizzly bear for the old “popping a paper bag” prank.

A few days of red-faced apologies later, Bryan deleted his Twitter account, explaining that he’d decided it was too tempting for him, especially after a few beers.

“It gets me in trouble too much,” he wrote, on an Instagram post. “Don’t drink and tweet! Don’t drink and tweet!”

This seems to have done the trick; the kerfuffle faded quickly away. Probably that’s because Bryan’s last line rang like a bell. Nearly everyone who has a social media account and is not an absolute teetotaler has had the experience of waking up the next morning after a friend’s birthday party and discovering that he has embarrassed himself with a late-night Facebook post that seemed like the right thing to do at the time, but ...

The first drunk tweet in Oregon history didn’t end nearly so benignly. Maybe it would have, if Twitter had been a thing in March of 1838 when, fortified with a nice zesty jolt of French brandy, the Rev. Herbert Beaver took quill pen in hand and sat down to compose it; but, then again, maybe not.

Now, I have to confess that I have no hard evidence that Beaver was drunk when he belted out his handwritten “tweet.” But, one of the unintended consequences of the tweet, much later, would be the publishing of Beaver’s household liquor consumption, which was absolutely heroic. I figure a fellow who burns through the alcoholic equivalent of 17 “fifths” of Jack Daniels every month probably can be assumed to be no stranger to the whole “Dutch courage” thing, when sitting down to write an angry letter.

The thing about that letter, and the reason it had something in common with a modern social-media post, is that there was no assurance of privacy in it. As a matter of general administration, Fort Vancouver’s chief factor, Dr. John McLoughlin, looked over all the outgoing correspondence before sending it off to London.

Beaver may have assumed that this would not be the case with his correspondence. He having been appointed to his post by the Company’s governor in London, he figured he was only answerable to the governor. McLoughlin, though, disagreed — and considered Beaver to be his subordinate. The two of them had already clashed more than once as a result of this misunderstanding, which was made worse by the fact that McLoughlin’s wife, Marguerite McKay, was a devout Catholic, and he himself had Catholic sympathies. Like a lot of Protestants back then, Beaver detested “papists” on general principles.

Not surprisingly, this had become a sore point between them, made worse because McLoughlin’s marriage to Marguerite was of the informal “fur-trade style” kind, basically a common-law marriage. Beaver considered fur-trade marriages to be living in sin, and was forever pushing the traders to sanctify their unions with the Indian and half-Indian ladies who graced their homes.

McLoughlin stubbornly refused to let Beaver formalize his marriage to Marguerite. This may have been because Marguerite, a devout Catholic, wouldn’t allow it; or he may have just been being stubborn. In any case, it was clearly very much on Beaver’s mind that evening as he stretched out his pen.

The ”tweet” was in reference to Marguerite McKay. He referred to her as “a female of notoriously loose character,” and “the kept mistress of the highest personage in your service.”

Naturally, when the autocratic and hot-tempered McLoughlin read those lines while reviewing the outbound correspondence, he was incandescent with rage.

Immediately he fired off a peremptory order, commanding Beaver to come to his office immediately. Beaver, doubtless a little daunted but refusing to recognize McLoughlin’s right to issue such an order, ignored him. This can’t have improved McLoughlin’s mood much.

In any case, the next day the two men encountered each other by chance in the courtyard at the fort. Beaver had prepared for such a chance by bringing a heavy walking stick, but this ended up making things worse for him, as an infuriated McLoughlin, roaring, “You scoundrel! I will have your life!” pounced upon him.

Even with a stick, Beaver was no match for McLoughlin, who was 6 feet 4 inches tall and built like a draft horse. After taking several kicks and punches, Beaver dropped his stick, which his wife picked up. McLoughlin wrenched the stick away from her and gave her husband a couple lusty wacks across the shoulders with it.

Then several bystanders arrived to help Mary Beaver stop the fight.

The following day, realizing he’d gone too far, McLoughlin apologized to Beaver for the attack.

“This Beaver spurned, and it is clear that he felt McLoughlin’s violence had delivered him — and perhaps the Company — into his hands,” writes historian W. Kaye Lamb. “Ill-concealed exultation as well as righteous indignation blazes up in the account of the affair that he sent to London.”

Perhaps luckily for all involved, McLoughlin left two days later for a previously scheduled overland journey into Canada, and in his absence James Douglas was left in charge.

