Ranald MacDonald was born on February 3, 1824, of an Indian mother, Princess Sunday, at the old Hudson's Bay Company post, Fort George (formerly Astoria), where his father, Archibald McDonald (sic), was a chief trader in the company's service.
After some home schooling of a kind he was sent in 1834 across the Rocky Mountains to the Red River Missionary School at Fort Garry (now Winnipeg, Canada), where he spent five years. He was there apprenticed as a bank clerk to Edward Ermatinger, an early banker of St. Thomas, Ontario.
Tiring of the tedium of bank book-keeping, in 1841, at the age of seventeen, MacDonald threw down his pen, vacated his bank stool, and ran away to sea. After seven years of adventure, he carried out a long-cherished and carefully planned purpose to push his way into Japan, from whose shores all foreigners were at the time rigorously excluded. He reached the Japan Sea on the American whaler, Plymouth.
Leaving ship in a boat prepared for the purpose, he capsized it when near shore and entered the country under the guise of a shipwrecked sailor. His strategy availed him little, for he was confined in a bamboo prison cage during most of his stay in the Flowery Kingdom. The awakening interest of the Japanese in world affairs caused the Japanese officials secretly to utilize MacDonald as a teacher of English to government interpreters.
A few years later, some of his pupils were the Japanese interpreters in the negotiations between Commodore Perry and the Mikado's representatives that resulted in the treaty of 1854 between the United States and Japan. In 1849, MacDonald with a number of other shipwrecked American sailors was rescued from further imprisonment in Japan and taken to Macao, China, by Commodore James Glynn of the American sloop-of-war, Preble.
Later wanderings and adventures took him to the Australian goldfields, and into British Columbia during the Cariboo "gold rush" of the sixties, where with his brother he ran a supply store for prospectors at Douglas, Harrison Lake, and a ferry across Fraser River to Lilloet. Finally, in his declining years, he settled on a homestead adjoining the site of the old trading post, Fort Colville, Stevens County, Washington.
Ranald died near Toroda P. O. , Ferry County, Washington, poor and unknown; his remains were buried in an unmarked grave in an old Indian cemetery on Kettle River in that neighborhood.
Ranald MacDonald was the first native English-speaker to teach the English language in Japan, including educating Einosuke Moriyama, one of the chief interpreters to handle the negotiations between Commodore Perry and the Tokugawa Shogunate. His Japan exploit marks him as one of the adventurous spirits of his century. There are memorials to Ranald MacDonald in Rishiri Island and in Nagasaki, as well as in his birthplace, where Fort Astoria used to stand in Astoria, Oregon.
The social prejudice against his mixed blood, together with his secret resentment thereof, probably prevented him from taking his proper position in the world.
MacDonald never married.
3 February 1790 – 15 January 1853
1844 - 1918
28 September 1841 - 3 April 1891
3 February 1828 - 10 February 1868
27 November 1846 - 27 August 1867
3 February 1834 - 16 May 1860
