US History/US History (Bureau Development Inc.)(1991).ISO/dp/0033/00330.txt

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$Pretitle{36}
$Title{Fort Vancouver
Chapter 3  Columbia:  The Great River of the West}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{US Department of the Interior}
$Affiliation{National Park Service}
$Subject{columbia
river
new
company
mcloughlin
north
fort
west
simpson
post}
$Volume{Handbook 113}
$Date{1981}
$Log{Hudson Bay - West*0033001.scf
Hudson Bay - East*0033002.scf
John McLoughlin*0033003.scf
}
Book:        Fort Vancouver
Author:      US Department of the Interior
Affiliation: National Park Service
Volume:      Handbook 113
Date:        1981

Chapter 3  Columbia:  The Great River of the West

     The first documented sightings by Europeans of the northwestern coast of
North America were made during the summer of 1741 by Russian mariners sailing
from Kamchatka, Siberia, under the command of Vitus Bering.  Forced by
circumstances to winter on a bleak island afterwards named for him, Bering and
many of his crew did not survive the trip.  But those who did brought back
reports of such treasures in sea otter pelts that fur traders at once began
pushing across the Bering Sea to the Aleutian Islands.  Learning of the
movement in the 1760's, Spanish officials in Mexico took alarm.  Would the
Russians' feverish activities lead in time to the rich silver mines of
northern Mexico?

     To strengthen Mexico's northern defenses Spanish officials in 1769
dispatched missionary expeditions northward to occupy California.  Shortly
thereafter naval expeditions sailed north to take possession, for Spain, of
every part of the west coast not yet occupied by the Russians.

     In 1774 one of those small ships, commanded by Juan Perez, worked its way
into Nootka Sound on the western coast of what became known as Vancouver
Island.  Although Perez did not land at Nootka, several Indians paddled out in
their huge wooden canoes to visit his ship.  One of them stole two silver
spoons from the officers' mess.

     Four years later Capt.  James Cook of England, an even greater navigator
than George Vancouver, put into the same sound during his futile search for a
usable Northwest Passage around the top of North America.  During his stay in
Nootka, Cook noticed two Spanish spoons dangling from a cord around an
Indian's neck.  Dutifully he reported the fact in his journal.

     Not just silver, it turned out, but any kind of metal was in demand among
the Nootka Indians.  They traded priceless furs for buttons hardware, kettles,
candlesticks tin cups, or whatever else the English sailors offered.

     In time news of this bonanza reached English merchants in Asia and
started a new rush of fur traders to the Northwest Coast.  Spain reacted
angrily.  Insisting that visits by Spanish mariners had made the area part of
the Spanish empire - Perez's spoons were the proof - Don Estevan Martinez in
1789 seized a small English trading post at Nootka and two English vessels
operating nearby.  Strangely, Martinez did not bother a pair of American
vessels that had recently arrived on the scene, one commanded by Robert Gray,
the other by John Kendrick.

     The incident nearly ballooned into a full-scale war.  England began
mobilizing her armies, but before the shooting began, Spain backed down and
admitted that she did not own the Northwest.  That triumph gained, England
sent George Vancouver into the Pacific to recover property appropriated by
Martinez and see to it that Spain abandoned military garrisons erected in the
area after Martinez' first acts of aggression.  His diplomatic missions
completed, Vancouver was to conduct a thorough survey of the Pacific coast
from San Diego to Cooks Inlet, Alaska.

     Vancouver worked meticulously.  He circled and mapped the island that now
bears his name, and after threading the magnificent waterways of Puget Sound,
he claimed that area for Great Britain.  But without the help of one of
America's first traders on the Northwest Coast, Robert Gray, he would have
missed the surf-hidden mouth of the West Coast's mightiest river.

     After visiting Nootka in 1789, Gray had sailed his ship, the Columbia
Rediviva, across the Pacific to China and then around the world to Boston. In
1792 he returned to the Pacific Northwest on another trading venture.  At dawn
on May 11, while searching for harbors that other traders had not yet found,
he risked crossing a long sandbar frothing with surf.  The effort put him into
a huge estuary fed by a majestic stream.  He named his discovery after his
ship -- "Columbia's River" (the possessive form soon disappeared) and traded
for nine days before recrossing the bar and continuing north to the Spanish
garrison at Nootka.

     A few weeks later Vancouver appeared.  On his way north the English
captain had noticed furious breakers crashing over a distant bar but had paid
no attention until he heard of Gray's discovery.  Then he decided to
investigate.

