The Last Voyage of Ronald McDonald
Son of an Astor Fur Company founder and grandson of Chief Comcomly, Ronald McDonald dies on the Colville Indian Reservation after a life of shipwreck, captivity, and frontier guiding.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
News has reached here of the death on the Colville Indian Reservation, where he had gone on a hunting trip, of Ronald McDonald, one of the noted characters of the Northwest. He was a son of Archibald McDonald, who founded Astoria for the Astor Fur Company. His mother was a daughter of old Chief Comcomly of the Chinook Indians, with whom McDonald negotiated a treaty. When young Ronald reached school age he was sent to Winnipeg and educated. Returning to the coast, he embarked in a trading vessel and was wrecked on the coast of Japan. He was taken prisoner, and for years was a servant of the mikado. He was rescued by the United States government and returned to the Northwest, where for years he was guide, trapper and hunter. Of recent years he had led a quiet and studious life. Scarcely a man in the Northwest had such a fund of adventurous reminiscences.
“Scarcely a man in the Northwest had such a fund of adventurous reminiscences.”
McDonald's story sits at the crossroads of the fur trade, Indigenous kinship, and Pacific exploration—histories that are often told separately. His death on the Colville reservation in 1894 also reminds us that these frontier biographies were still unfolding long after the famous expeditions.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.