US History/US History (Bureau Development Inc.)(1991).ISO/dp/0033/00332.txt

Text File | 1990-12-23 | 51KB | 815 lines

$Unique_ID{USH00332}
$Pretitle{36}
$Title{Fort Vancouver
Chapter 5  Life at Fort Vancouver in the 1840's}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{US Department of the Interior}
$Affiliation{National Park Service}
$Subject{fort
company
oregon
mcloughlin
vancouver
american
columbia
indians
work
time}
$Volume{Handbook 113}
$Date{1981}
$Log{}
Book:        Fort Vancouver
Author:      US Department of the Interior
Affiliation: National Park Service
Volume:      Handbook 113
Date:        1981

Chapter 5  Life at Fort Vancouver in the 1840's

     During the 1840's the nationalistic phenomenon known as Oregon fever
burned steadily hotter in the United States.  One thermometer for gauging it
is the number of people it propelled West.

     Until 1840 the only Americans who put down roots in Oregon were
missionaries to the Indians and fur trappers left unemployed by the dying of
their trade.  Then, in 1841, the first farmers eager for new land undertook to
test the long trail - a small party of 18 men, four women, and nine children
who broke away from a California bound group and chose Oregon instead.

     In that same year, 1841, the question of American sovereignty over Oregon
assumed national importance.  In the words of one politician, "The idea that
the great country west of the Rocky Mountains is to remain under foreign
influence is inadmissible.  At about the same time, in a move of debatable
legality, under the Convention Of Joint Occupancy, the government appointed a
man named Elijah White as United States subagent to the Indians of the
Northwest.  A former Methodist missionary who had returned East after
quarreling with Jason Lee, White promptly began recruiting a party to
accompany him West.  A total of 114 agreed to join him.

     Simultaneously Senator Lewis Linn of Missouri presented Congress with
still another bill to organize the Territory of Oregon and give each person
who emigrated there 260 hectares (640 acres) of his own choosing.  The bill
did not pass that year, but more and more people, especially in the
Mississippi Valley, were growing convinced that a comparable one soon would.

     The gathering intensity produced the so-called Great Migration of 1843.
The best estimates indicate that 875 people - about 290 of them males capable
of bearing arms - took to the trail that year with well over 100 wagons and
perhaps 5,000 head of livestock. Earlier caravans abandoned their wheeled
vehicles for pack animals in the southern part of today's Idaho.  In 1843,
however, the party's guide missionary, Marcus Whitman, insisted that wagons
could be taken all the way through the gnarled sagebrush of the desert, over
the thickly forested Blue Mountains and down the rocky slopes to the Columbia.

     He was right, but only because a strong body of axmen and shovelers went
ahead to clear the way as far as the Columbia's fearful gorge, There, as the
chill rains of November swept across the boulder fretted river, some of the
wayfarers exchanged their vehicles for Indian canoes.  Others took their
hard-used wagons apart and loaded the pieces in bateaux.  Hardier Souls built
rafts tied the wagons onto the timbers and floated and lined these awkward
craft through the cascades.

     It was a dreadful ordeal, not without loss of life.  But it showed the
way and later migrants had less difficulty.  The next year 1,400 people went
to Oregon, In 1845 the figure soared to 3,000.  During 1846 a wagon road was
completed across the Cascade Mountains so that the gorge could be avoided.  By
the end of that year Oregon's white population stood close to 6,000, even
though hundreds of malcontents moved on to California.

     The immigrants who stayed in Oregon could not avoid the huge shadow of
Fort Vancouver.  Even the wet weather of the Northwest had helped increased
its air of power, because wood, particularly that of the stockade's deep-set
pickets, rotted quickly and sections of the wall had to be frequently
replaced.  During the rebuilding, the stockade kept being extended until the
fort embraced a rectangle 223 meters (731 feet) long by 98 (323) wide, an
enclosure of 2.2 hectares (5.4 acres).

