Next year, in May, came Rae by boat to carry out the plans, and Birnie, the Scotch warder of the Columbia bars at old Astoria, as clerk, and Sinclair as trader, and McKay and Ermatinger by land as leaders of the inland brigades. Rae lands goods worth $10,000, and takes possession of a 1000 acre farm on the site of the modern San Francisco, and purchases a building worth $4,600 to house the goods. Eloise McLoughlin, Rae’s wife, does not come at once; and the Spaniards are a pleasure-loving people. Wines are used more than water, and the handsome Scotchman is no unwelcome visitor to the lavish homes of the proud Mexicans. What with wine and beautiful Spanish women as different from the Half-breed wives of the North as wine from water, and plotting and counter-plotting of revolutionists--did Rae lose his head? Who can tell? It would have needed a wise head to remain steady in an atmosphere so charged with political intrigue--intrigue which Rae had been appointed to watch. He certainly drank hard, and he may have cherished errant love, too, for when Eloise McLoughlin, his girl bride, came down from the Columbia River, high words were often heard between the two. American influence was waxing strong in San Francisco; and in his cups, Rae was wont to boast “that it had cost £75,000 to drive Yankee traders from the Columbia, and the Hudson’s Bay Company would drive them from California if it cost a million.” Came one of the sporadic revolutions. The revolutionists were partial to the English, hostile to the Americans. Rae furnished the rebels with arms. They were defeated. They had not paid for their arms. Rae found himself responsible for a loss of $15,000--some accounts say $30,000--to his Company. That he was in love with a Spanish woman may have been a baseless rumor; but if there were a shadow of truth in it, it must have furnished additional reason for discrediting him with his father-in-law--McLoughlin. January, the 19th, at eight A. M., Sinclair, the clerk, heard loud cries above the store. He dashed upstairs into Rae’s apartments to find him standing in the presence of Eloise McLoughlin with a pistol in his hand ready to kill himself. Sinclair knocked the weapon from his hand. A shot rang out. Rae had had another pistol and fell to the floor with his brains blown out. On a table near were the bottle of an opiate, which he had taken to deaden pain, and his will, written that very morning. His wife fainted. Absolutely nothing more is known of the tragedy than the facts I have set down here. It is a theme rather for the novelist than the historian. Simpson ordered the San Francisco post closed. Dugald McTavish came down in March of ’46 to close up affairs. The one-thousand-acre farm, which would have netted the Company more than all the furs of Oregon if they had held on to it till San Francisco grew to be a city, was relinquished without any compensation of which I could find a record. The store was sold for $5,000.