     When he reached the site, the breakers were still furious.  Unwilling to
risk his flagship Discovery to the maelstrom, he sent in a smaller vessel, the
Chatham, commanded by Lt. William Broughton.  Awed by the estuary and
convinced that Gray had not ventured out of it into the river proper,
Broughton ordered his sailors to lower the Chatham 's long boat.  For several
days he and his men rowed upstream.  Somewhere above the mouth of the Wamette
River they halted.  There, within full view of a snowcapped peak that
Broughton named Mt. Hood after an admiral of the British navy, he laid claim
to the area for Great Britain.  Like Vancouver's action in Puget Sound,
Broughton's claim was perfunctory, but both claims might help Britain gain a
point or two in the coming territorial contest with the United States.

The River Rovers

     Sizable rivers drew sharp attention from early fur traders for two
reasons.  First, they furnished the only adequate means of reaching the
natural resources of the continent's interior.  Secondly, there was always the
hope that the upper reaches of rivers flowing into the Atlantic might
interlock with the headwaters of Pacific-bound streams in such a way that the
movement of lightweight articles, including furs, between the coasts and hence
to and from the Orient could be quickened.

     By the time Robert Gray discovered the Columbia River, fur traders of the
North West Company of Montreal were working farther and farther west, driving
frail birchbark canoes laden with trade goods deep into the Athabasca country
of northern Alberta.  The effort was so staggering and so expensive that
certain leading Nor'Westers began arguing that it would be cheaper to send
goods by ship around South America to the mouth of a Pacific river that would
provide a canoe route to posts in the interior.

     Did such a river exist?  Could it be discovered by land rather than by
sea?  The first determined efforts to find out were launched by an icy-
blooded Scot named Alexander Mackenzie.  Striking northwest in 1789 down the
river that now bears his name, he reached, to his dismay, the Arctic Ocean and
not the Pacific.  In 1793, he and nine voyageurs tried again.  Using a
specially constructed canoe 8 meters (26 feet) long, they struggled from Lake
Athabasca up the howling canyons of the east-flowing Peace River into New
Caledonia (now British Columbia).  After crossing a low divide they reached an
upper tributary of a stream later named the Fraser.  The Fraser did indeed run
into the Pacific, but its canyons proved unnavigable by canoe.  Frightened and
lost, Mackenzie's voyageurs cached their battered craft beside the river and
continued westward on foot and then in a purchased Indian dugout canoe until
they reached a saltwater fjord known today as Dean Channel.  The Pacific!
Mixing vermillion with grease, the party's leader daubed on a granite cliff,
"Alexander Mackenzie, from Canada by land, the twenty-second of July, one
thousand seven hundred and ninety-three."

     If Mackenzie had reached the spot a few weeks earlier, he might have seen
explorers Vancouver and Broughton cautiously inching their vessels into and
out of the same rock-girt sound.  Although Mackenzie's journey had been an
epic of endurance, his route was too rugged to be used for moving supplies
into the interior.  So other Nor'Westers kept looking for better ways.
Finally, early in the 1800's David Thompson found the key by crossing the
Rockies to the headwaters of the Columbia.  He was a shade too late, however.
The United States had acquired much of the Trans-Mississippi West by means of
the Louisiana Purchase, and Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark had
led an exploratory party across the Continental Divide to the Pacific in 1804.

     Lewis and Clark's account of their trip described, among other things,
the wealth in beaver that abounded in the streams of the Rocky Mountains. This
information caught the eye of the richest man in America, John Jacob Astor,
who decided to build a huge central depot named Astoria at the mouth of the
Columbia River and from there create an extensive fur-trading empire. But in
1813, while Britain and the United States were at war, the British seized
Astoria.  Events seemed to point to British control of the Oregon Country.
But jingoists in each country wanted their nation to assert ownership over the
entire stretch of land from California to Alaska. Professional diplomats
realized, however, that each nation had established legitimate claims in the
area and that the territory should be divided equitably between them.  But
what line was equitable?

     Americans argued for the 49th parallel, the boundary from the Lake of the
Woods in northern Minnesota westward as far as the Rockies.  The British
objected.  Such a line would give the United States control of Puget Sound.
Beyond question those magnificent inlets had been explored first by George
Vancouver.  The English insisted, therefore, that a more reasonable frontier,
and one that would give them control of Puget Sound, would be the Columbia
River from the 49th parallel to the ocean.

     Months of wrangling failed to break the impasse.  Finally, on October 20,
1818, the weary diplomats postponed the ultimate decision through a compromise
known as the Convention of Joint Occupancy.  This agreement stated that
vessels and citizens of both nations were to have equal rights of trade and
settlement throughout the country during the next ten years, after which the
problem would be reviewed.