     Within the walls social patterns were as rigidly stratified, it seemed to
American visitors, as if the place were a feudal bastion where impassable
gulfs separated the rank-and-file from the officers.  In British minds,
however, the fort's tight hierarchical organization was a guarantee that they
could maintain in the isolated wilderness the kind of order they had cherished
at home.  To them the American custom of voting about procedures and personnel
- the members of the immigrant trains, for example, elected and deposed their
captains by ballot - smacked of anarchy.  Or, as George Roberts put the
matter, with emphasis: at Fort Vancouver "there was no government from below."
Orders came from above and were meant to be obeyed without question.

     The dining hall that bisected the Big House epitomized the social
distinctions.  To the right were McLoughlin's quarters, to the left, James
Douglas's.  In the large room between, the gentlemen of the establishment
assembled three times a day for what was called the "public mess," although
the general public was by no means welcomed.  The long table could seat from
12 to 30 people at a time, depending on how many brigade leaders, chief
traders from outlying posts, clerks, ship captains, and important guests
happened to be on hand.  The white cloth that covered the boards - perhaps the
only white cloth in Oregon during the early 1840's - sparkled with silver and
fine glass and was lent color by partly filled wine decanters and Spode.

     Food was prepared in a separate kitchen that was connected to the rear of
the dining room by a covered passageway.  One of the fort's clerks was
responsible, as part of his daily chores, for drawing up the menus and
deciding on how dishes were to be prepared, boiled, roasted, or whatever.
Cooking was done by French Canadians and Hawaiians.  Fare was bountiful:
succulent soups thick with meat and vegetables, fowl, fish, produce from the
gardens and root cellars, puddings, pies, fruits, and cheese.  A specialty
that Narcissa Whitman, for one, never learned to relish was black pudding, a
concoction of blood, fat, and spiced pork stuffed into a gut.

     Wine was served at formal occasions.  McLoughlin sipped only enough to
put others at ease a sure indication that everyone watched him closely to
avoid breaches of etiquette.  American guests found the gentlemen of the fort
to be well informed and lively conversationalists.  Seniority was strictly
observed.  The lower one's rank, the farther from the head of the table he
sat.  Unless addressed with a direct question, the junior clerks at the far
end never ventured a remark.

     Influential Indians were often fed at a side table in a corner of the
hall.  Women, except for Mrs. McLoughlin occasionally, were not admitted.
They were served either in their own family apartments or, according to the
reminiscences of McLoughlin's daughter Eloisa, at a gathering of their own.
The American naval explorer, Lt. Charles Wilkes, whose expedition spent
several weeks in Oregon in 1841, found the exclusion inexplicable.  The women
Wilkes saw, he wrote crisply, "exhibited both propriety of behaviour and
modesty of deportment," and would have graced the board with their presence.
Clerk Thomas Lowe was still more outspoken.  On deciding to marry the part-
Indian daughter of trader James Birnie, he resigned from the company because,
he railed in a letter to a friend, "to mess at the public table myself, and
see the blackguard cook and steward neglect and treat the families in any way
they thought proper was not to my taste."

     The company would have preferred that none of its employees marry, for a
man without a family submitted more easily to being moved from post to post as
convenience dictated.  But, as McLoughlin once wrote, men will have women, and
attachments took place regardless of company wishes, often to be legalized
only after priests had reached the country.  True affection existed between
most of the couples.  Husbands frequently sent out orders for "eardrops,"
rings, and beads for their mates.  They liked to see their partners in
English-type dresses.  In most respects the women obliged, although Indians
clung to moccasins in preference to shoes, and halfbreeds had a tendency to
wear "gaiters," cloth leggings, richly ornamented with beads, that reached
from below the knees to the instep.  All of them disdained the sidesaddles
that proper white females were supposed to choose and instead rode astride.
Remarkably fine equestriennes they were, too, according to Lt. Henry J. Warre,
who investigated the military potentials of Fort Vancouver for the British
government in 1846.

