Childhood and Early Career
McLoughlin was born in Rivière-du-Loup, Quebec, of Irish (his grandfather came from Sharagower in the Inishowen peninsular of County Donegal), Scottish, and French Canadian descent. He lived with his great uncle, Colonel William Fraser, for a while as a child. Though baptized Roman Catholic, he was raised Anglican and in his later life he returned to the Roman Catholic faith. In 1798, he began to study medicine with Sir James Fisher of Quebec. After studying for 4½ years he was granted a license to practice medicine on April 30, 1803. He was hired as a physician at Fort William, Ontario (now Thunder Bay), a fur-gathering post of the North West Company on Lake Superior; there he became a trader and mastered several Indian languages.
In 1814 he became a partner in the company. In 1816 McLoughlin was arrested for the murder of Robert Semple, the governor of the Red River Colony, after the Battle of Seven Oaks (1816), though it is often claimed he stood in proxy for some Indians who were blamed. He was tried on October 30, 1818, and the charges were dismissed. McLoughlin was instrumental in the negotiations leading to the North West Company's 1821 merger with the Hudson's Bay Company. He was promoted to the Lac la Pluie district temporarily shortly after the merger.
Read more about this topic: John McLoughlin
Famous quotes containing the words childhood and, childhood, early and/or career:
“[Children] do not yet lie to themselves and therefore have not entered upon that important tacit agreement which marks admission into the adult world, to wit, that I will respect your lies if you will agree to let mine alone. That unwritten contract is one of the clear dividing lines between the world of childhood and the world of adulthood.”
—Leontine Young (20th century)
“When we raise our children, we relive our childhood. Forgotten memories, painful and pleasurable, rise to the surface.... So each of us thinks, almost daily, of how our own childhood compares with our children’s, and of what our children’s future will hold.”
—Richard Louv (20th century)
“The secret of heaven is kept from age to age. No imprudent, no sociable angel ever dropt an early syllable to answer the longings of saints, the fears of mortals. We should have listened on our knees to any favorite, who, by stricter obedience, had brought his thoughts into parallelism with the celestial currents, and could hint to human ears the scenery and circumstance of the newly parted soul.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The problem, thus, is not whether or not women are to combine marriage and motherhood with work or career but how they are to do so—concomitantly in a two-role continuous pattern or sequentially in a pattern involving job or career discontinuities.”
—Jessie Bernard (20th century)