     Obviously the country whose citizens showed themselves most active in
Oregon during that decade would have a strong talking point when debate
resumed.  Realizing this, Astor tried to prevail on the United States
government to send troops to the Columbia to help him reestablish superiority
over the North West Company.  Washington declined, and except for a few
American trading ships that plied the coast, the entire Oregon country was
firmly in British hands.  Freedom from Astor's competition brought scant
relief to the Nor'Westers, however.  East of the Rockies their firm was locked
in a death struggle with the older Hudson's Bay Company.

     Since there were no Hudson's Bay Company people in the Pacific Northwest
during that period, the area was free from strife.  But the Nor'Westers in
charge of the new posts west of the mountains felt they had been forgotten by
leaders whose interests centered on the eastern struggle.  Affairs on the
Columbia drifted aimlessly; morale sagged; expenses soared.

Wilderness Strategies

     By 1819 the destructive struggle for the control of the Canadian fur
trade had brought both the North West and the Hudson's Bay companies to the
edge of bankruptcy.  Cracking first under the strain, the Nor'Westers sent out
peace feelers.  Their London based rivals responded favorably, and in 1821 the
erstwhile antagonists merged.

     As a reward for the peacemaking, the British parliament gave the new
concern a 21-year license as the sole legal fur trading company in British
North America.  The only major exception to the monopoly concerned the Oregon
country, where all rights of settlement and commerce had to be shared with
citizens of the United States.

     Although the new monopoly was described as a coalition of equals, victory
really belonged to the Hudson's Bay Company.  Its name was retained for the
new organization.  Its governor and board of directors, commonly called the
Honorable Committee, held ultimate authority over policy.  The chief
contribution of the North West Company was the remarkable system of operations
that had enabled its men to reach the Pacific within a quarter of a century of
the company's formation.

     The galvanizing force of the Nor'Westers' setup had been the opportunity
it gave talented traders to rise out of the ranks of salaried clerks and
became "wintering partners" in charge of major fur-producing districts.
Because wintering partners shared in the company's annual profits, they were
aggressive about adding to those profits.  And the new coalition retained the
outlines of this system.

     For ease in administration, the huge domain of the new coalition was
divided into Southern and Northern departments.  Although not 'northern" in
terms of geography, the region west of the Rockies was attached to the latter
department.  In turn this area was divided into two districts, New Caledonia,
present-day British Columbia, which was deemed to be rich in furs, and the
Columbia, known to be a potential source of trouble.

     At first the Northern and Southern Departments each had its own resident
governor and its own council of field officers.  The council was another
carryover from the North West Company.  Every summer until 1803 that firm's
wintering partners and its Montreal agents had met at their imposing
headquarters post, Grand Portage, on the northwestern shore of Lake Superior
and had voted on all matters pertaining to their trade.  In 1803, after
boundary surveys had shown that Grand Portage lay inside the United States, a
new and even more imposing headquarters post had been constructed a short
distance northward, on Canadian soil, at the Kaministiquia.  At the new post
the picturesque rendezvous and council of traders and agents continued.  The
retention of the council in the administrative setup of the coalition led the
Nor'Westers, who held numerical superiority in the gatherings, to hope that
they could control the firm.  That dream went awry because of the office of
resident governor.

     The position of field governor had been created by the Hudson's Bay
Company at its founding in 1670.  It was the governor's duty to make sure that
the wishes of the Honorable Committee were carried out in the field.  So far
as his underlings were concerned, he ruled supreme, but he could be dismissed
by the committee.

     These functions remained largely unchanged with the addition of a second
governor following the coalition, except that now both executives worked
through the councils of the two departments.  They presided over meetings,
acted as the voice of the Honorable Committee during discussions, and relayed
the councils' recommendations to London - where the company heads were
entitled to veto anything.

     The governors were chosen for executive and administrative ability rather
than for detailed knowledge of the fur trade.  The first head of the Southern
Department was William Williams, a former ship captain for the East India
Company; of the Northern Department, George Simpson, once a junior officer in
a firm dealing in sugar.  All this was surprising to the Nor'Westers and
increased their determination to show the governors where power lay.

     George Simpson taught them better.  He possessed, besides limitless
energy, an uncanny instinct for manipulating men.  He knew when to flatter and
when to threaten; when to lead and when to stand aside.  Though he began
gently, he gradually reduced his council to little more than a rubber stamp.
When Williams retired in 1826, the committee decided that two heads were
unnecessary, and Simpson became governor-in-chief of all Hudson's Bay Company
operations in North America.  True, he was answerable to the London Committee,
but the restraints were seldom visible to the traders.  To them he was "The
Little Emperor," master of their destinies and concocter of plans of infinite
complexity.

     When Simpson and the Honorable Committee began studying the balance
sheets of the Columbia Department, they were discouraged.  The remote
district, which once had seemed so profitable a prize of war, had for some
years been maintained by the North West Company at a loss.  Several causes
were responsible - unsatisfactory marketing, lack of leadership, the uncertain
temper of the Indians and too narrow a range of activities.