     The wife of a company official did little housework.  Each morning the
cook or an assistant brought around hot water for her husband's washing and
shaving and brushed shoes and broadcloth coats.  Others of the kitchen staff
swept the bachelors' rooms.  Indians of both sexes detested housework and
could seldom be prevailed upon to do it.

     These little perquisites hardly added up to luxury.  The rooms in the
Bachelor's Range were small, without running water, and spartanly furnished
with a stool, a wooden-bottomed chair or two, a rough table, and a wooden bunk
bed piled high with blankets and covered with a deerskin spread.  Only the
finicky took the trouble to order special mattresses stuffed with the down of
wild geese.  Infestations of fleas were common.  Another drawback was the
likelihood of being turned out of one's room and forced to double up with
another disgruntled clerk to make space for visitors. Socializing took place
in a smoking room at one end of the Bachelor's Range.  Clay pipes were the
favorite medium.  Despite the blue haze of tobacco, the room was warm and
attractive, its walls hung with Indian paraphernalia. Women were accepted at
card parties.  And at the rare dances, several visitors remarked with
surprise, they showed they had quickly copied the dresses and manners of the
wives of missionaries and ship captains whom they encountered from time to
time.  Their husbands, too, helped teach them dance steps and party manners.

     During Fort Vancouver's early days the press of work was so great that
Sunday was the one day of rest - Sundays plus Christmas, New Year's, Good
Friday, and All Saints Day, the last a church feast observed each November 1.
By 1840, however, enough clerks had been sent to the Columbia that Friday also
became a day off.

     They made the most of the free time.  Hunting wild fowl was a favorite
sport at almost any season.  Horse races for sizable stakes absorbed attention
for days in advance and furnished hours of conversation afterwards.  In good
weather long rides by mixed parties of men and women were popular.  The more
spirited of the younger clerks often showed off by lassoing wild cattle, a
skill, one suspects, that was brought to Oregon by the California vaqueros who
occasionally accompanied shipments of livestock to the north.

     Horseback picnics, with the food being carried to the rendezvous by cart,
were eagerly anticipated.  Although James Douglas seemed stern and unbending
to many, he would sometimes load several children into a gig for an outing.
McLoughlin often let a favored youngster cling to the back of his saddle as he
made his inspection tours around the farms and mills.

     The founding of Oregon City near the falls of the Willamette widened
social horizons considerably.  According to Lieutenant Warre, company clerks
would sometimes use their Fridays to paddle up the river in canoes, dance
until exhausted, drink a little, and return through the, pre-dawn darkness in
time for work the next morning.

     The greatest stimulus to enjoyment was the arrival of the 18-gun HM
sloop-of-war Modeste, which was sent to the Columbia, in Simpson's words, to
show "British Subjects and Foreigners that we had protection to a certain
extent." The warship was stationed in the river near the company's docks for a
month in the summer of 1844 and from the end of November 1845 to May 1847. The
naval officers broke the monotony of the long stay with dinners and card
parties and at least one grand ball aboard ship.  Another famous ball was
given by the Modeste's captain, Thomas Baille, in the room he was allowed to
occupy in the fort, quarters that must have been stuffed to suffocation by the
dancers.  In addition, the younger officers of the ship put on plays under the
shade of a sailcloth awning stretched across the deck, the first theatrical
performance in the Northwest.  Titles were intriguing: Three Weeks of
Marriage, The Deuce was in Him, and so on.  The orchestra was made use of
violin, flute, and the harmonious bagpipes.  To all of this the gentlemen of
the fort responded as best they could with banquets, balls, and parties of
their own.

     Very few common laborers were quartered inside the stockade.  Most lived
in a straggle of huts built in irregular lines along a pair of roads that lay
beyond the fields to the west and southwest of the fort.  Different visitors
reported different numbers - from 30 to 60 houses.  The discrepancy may not
result entirely from careless reporting; all buildings in the fort complex,
from McLoughlin's house to the smallest outbuildings, decayed rapidly, and it
is likely that the workers' huts were constantly being pulled down and
rebuilt.  Nor did the number of shelters indicate the size of the work force,
for two or three families often crowded under the same roof.

