There’s a famous phrase that goes “well-behaved women seldom make history,” but Meagan Huff isn’t entirely on board.
The assistant curator at Fort Vancouver National Historic Site spent Saturday afternoon talking to visitors about Marguerite and Eloisa McLoughlin, a mother and daughter who lived at the Hudson’s Bay Company fort. Huff’s pop-up display was part of a special program on women’s history at the fort on Saturday, the last day of Women’s History Month.
“They never stormed a barricade,” Huff said of the mother-daughter duo. “Sometimes, women have to be out of this mold to be revered, but they lived these full, fascinating lives that are worth talking about.”
The two ended up at the fort in 1824 after Marguerite McLoughlin’s first husband died, leaving her with four kids at Fort William in Ontario, Canada. She married John McLoughlin, and they came to Fort Vancouver around 1824. Eloisa McLoughlin was about 7 when they arrived at Fort Vancouver, and in her writing, she described growing up at the fort to be isolating. Males and females were separated. The women and girls ate in their own mess hall and weren’t allowed visitors, unless the visitors were women, which was rare, Huff said.
“We never saw anybody,” Eloisa McLoughlin wrote about her time at the fort, according to Huff.
When deciding on which women to honor for the event, Huff said she picked Marguerite and Eloisa McLoughlin because they are two of her favorites. Both women were widows and moved around with kids, with Eloisa McLoughlin leaving the fort after her first marriage and ending up in Alaska and later in San Francisco and Portland.
Huff’s display was in the white Chief Factor’s House, and featured pictures of both women, as well as a few items they owned that were donated to the park’s museum by relatives. She showed off needle cases, thimbles and bead containers all made from ivory or bone. There was also a bag Eloisa McLoughlin made with beading.
Another popular destination on Saturday was the trading post room at the fort, where volunteer Rosanne Petersen was dressed as a person of Native American and European decent, wearing a dress and some beaded jewelry. In the trading post, she discussed all the items people could stop in to trade or trade for, including blankets, fur skins and muskets.
She also talked to visitors about how trading between Native American tribes, and how women from one tribe could end up marrying someone from a different tribe, creating an alliance between the two and linking them.
When Petersen asked Brooke Fawcett, who was visiting the trading shop, how old she was, Brooke replied that she is 14.
“Oh, you’re marriageable age,” Petersen said. “They traded girls who were marriageable age, too.”
Fawcett’s mother, Alicia Fawcett, wrapped her arm around Brooke and laughed.
“I don’t think I’ll be trading her in,” Alicia Fawcett said. “She’s my only daughter.”
Petersen also told visitors about Native American women’s work at the fort.
“Native American women were crucial to the success of Fort Vancouver,” she said.
Other displays included volunteer Shelly Toews showing off the Barclay quarters, and talking to visitors about Maria Barclay, one of the founding mothers of Fort Vancouver in the 1840s. In 2017, one of her silk dresses was acquired by the fort and restored. The purple-and-copper plaid dress was on display in the Chief Factor’s House.
A portrait of Barclay and her son was hanging in their quarters, along with some toys and tea cups.
“You look at portraits of these smiling people in history, and think they just look so stiff and boring,” Huff said. “It’s fun to show visitors who they really were, and help them make connections to them.”