Douglas was at pains to keep Beaver as happy as he could, and for some time he thought it was working. It should have been a great relationship, really, as Douglas and his now-wife, Amelia Connolly, had been the first marriage ceremony Beaver had presided over at the fort (Douglas and Connolly had, of course, been fur-trade-style spouses before that).

But, it was not to be. The break literally happened in the middle of a letter Douglas was writing to London in which he copiously praises Beaver’s efforts in one paragraph, and a few lines later speaks very disparagingly and contemptuously of him.

So what happened? Well, once again, Beaver sent a “tweet” in his report to London (which at this point he obviously well knew the head of the fort would be reading) that included this line:

“I see the principal house in your Establishment made a common receptacle for every Mistress of an Officer in the service, who may take a fancy to visit the fort.”

Douglas, incensed, dashed off a note to Beaver demanding that he explain what this meant, and who these “mistresses” were. This Beaver replied to in very formal terms, declining to provide any explanation, and after that, the two of them were no longer on speaking terms.

So Douglas dashed off a lengthy letter to London rebutting Beaver’s accusations (and disclosing his consumption rate of brandy, port, and other liquors, as mentioned above), and at his very next opportunity Beaver embarked for London “for the purpose of instituting legal proceedings against Chief Factor McLoughlin,” as he put it.

This he attempted to do after arriving home in May 1839; but nothing came of it, and shortly thereafter he was told that his services would no longer be needed, and was hit in the backside with a check for 110 pounds sterling to settle his claims against McLoughlin and the Company.

Beaver went on to become a chaplain in the British Army in South Africa, where, in 1858, at the age of 58, he died.

McLoughlin wouldn’t get off unscathed either; the Hudson’s Bay Company brass in London never quite trusted him after this incident, especially as he started befriending American settlers who arrived in the country destitute. Eventually they tried to “kick him upstairs” by offering him a promotion that would require him to move back east, and he resigned and took up a land claim at Willamette Falls in what is now Oregon City.

It is tempting to think of Herbert Beaver as a sanctimonious clown, a hard-drinking version of Jane Austen’s Mr. Collins from Pride and Prejudice. And there is, as we’ve seen, something to that view. His anti-Catholic sentiments were over the top even for the 1830s, and his constant complaints about the inadequacy of his housing and the unsuitability of the servants assigned to him in this roughest of frontier outposts don’t endear him much to modern readers.

But there are a couple things that should be mentioned about him, and maybe they actually make up for all the unnecessary trouble and drama he caused:

First, there’s the issue of slavery. The Indians of the Pacific Northwest practiced slavery, pressing war captives into forced service, and under McLoughlin the Hudson’s Bay Company followed this custom, a blatant violation of English law and Company policy. Beaver, when he learned this, had a fit, and it’s chiefly thanks to him that this practice was stopped.

He also had a point about “fur-trade marriages.” The problem with them was, the women were committed to them, but the men often were not. Even Marguerite McKay was a former cast-aside fur-trade wife; she’d been “fur-trade married” to trader Alexander McKay, who had deserted her. This happened a lot in the Company’s remotest outposts, and resulted in a lot of abandoned wives and semi-orphaned children dependent on the charity of the Company. It was blatantly unfair, clearly immoral by the lights of the church, and Beaver did his best to stand up to it.

In spite of all the trouble Beaver encountered, including the healthy portion he laid upon himself, Beaver did some real good at the fort — giving at least a dozen “fur-trade wives” some stability and legal status, and ending slavery in the Oregon Territory for good.

It makes one wonder how much different history would have been, if only Beaver had had a little less of a tendency to drunk-tweet, and a little more generosity of spirit.

(Sources: “Herbert Beaver: First Anglican Clergyman West of the Rocky Mountains,” an article by thomas E. Jessett published in the December 1947 issue of English Church History; “The James Douglas Report,” an article by W. Kaye Lamb published in the March 1946 issue of Oregon Historical Quarterly; “Experiences of a Chaplain at Fort Vancouver,” an article by Herbert Beaver published with “Editorial Comment,” an article by R.C. Clark, both in the March 1938 issue of Oregon Historical Quarterly.)

Finn J.D. John teaches at Oregon State University and writes about odd tidbits of Oregon history. His most recent book, Bad Ideas and Horrible People of Old Oregon, published by Ouragan House early this year. To contact him or suggest a topic: [email protected] or 541-357-2222.