     From a distance the village looked neat and orderly.  On a closer
inspection impressions changed.  Earthen floors and limited furniture
characterized most of the dwellings, partly because the Indian women and
halfbreeds preferred to sit on the ground rather than in chairs.  Cleanliness
was not notable, especially during the winter-rainy season when roads and the
courtyards of the fort were quagmires of mud.

     Employees had a tendency to segregate themselves by nationality, French-
Canadians and halfbreeds in one neighborhood, Hawaiians in another, Anglos in
a third.  Often a cluster of Indians would build shelters at the edge of the
nearby forest.  There were some common bonds, however.  French was the
principal language, fortified by the Chinook trade jargon that had developed
over the years to facilitate commerce between trading ships and Indians.
Another bond was matrimony; most of the women living in the village were from
nearby tribes.

     Although any man might be assigned to any task, those from the British
Isles generally acted as mechanics - coopers, tinsmiths, carpenters, millers,
boat builders, and the like.  Most memorable of the blacksmiths was William
Cannon, an American who had arrived on the coast in 1811 with the overland
party of Astorians.  Cannon supervised the five forges at the fort from 1825
until the company withdrew from the area in 1860.

     Iroquois Indians and French-Canadians served as boatmen and trappers.
Slim, graceful Hawaiians were expert swimmers.  They also were the backbone of
the lumbering crew at the sawmill eight kilometers (five miles) up the river;
they dexterously handled the ten yoke of oxen that hauled logs to the saws,
and they prepared and managed the rafts of lumber that were floated down the
Columbia to the fort's loading docks.

     Much of the farm work - plowing, carting manure, harvesting, thrashing,
potato digging, and fruit picking - was handled by French Canadians.  In 1838
McLoughlin added local Indians, including women, for the latter proved adept
at harvesting seeds for future crops.  He seems to have been inspired in part
by the work of missionaries Marcus Whitman and Henry Spalding, who were trying
to teach the value of work to Indians at their stations in the interior.  Like
them, McLoughlin insisted that the best way to civilize the natives was to
train them in Anglo-Saxon ways of thrift and industry.

     Religion was an important factor in Vancouver life.  As noted before,
company rules demanded Sunday services, with the chief factor at each main
post reading both Protestant and Roman Catholic services if no parson or
priest was available.  For years the dining hall served as a common meeting
place for both groups.  When Catholic priests arrived in 1838, they were
assigned an "old store" to use.  In the mid-1840's this inadequate structure
was replaced by a more commodious building outside the north stockade.
Meanwhile the dining room continued to house Church of England services.

     The Hawaiians, few of whom spoke English, posed a special problem.  To
meet their needs the company in 1844 brought from Hawaii a large, grave,
well-educated native known as Kanaka William.  Although William was not an
ordained minister, he was given a special chapel just inside the north gate.
There, in what was called the Owyhee Church, at a wage of 10 pounds a year, he
read scripture and urged temperance and chastity on a congregation of from 20
to 40 persons.

     For their dawn to dusk work the laborers were paid, on the average, 17
pounds a year.  They were given huts to live in and were provided with a
weekly ration of 3.6 kilograms (8 pounds) of potatoes and the same of salted
salmon. In the summer, before the new potato crop was ready to dig, their menu
was varied by an equivalent portion of peas and occasional bits of tallow.  On
the four annual holidays they were treated to regales, feasts of beef, flour,
and a quarter of a liter of rum per person.  Just before a brigade left for
the interior its people too were given a regale.  Otherwise the men had to buy
such luxuries as bread or tea at the company store.  Except at regales, liquor
was prohibited, at least on the rule books.

     Cloth from which the women made clothing for their families, cutlery, and
other household items were also available at the store.  Purchases were
charged against each worker's account.  Here again discrimination came into
play.  For their purchases, clerks and other officers were charged 33 1/2
percent more than invoice cost in London.  Workers and seamen paid a 50
percent advance.  Persons not connected with the company were charged double,
a matter of some grievance to American settlers when they found out about it.

