Ranald MacDonald’s Grave State Park Heritage Site – state parks quest #66

Five things

#1. At less than an acre in size, this is the smallest state park in Washington, but Ranald MacDonald did not live a small life. He was born in 1824 at Fort Astoria near the mouth of the Columbia River, the son of Scottish fur trader Archibald McDonald and Koale’xoa/Princess Raven, a daughter of lower Chinook leader Concomly, His mother died shortly after his birth. When the Hudson’s Bay Company built Fort Vancouver as its headquarters in 1825, McDonald moved there, eventually remarrying a Métis-French woman named Jane Klyne. When Ranald was 10 years old, the McDonalds moved to the Red River Colony in what’s now Winnipeg, Manitoba. By all accounts an attentive and doting mother to all of her children, Jane educated Ranald and the 12 children she and Archibald had together. For reasons unknown, Ranald and his half-siblings all used the spelling “MacDonald,” while Archibald used “McDonald.”

#2. Bored with working as a bank clerk (a stable career that pleased his father), in 1845 Ranald signed on with the whaling ship Plymouth and set off for foreign climes. Off the coast of Hokkaido in 1848, he convinced the captain to let him set sail toward Japan in a small boat. It’s not clear what sparked Ranald’s interest in Japan. Scholars have speculated that he may have been looking for a racial connection between the Japanese and Pacific Northwest native tribes, of which he was a member by birth.

#3. Heading toward Japan, MacDonald feigned a shipwreck. An Ainu (indigenous Japanese) fisherman rescued him off Rishiri Island. At the time Japan was mostly closed to foreigners, and Ranald was arrested and sent to Nagasaki, where he was tried and imprisoned for illegal entry. Nagasaki was the only port in Japan allowed to trade with other countries, and then only with the Dutch. Confined there for 10 months, MacDonald tried to learn Japanese and taught English to 14 fellow prisoners, all of them samurai, thus becoming the first English teacher in Japan. It’s not the typical path to international travel, for sure. One of the students, Einosuke Moriyama, was “dearest to me in every regard, and most esteemed, and ever loved,” MacDonald later wrote. In April 1849, MacDonald was remitted along with more than a dozen other sailors, and on his release returned to Canada.

#4. But years after MacDonald left Japan, his students used what they had learned. At the time Japan had a firm isolationist policy called sokaku, which had been in place from 1603 and lasted until 1868. Sokaku kept the Japanese people in Japan and kept foreigners out, and limited trade and foreign relations as a response to concerns about the potential impact of Christianity as well as unrestricted trade and piracy. When Commodore Perry arrived in Japan in 1853 and demanded the Shogunate end the country’s isolation, Moriyama used the English he’d learned from MacDonald to act as an interpreter. Thus MacDonald’s students helped open Japan to the outside world, ushering in an era of modernization.

#5. Back in Canada, MacDonald’s wanderlust kicked in again. Through the 1850s and 1860s, he worked the gold fields in Australia, sold supplies to miners and prospectors during the Cariboo gold rush in British Columbia, joined a prospecting expedition on Vancouver Island, and looked for gold around Fort Colvile and the Kettle River, not far from where he is buried. MacDonald biographer Frederik Schodt writes that the adventurer “genuinely enjoyed people [and] had a rare ability to attract people from broad walks of life, putting them at ease and endearing himself to them.” MacDonald spent the last years of his life at Fort Colville, near Kettle Falls, Washington. In 1894, while visiting his niece, Jenny Lynch, in Toroda, just across the river from the cemetery, MacDonald died. Allegedly his last words were, “Sayonara, my dear. Sayonara.” He was 70 years old. There are monuments to MacDonald at Fort Astoria, near the iconic column on the hill and in the town cemetery, as well as one on Rishiri Island and in Nagasaki.

Fast Facts about Ranald MacDonald Grave State Park Heritage Site

• <1-acre day-use park, open year-round
• one picnic table, interpretive markers
• Discover Pass required, $10 daily or, for a very reasonable $30, purchase an annual pass
• Note: you won’t find this park on the State Parks website, but it is indeed a state park and open to the public.
• It’s hard to find the park. These directions from Ferry County government will help.

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Land Acknowledgment

Ranald MacDonald State Park Heritage Site occupies the traditional and unceded lands of the Syilx Okanogan peoples, who have lived and travelled here since time immemorial.

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