     On absorbing Astoria in 1813, the Nor'Westers had been faced with the
problem of disposing of 15,000 or so pelts that were gathered each spring from
the adjacent valleys and from the five posts operating on the upper river and
its tributaries.  At first the Montreal firm had sold these pelts in China
under license from the monopolistic East India Company and then had invested
the proceeds in Oriental goods for resale in Europe.  When this arrangement
proved unsatisfactory, the Nor'Westers hired a Boston firm to conduct the
Asian trade for them, for Americans were not subject to the restrictions
imposed on British subjects by the East India Company.  The Bostonians,
however, exacted a 25 percent commission and again profits were disappointing.

     Another problem, and one that grated on George Simpson's nerves, was a
lack of firm policy lines.  During the struggle between the old companies, no
close check had been kept on the men in charge of the Columbia River posts.
Feeling left out of things, they had grown lax.  Instead of feeding themselves
and their men on garden produce and livestock raised at their establishments
they had imported food from England and had purchased hundreds of horses from
the Indians - for eating, not riding.  Too much of the merchandise intended
for the Indian trade leaked out to relatives of the employees' red wives, and
too many unsalable items for instance, ostrich plumes and coats of armor were
carried on the inventories.  Leaders also failed to experiment with new
methods.

     Were the problems insuperable?  Should the Columbia be abandoned?  Unable
during the early years of his governorship to visit the district, Simpson sent
men he trusted to investigate for him.  Their reports stirred his hopes.  In
particular his imagination was caught by the wealth in furs that roving bands
of trappers and traders the so-called Snake brigades obtained each year in the
rugged land embraced by modern Idaho.  There indeed was a field worth looking
into - one that of itself might justify a reorganization of the entire
Columbia district.

     A new twist was brought to the Columbia problem by developments in the
international field.  In an effort to aid the Russian American Fur Company,
whose headquarters were at Sitka, Alaska, the czar had issued, in September
1821 a "ukase" (decree) declaring that no foreign ships would be allowed
within 160 kilometers (100 miles) of the coast above 51 degrees north
latitude.  This was far south of the 540 40' line then considered to be the
northern boundary of "Oregon."  At once the British and American governments
challenged the Russian claim, with the Americans adding that the continents of
the New World were "no longer subjects for any new European colonial
establishments", a pronouncement later incorporated into the Monroe Doctrine.
With this opposition, the Russians withdrew north of 54 degrees 40 minutes.

     During the course of the negotiations with Russia American and British
diplomats resumed debates about the, border between their own nations west of
the Rockies.  Because the officials of the Hudson's Bay Company were in close
touch with the British Foreign Office, the company soon learned that there was
little chance of England's holding anything south of the Columbia River and
that only firm effort would keep the Americans form gaining a line along the
49th parallel.  Either boundary would deprive the Hudson's Bay Company of the
Snake River country of Fort George, which lay on the south bank of the
Columbia, and of unrestricted use of the Columbia River as a highway for
reaching New Caledonia from the Pacific.

     The problem was complicated by alarming developments inside the United
States, In 1822, two Missourians, Andrew Henry and William Ashley, started up
the Missouri River with a big force of tough American mountain men. Newspaper
reports reaching England said the trappers intended to cross the Rocky
Mountains.  Simultaneously, a Virginia Congressman, Dr, John Floyd, introduced
into the U.S. Congress a bill that would require the President to occupy the
waters of the Columbia River, extinguish Indian titles there, and give
immigrants generous allotments of land.

     Although the North West Company and its successor, the reorganized
Hudson's Bay Company, had continued occupying Fort George on the south bank of
the Columbia's estuary, the post, which had been seized during the War of
1812, legally belonged to Astor and would have to be turned over to any party
of Americans demanding it on his behalf.  The company could avoid suffering
this humiliation in front of the Indians by abandoning the post in favor of a
new fort on the north bank.  This new establishment would serve, moreover, to
strengthen British claims to the empire between the Columbia river and the
49th parallel.

     Should the new post become the headquarters fort for all the company
activities west of the Rockies?  The Honorable Committee thought not.
Somewhere north of the 49th parallel, the directors reasoned, there must be
another river - the Fraser, perhaps that would provide a shorter, less
vulnerable route into New Caledonia.  As soon as that route was developed, the
main depot should be placed near its mouth.  Accordingly the fort projected
for the north bank of the Columbia should be built with the understanding that
if a better approach to New Caledonia were found, the Columbia River post
would be reduced to secondary importance.