     Many of the workers sought to ameliorate conditions by using slaves, who
not only performed household chores but also hunted and fished for additional
food.  Bondage was widely accepted among the Northwest tribes.  The Indians
obtained slaves by stealing or buying children, and it was the Indian wives of
the employees who introduced the captives into their new homes.

     London objected.  In 1833 Britain had abolished slavery throughout her
colonies, and the Honorable Committee of the Hudson's Bay Company could hardly
condone lawbreaking.  Yet efforts on the Columbia to free household slaves met
determined resistance.  If forced to get rid of their human possessions, the
workers' wives simply sent them to relatives in Indian villages, where their
lot was worse than before.  The slaves, moreover, had never learned to fend
for themselves and often preferred the security of servitude to the
uncertainty of freedom.  Now and then McLoughlin or Douglas had a chance to
rescue a rare runaway or to put a man to work in his spare time so that he
could earn enough blankets and trinkets to buy his freedom. In the main,
however, the antislavery law was ignored as being unenforceable.

     Another problem was the education of children at the fort.  Officers who
could afford to do so sent their sons to school in Canada or in England.  No
provision existed, however, for small boys, for daughters or for the children
of the lower ranks of employees.  An opportunity to improve matters appeared
in 1832, when the collapse of Nathaniel Wyeth's first expedition left some of
his men stranded beside the Columbia.  McLoughlin promptly hired one of the
Americans John Ball, to teach six young boys, including his own son David.
Ball soon quit, but was followed by another of Wyeth's men, Solomon Smith, and
then by a trained teacher, Cyrus Shepherd, who arrived in 1834 with
missionaries Jason and Daniel Lee.

     The number of pupils expanded sharply.  Girls and, evidently, some
workers' children were included on the roll.  Most engages, however, put their
offspring to work at an early age and saw little point to education.  Orphans
made up still another group in the schoolhouse, which at first was the store
that became the Catholic chapel and later the Owyhee church.  Several of these
waifs roamed the village.  When an employee left the country, he often
abandoned his family.  On returning to her tribe the forsaken wife also
Occasionally walked away from her children.  In other instances a wife would
run away with an Indian lover and leave the husband with children he was too
busy to care for.

     By the time the Whitmans reached Fort Vancouver in 1836 McLoughlin had
gathered up 18 of these derelicts and was using the school as a means of
occupying them.  He was particularly anxious that all youngsters learn
English.  Convinced that hymn singing would speed the process, he pressed
every visiting missionary to help for as long as possible as choir leader. He
liked to pop in on a class during lessons and pass out barley sugar as a
reward for proficiency.  He hung a leather badge, analogous to a dunce's cap,
around the neck of any who lapsed into French.  Marguerite McLoughlin liked to
help with the singing, even though she knew little English.

     Despite the McLoughlins' interest, all was not well in the Northwest's
first educational institution.  Many of the children lacked normal homes to
which to return.  For instance, consider clerk Francis Ermatinger.  He caught
his Indian wife in an affair with a man from her tribe, cut off the fellow's
ears with a hunting knife, for which he was severely reprimanded by
McLoughlin, and then turned the woman out of doors.  He sought the school as a
surrogate home for his small son Lawrence, but soon withdrew him and sent him
east to his brother.  His reason: although the children were fed well, they
were poorly supervised and developed dirty habits and scandalous morals.

     He may have had a point.  In 1839, teacher John Fisher Robinson was
caught taking sexual liberties with the young daughter of chief trader John
Work.  Douglas had Fisher tied to one of the cannon in front of the Big House
- this was during McLoughlin's furlough in England - summoned the entire
populace to watch, and flogged the culprit mercilessly.  The affair so shook
the fort that schooling apparently lapsed for a time and was not resumed until
1844, when George Robert's new English bride agreed to tutor the officers'
children for 5 pounds a year per pupil.

     Because customary penal institutions were unavailable, Parliament allowed
the company in all except flagrant cases to police itself as expediency
demanded.  To George Roberts at least, the program succeeded; he cited as
evidence the workers' deference and lack of sullenness as they lined up at the
main gate early each morning to receive their day's assignment.

     Many methods of securing obedience, some quite subtle, were employed. The
mingling of races that helped keep peace during the travels of the fur
brigades also helped prevent concerted resistance at the fort.  Another
deterrent, some people believed, was the extraordinary dignity of the
officers.  When the Spalding-Whitman party reached Fort Walla Walla on its
historic transcontinental journey, Narcissa's overwhelming impression of
trader Pierre Pambrun was his being, even in the wilderness, so "very much the
gentleman."

     All officers tried to convey this impression.  They customarily wore
white shirts and broadcloth suits.  When faced with long horseback rides, they
might switch to leather pants to save wear and tear on cloth ones, but they
always took along a tall beaver hat, protecting it from rain with a removable
oilcloth cover.  More impressively, neither McLoughlin nor Douglas, both of
them burdened with unusually hot tempers, used profane or vulgar language, and
they tried to impose that standard on all underlings.

     Despite the awe that such Olympian aloofness helped inspire among humble,
uneducated folk, there inevitably were breaches of discipline.  Clerks
received reprimands, which were forwarded to London and injured chances for
promotion, as in the case of Ermatinger's ear cutting.  Workers were sometimes
placed in irons and put in solitary confinement.  The fact that a small jail
was built inside the stockade during the early 1840's suggests that as the
fort grew, the need for such a place also increased.

     Lawbreakers apparently got what the factors thought they deserved.
Results testify to effectiveness.  Except for the murder of John McLoughlin,
Jr., no major upheaval caused by insubordination ever shook the vast
department.  For decades a mere handful of "gentlemen" ruled without police
aid over a large group of tough men who, physically at least, were quite
capable of taking over the entire establishment.

Crisis:  Conflict and Retreat

     The great English bastion beside the Columbia dominated the lives of the
incoming Americans to a greater extent than most of them had anticipated - or
than they liked when the extent of their dependence dawned on them.

     On leaving home many of the pioneers supposed, if they thought about the
matter at all, that American stores and warehouses would follow them
automatically into the Northwest, for that was what happened on successive
frontiers back east.  The development was laggard beside the distant Pacific,
however.  True, the Methodist mission maintained a poorly stocked general
store at its headquarters near today's Salem, and in 1842 and again in 1843
sea merchants brought small cargoes into the Willamette River.  The
merchandise and credit that these suppliers were able to offer were limited,
however, and so the burden of supplying the first bewildered migrants fell
upon Fort Vancouver.

     Douglas and McLoughlin held different opinions about how the pleas for
aid should be handled.  Douglas thought the newcomers should be given just
enough to let them survive.  Discouraged by the rainy season, they might then
drift on to California, as several of the party of 1842 had done.  McLoughlin,
by contrast, argued in favor of granting the sufferers, on credit, as much
seed, livestock, and equipment as the fort could spare.

     He was prompted in part by generosity.  But he was also practical.  He
feared that if he refused the requests, the migrants would seize by force what
they needed, perhaps burning down the log fort in the process.  But if they
were given the means for planting crops, they would peacefully grow enough
food for the influx that he believed would follow in 1844.  Accordingly he
extended to the newcomers unsecured credit amounting to 6,606 pounds, a figure
that shocked George Simpson.

     As matters developed, a large part of the debt was never repaid.  Still,
McLoughlin proved partly correct.  The men of '43 did grow bumper crops for
those who followed.  Meanwhile trading ships arrived with supplies.  As a
result many of the migrants of 1844 and 1845 bypassed Fort Vancouver in favor
of the new town, Oregon City, that was taking shape beside the falls of the
Willamette River.

     In the eyes of the Hudson's Bay Company the change had its drawbacks.
Many of the newcomers brought with them the searing anti-British, anti-
Catholic prejudices that swept the United States during those years.  Not
having experienced McLoughlin's fair treatment at Fort Vancouver, they looked
on the company as a heartless foreign corporation dominated by economic and
religious tyrants.

     When the wealthy firm opened a branch store at Oregon City, the
disgruntled owners of local outlets growled that the Hudson's Bay Company was
crushing American enterprise to reassert its monopolistic control.  Another
galling situation was the need to sell grain to the Company.  Wheat was early
Oregon's chief "money" Crop; warehouse certificates for it were accepted as
legal tender in the almost cashless society.  There were few buyers and fewer
vessels available for shipping the grain to market, however.  And so, in the
opinion of many farmers, the company deliberately underpaid them for crops and
then sold the purchases at an astronomical profit in Alaska and Hawaii. But
even more than this the jingoists among them resented the 260-hectare
(640-acre) claim that embraced Oregon City and the water rights at the falls.
Though McLoughlin insisted the property belonged to him by right of first
occupation, many Oregonians believed that he was acting as an illegal front
for the Hudson's Bay Company illegal because foreign Corporations could not
acquire land by preemption in the United States, and surely this area would
seem to be American.

     The problem of the townsite had come about because the easily harnessed
water power at Willamette Falls made the spot the most valuable piece of real
estate in early Oregon.  Simpson and McLoughlin had recognized its potential
in 1828, but circumstances had prevented development of the property.  Then in
1840 MCLoughlin had generously - carelessly, depending on one's point of view
- allowed a member of the Methodist mission to erect a house there.

     Presumably the building was to be devoted to the service of Indians who
congregated at the falls to fish.  Soon, however, the missionaries showed that
they intended to claim the property for Commercial purposes.  At that, Simpson
instructed MCLoughlin to assert the company's prior rights.  He probably did
not foresee how vigorously the chief factor would act.  Having learned from
the migrants of 1842 that Linn's bill concerning Oregon offered settlers 260
hectares (640 acres) each, McLoughlin hired a surveyor to measure off that
amount at the falls.  The lines, moreover, were to be laid out so as to
include not only the mill sites at the brink of the cataract, but also a
townsite, called Oregon City, between the riverbank and its bordering bluffs.

     To placate his Opponents McLoughlin gave away several lots for religious
and civic purposes.  The rest he offered for sale.  He built a sawmill 19
meters (63 feet) long and 13 meters (43 feet) wide, filled it with expensive
machinery, and then began work on a gristmill.  In 1844, when the Methodist
mission was disbanded, he spent several thousand dollars buying its Oregon
City properties, including lots he had given a few years earlier.

     He financed all this with company funds.  But because he suspected that
the claims of a foreign Corporation would not be respected by the pioneers, he
declared in public that the town and mill sites were his private property, Not
many people believed him.  In an effort to resolve the ambiguity he sent
Simpson in March 1845, 4,173 pounds in payment for the claims and
improvements, The letter that accompanied the drafts was incoherent, but
probably he meant to say that if the Company decided it could not hold the
property, he wanted to be able to step forward as the true owner.
Unfortunately, the vagueness left him open to future trouble.

     The Oregon City lands weren't the only ones in jeopardy.  The officers at
Fort Vancouver soon realized that as good land became scarce in the Willamette
Valley, latecomers might try to cross to the fertile regions north of the
Columbia.  They might even attempt to squat on company fields, again on the
grounds that foreign Corporations had no rights in American territory.

     Popular sentiment throughout the United States would support such
trespasses.  Patriots applauded loudly when President John Tyler told Congress
that American claims reached as far north as 54 degrees 40 minutes, the
southern tip of Alaska.  James K. Polk, campaigning for the Presidency during
the summer and fall of 1844, threatened to use force if necessary to attain
the same boundaries.  Such talk stiffened Britain's Once indifferent regard
for the Northwest, and the English press growled back in tones as belligerent
as those used in the United States.  As war talk swelled, