Dr. McLoughlin "lived in impressive pomp," said Thomas Nelson Strong, "and all down the river the story of the stately halls and the wealth and magnificance of Fort Vancouver was told by Indian to Indian with bated breath." But all this outward magnificence that so impressed the natives, and the decorum that so impressed the visiting whites, were indeed not accompanied by much genuine culture. Fort Vancouver, it would rather definitely appear in confirmation of the old botanist, was a place that, in the character given to it by the Chief Factor, was not conspicuous for its soul. At morning and at evening, or in the serenity of a summer noon, Dr. McLoughlin could stand with his cane and look across the "swift-flowing Wauna," but any uplift that may have been given to his spirit by all the beauty encompassed in his gaze has not been told by himself or by others. The objective features of his life have been detailed over and over, but we do not know how he lived inside himself.
His own writings, on the basis of moods expressed, may be said to fall into three general classifications—instruction and controversy and command, explanation and alibi, and complaint; and these moods at least are sadly revelatory from the inside in paralleling the periods of his rise and fall.
The trappers as a whole, however, and different from their king, have left us a considerable body of literature, some of which is even of a subjective nature. Among them, of course, there were many good story tellers, modern Irvin Cobbs, whose stories unfortunately remained oral and unrecorded, so that we know about them but do not have them. There was