     Inasmuch as American trappers were already on the move, there was no time
to lose.  The Honorable Committee ordered Simpson to abandon his plans to
visit England to wed his fiancee and travel instead to the Columbia, either to
abandon the area or to launch as many of the proposed projects as seemed
feasible, He should also take with him a chief factor capable of handling
whatever evolved.

     His choice, confirmed by the council of the Northern Department in July
1824, fell on a known rebel and former Nor'Wester, Dr. John McLoughlin
(pronounced McLocklin), a white-haired giant 39 years old.  On hearing of the
appointment, some men felt that McLoughlin was being exiled so that he could
not stir up trouble in the reorganized company.  This is unlikely.  Simpson
attached too much importance to the Columbia district to use it as a dumping
ground, If the area were to be held, its head would have to possess many
talents, originality in carrying out directives, decisiveness in
administration, experience in handling Indians, firmness in meeting
competition, and an ability to be diplomatic without weakness in case of
conflict with American officials.  In John McLoughlin, Simpson expected to
find all these qualities, plus rebelliousness.

[See Hudson Bay - West: Map (West) showing the Hudson's Bay Company's
operations in North America with special emphasis on the Oregon Country. The
red type labels posts run by the company.]

[See Hudson Bay - East: Map (East) showing the Hudson's Bay Company's
operations in North America with special emphasis on the Oregon Country. The
red type labels posts run by the company.]

Field General for the Northwest

     Circumstances gave John McLoughlin a complex character scarred by
contradictions.  Sometime before 1750 his paternal grandfather, an Irish
Catholic also named John McLoughlin, had settled in the predominantly French
village of Riviere du Loup beside the St. Lawrence 193 kilometers (120 miles)
northeast of Quebec.  There grandson John was born October 19, 1784.

[See John McLoughlin: John McLoughlin, now honored as the "Father of Oregon".]

     Though the family became small landholders, they were poor.  But they had
pretensions.  They claimed to be members of the MacLoughlins of Clan Owen, one
of whose precursors was the first Christian king of Ireland.  Awareness of
those origins, as he supposed them to be, helped inspire John McLoughlin's
driving ambition.  It may have accounted, too, for his restiveness under
authority and for his regal bearing.  It certainly led him later to have the
McLoughlin coat of arms, a lion rampant between naked sword blades, engraved
on his table silver, an incongruous note, surely, for the rough surroundings
of frontier Oregon, where he lived out his closing days.

     Religious differences played a role, too.  His mother, who was part
French and part Scot, incurred her father's wrath by marrying a poor Catholic
farmer.  Her father punished her by refusing to finance her children's
education in Quebec unless they were raised as Protestants.  The split
troubled John McLoughlin, who was devout by nature.  The choice of a career
also bothered him.  At first he wanted to be a doctor.  In 1798, when he was
14, he left common school and apprenticed himself to a Quebec physician.  He
did well enough so that in May 1803, aged 18, he was able to pass the
relatively simple examination of the times and win a license "to Practice in
Surgery and Pharmacy or as an Apothecary."

     As soon as he received his license, young McLoughlin joined the North
West Company as an assistant to the regular physician.  He was stationed at
Fort William, the company's distribution center for supplies destined for the
interior and the collection point for furs gathered from as far away as the
Rocky Mountains.  Summer was the meeting time for the voyageurs who moved the
big freight canoes through the network of rivers and lakes, for the clerks and
wintering partners who supervised the far-flung activities, and for the
Montreal agents who imported from abroad the cloth, iron utensils, guns,
trinkets, and rum used in the trade and then handled the selling of the furs.
Many of these men brought their Indian mates and halfbreed children with them,
and those who had accumulated aches and pains during the winter were eager to
consult the post doctor and his assistant, the only medical men in a million
square kilometers of wilderness.

     After the throngs had returned to their wintering grounds, there was no
more doctoring to do, and McLoughlin became a trader.  Of necessity he stayed
fairly close to Lake Superior, for he had to be on hand when his patients
began arriving the following summer.  Still, during the next few seasons he
roamed by canoe, dog sled, and snowshoes over an area almost the size of New
England and developed into a fine trader.

     His appearance helped.  In a land where most Indians and French Canadians
were short, he stood 193 centimeters (6 feet, 4 inches) tall.  He was heavily
boned.  The brows above his light blue eyes were massive.  His blond hair was
thick, his complexion ruddy.  Although he could be animated when his interest
was challenged - many acquaintances described him as a stimulating
conversationalist - his expression was habitually grave and he moved with a
slow dignity that impressed the Indians.  All his life he looked older than he
was.

     He liked trading but fretted over finances.  He felt he was not paid as
much as he had been promised when accepting the job.  The orderly flow of the
trade and hence its profits were disrupted first by the border fighting that
accompanied the War of 1812 and then by the growing competition with the
Hudson's Bay Company.  Frequently he talked of seeking surer ground somewhere
else, but he never did.  Salary boosts and finally, in 1814, a wintering
partnership softened each upsurge of discontent.  He needed money to help
finance his younger brother David's medical education in Scotland.

     Finally, there was his own family.  About 1810 he married au facon du
nord - that is, without benefit of clergy, there being no clergy about - a
woman nine years older than himself, Marguerite Wadin McKay.  Daughter of a
pioneer Swiss trader and an Indian generally presumed to be a Cree, Marguerite
had been married to and then abandoned by wintering partner Alexander McKay,
who took along their son, Thomas.  Marguerite brought McLoughlin three step-
daughters all were married before he left for the Columbia - and the new pair
added four children of their own, two girls and two boys.

     Many traders gave scant heed to their part Indian offspring, but not
McLoughlin.  He sent the three eldest children, as soon as they were old
enough, to Montreal or Quebec to be educated.  The two boys went on, with
indifferent success, to additional schooling in Europe.  The youngest
daughter, Eloisa, stayed with her parents in Oregon.  McLoughlin was equally
devoted to their mother, insisting always that she be accorded full deference
in spite of the Indian blood that to some whites, especially in Oregon, was a
mark of inferiority.  In return she brought him strength in times of sorrow,
and when his hot temper exploded, she better than anyone else could calm him.

     As a wintering partner, McLoughlin was placed in charge of posts that
were supply centers as well as trading forts - first Rainy Lake on the border
between today's Minnesota and Ontario and then Fort William, now Thunder Bay,
itself.  Under his sharp scrutiny dozens of workers tended fields and
livestock, built canoes, maintained buildings enough to have constituted a
small town, and dealt with the Indians who trooped in to trade.  He also had
to be prepared for the big canoe brigades of hungry men that swarmed through
his domain each year.  Although he was answerable for results at the annual
meeting of partners at Fort William, to the workers beneath he was
unchallengeable.  His commitment to the fur trade was total, and yet he never
abandoned the title he liked best, Doctor McLoughlin.

     When open warfare broke out between his firm and the Hudson's Bay
Company, McLoughlin helped lead a brigade of fighters against the Hudson's Bay
settlement south of Lake Winnipeg.  Before he arrived on the scene, however,
the metis, the halfbreed buffalo hunters of the North West Company, fell on
the enemy and massacred 21.

     Arrested as an accomplice in the murders, McLoughlin was sent with
several other partners for trial to York, now Toronto.  Along the way a storm
in Lake Superior swamped the overloaded canoe in which he was being
transported.  Nine men drowned.  McLoughlin was dragged unconscious from the
water and revived by his anxious companions.  Later in the winter he fell ill
at a roadside inn and again almost perished.  Family legend avers that the
experiences turned his heavy shock of hair snow white, although he was only 32
years old.

     The jury found him not guilty.  By then he had had enough of violence and
dwindling profits, and when the company's Montreal agents insisted on
continuing the conflict, he led the wintering partners in a revolt designed to
reach an accommodation with the Hudson's Bay Company.  Discovering what he was
up to, the Montreal agents hurried to London after him and managed to relegate
him to a minor role in the negotiations that followed.

     In January 1821 he was named one of the chief factors of the new company
and assigned to his old post at Rainy Lake.  While there, he carried on a
brisk competition with American fur traders pushing north across the unmarked
boundary.  His success in defeating their efforts while maintaining strict
economy was one reason that prompted Simpson to choose him, in 1824, as the
new head of the Columbia district, where more competition from Americans was
certain to come.

     At that time, his two oldest children were in school in Lower Canada. He
took the others, Eloisa, aged six, David, three, and their mother from Rainy
Lake to Norway House at the northern end of Lake Winnipeg.  While they waited
there, he continued to York Factory to attend the council meeting.  On July
27, 1824, he started back to Norway House with 14 voyageurs manning two
8-meter (26 foot) "north canoes" destined for the Rockies, Simpson planned to
follow on August 16 in a light express canoe with chief trader John McMillan.

     The trip was difficult, with long hours against strong currents under
clouds of mosquitoes and voracious black flies.  Portages were arduous with
mud in some places and knee-deep ashes warm from a forest fire in one place.
To McLoughlin's chagrin, Simpson overtook him well east of the mountains.

     From there on the parties traveled together, using pack horses to carry
their equipment and food over awesome Athabasca Pass.  On the far side of the
mountains, they picked up boats prepared for them, in an extraordinary
coincidence, by Marguerite's tall, bold, moody son, Tom McKay.  From there on
the Columbia's impetuous current swept them toward the distant coast at a
furious clip of 160 kilometers (100 miles) a day.

     No longer was there talk of abandoning the district, a possibility the
committee had instructed Simpson to consider.  Instead he was aboil with plans
for change - plans that McLoughlin would have to carry out with fewer men and
at less expense than had ever prevailed in the remote district.  It was not
going to be easy.

Creating a Defensive Outpost

     After the hurrying boats crossed what is now the boundary between
Washington and British Columbia, the mountains diminished to rolling hills and
the forests to scattered groves.  Late in the afternoon of October 27, eight
days after McLoughlin's 40th birthday, the travelers came upon the point where
the Spokane River flows into the Columbia and found Peter Skene Ogden with 30
voyageurs.

     Ogden's men had just returned from the mouth of the river with several
boatloads of supplies that had been brought by ship around Cape Horn to Fort
George.  The vessel had also carried dispatches advising of Simpson's approach
overland, and so Ogden had decided to wait for the party in case the governor
wished to make a side trip to Spokan (no "e") House - the principal post of a
subdistrict that reached from the Columbia to the Rockies of western Montana.
The fort lay about 16 kilometers (10 miles) northwest of the present city of
Spokane.

     Simpson wanted to go, so the next day Ogden led him, McLoughlin, and a
few others on an 80-kilometer (50-mile) horseback ride to the post - a trip,
Simpson wrote in his journal, that left McLoughlin sore and stiff.  The
purpose of the journey was to let the men become acquainted with each other,
for burly Peter Ogden was a key figure in Simpson's expanding plans for the
famed Snake brigade of wandering trappers.

     On inventing the brigade, Donald McKenzie of the North West Company had
used Fort Nez Perce, much farther down the Columbia, as his take-off point.
But the Nez Perce Indians were unfriendly to the traders, and the first leg of
the journey to the Idaho country lay through country devoid of beaver. After
the merger of the companies, the new managers shifted the jumping-off point to
Flathead Post.

     The experiment was proving unsatisfactory.  The trappers stayed unruly,
and Blackfeet Indians striking across the low passes of the Rockies proved
deadly.  One season in such a field was enough for the leaders assigned to the
brigades.  As one put it, "When that Cuntree will see me agane the Beaver will
have Gould Skins."  It was Simpson's hope that Ogden would provide the
stability the brigades needed if they were to succeed not only in holding off
the advancing Americans but also in exploring the entire belt of country
between the Columbia-Snake river line and Mexican California.

     Simpson attached great importance to the explorations.  The maps of the
time all showed a big lake deep in the interior -- our Great Salt Lake.
Assuming that so big a body of water naturally had an outlet, cartographers
invented a river, the Buenaventura, that flowed from the lake to the Pacific.
In addition, the huge map of the West prepared by William Clark of the Lewis
and Clark expedition suggested that the Willamette River, which joins the
Columbia at to day's Portland, had its source near the same lake.

     If the Buenaventura and Willamette rivers ran as the maps said they did,
then either the Americans or the British could use them for supplying their
brigades in the interior.  Simpson intended for the Hudson's Bay Company to
occupy the strategic streams first, To that end he directed Ogden to journey
straightway to Flathead Post, meet the year's brigade as it returned from the
Snake River, and turn it back south into the teeth of winter.  Ogden was to
trap as he went, of course, and eventually emerge, if possible, on the lower
Columbia.  Meanwhile still another brigade, this one led by Finan Macdonald
and McLoughlin's stepson, Tom McKay, was to strike south through central
Oregon in the hope of intercepting the Buenaventura near the coast.  If all
worked as scheduled, the grim labor of using the Columbia as a supply road
would be ended, the Americans would be thwarted on a wide arc from the sea to
the Rockies, and Great Britain would have a powerful bargaining lever to use
when boundary negotiations were resumed in anticipation of the ending, in
1828, of the Convention of Joint Occupancy.

     New Caledonia presented as serious a supply problem in Simpson's mind as
did the Snake Country.  Again the Columbia was the traditional highway.  Men
from the northern interior journeyed each year to Fort George, piled what they
needed into wooden bateaux - boats up to 12 meters (40 feet) long - and toiled
up the great river to a dreary post at the mouth of a stream called Okanogan.
There the goods were loaded onto 250 or more horses and taken north through
present British Columbia to Fort Alexandria, safely above the Fraser River
canyons, There the travelers returned to the water for the final leg of their
journey to Fort St. James on Stuart Lake, headquarters post of New Caledonia,
It was an arduous procedure.  Moving furs out of the district and supplies
back in consumed four months and Simpson wanted to cut the time and costs.

     When his and McLoughlin's parties reached Fort Okanogan on their descent
of the Columbia, out came the maps again.  Obviously, Simpson growled, the
Fraser River furnished a much shorter route to New Caledonia than did the
Columbia-Okanogon trail.  Moreover, the Fraser emptied into the Pacific north
of any boundary line the Americans were likely to obtain and thus would not be
subject to their harassments.  True, the discoverer of the river, Simon
Fraser, had reported in 1808 that its lower canyons were unnavigable, but no
one had checked.  Simpson intended that a party should do so while he was on
the Columbia.  If results turned out as anticipated, the great headquarters
post of the West would be built on the Fraser, and the posts along the
Columbia would become of secondary importance.

     Then on they went, talking endlessly of what McLoughlin would have to do
to bring these plans to fruition while building a new fort on the north bank
of the river and expanding agricultural production with a reduced work force.
They ran some of the rapids in the majestic gorge where the Columbia breaks
through the Cascade Mountains and portaged around others, their guns ready
because of the reputation of local Indians.  At twilight on November 8, 1824,
they saw, in a small clearing amidst dripping evergreens, Fort George, and
their 4,700-kilometer (2,900-mile) trip was over.

     Within days McLoughlin and the chief factor he was replacing, Alexander
Kennedy, were being paddled upstream through intermittent rain in search of a
site for the new north-bank post.  Just above the island-screened mouth of the
Willamette, at a place already named Jolie Prairie by passing voyageurs, they
found an opening in the forests about 5 kilometers (3 miles) long and 1.5
kilometers (1 mile) wide.  A low bluff backed by fir trees marked the top of
the gently rising slopes.

     The view from the bluff was magnificent; tree-dotted meadows brightened
by two small lakes, the broad river with massed forest beyond, and rising to
the southeast the stupendous snow cone of Mt. Hood.  What McLoughlin noticed
most, however, was the ample pasturage the place afforded for livestock and
the ease with which the rich loam could be broken for wheat, potatoes, and
garden vegetables.  Moreover, a post on the top of the bluff could be easily
defended against Indians, an advantage that compensated in his mind for the
inconvenience of having to haul supplies from the river's edge.

     Although Fort Vancouver, the new post that Simpson authorized, was
smaller than Fort George, McLoughlin's building of it went at snail's pace.
Heavy rains caused frequent interruptions and few men were available, for
Simpson sent off 42 hands through Puget Sound to explore the lower Fraser,
Other men had to stay at Fort George to carry on the usual trade with the
Chinook Indians, who moved in and out of the Columbia's broad estuary in
magnificent canoes, each hollowed from the trunk of a single monstrous tree.

     Even so, McLoughlin by March had outlined the new post with a stockade of
4-meter (13-foot) pickets and had erected inside the enclosure two warehouses
for holding merchandise currently stored at Fort George.  The transfer was
laborious - oar-power for dragging two flat-bottomed scows 120 kilometers (74
miles) upstream to Jolie Prairie.  Included in the loads were two 18-pounder
cannons, 31 cattle, 17 pigs, and a few work horses.

     Simpson was exultant.  Although ice had stopped his explorers 97
kilometers (60 miles) above the Fraser's mouth, Indians reported that the
canyons ahead were "not barred by dangerous rapids or falls."  Accordingly,
just before he started back east he told McLoughlin that if London approved,
the Columbia's new factor should begin work on a preliminary Fraser River
depot the next year.

     This did not mean that Fort Vancouver was to be neglected.  Until
navigation on the Fraser River had been thoroughly tested, the Columbia would
remain the nerve center of the Company's activities west of the Rocky
Mountains, and Vancouver would be its chief base for fending off Americans
seeking to penetrate the Northwest either by land or by sea.

     The amount of work was staggering.  The first problem was to placate the
coastal Indians.  Angered at the abandonment of Fort George, they threatened
to close the Columbia to travel and had to be calmed with an adroit mixture of
sternness and diplomacy - matters that sorely delayed work on the new fort and
the planting of fields.  Meanwhile, whenever time allowed, McLoughlin
journeyed upstream to study the supply problems of the inland posts and of the
brigades by which Simpson set much store.  The supply ship William and Anti,
too, presented a problem.  McLoughlin had planned to sail north on her as far
as Alaska to investigate maritime fur trade possibilities.  The ship needed
such extensive repairs that McLoughlin had to cancel the trip and, after the
vessel was seaworthy again, entrust the work to a subordinate.  It was an
unfortunate delay.  The ship's captain refused to enter risky looking coves
where Indians waited to barter pelts and because McLoughlin's understudy had
no authority to force diligence, the belated journey produced little
information.

     Still, there was progress.  Careful soundings of the river, the first
ever taken, showed that it was possible for seagoing vessels of 200 tons or so
to ascend as far as Fort Vancouver, where cargoes could be unloaded without
intervening lightering.  The accomplishment was of prime importance in the
demanding tasks of forwarding supplies to inland posts.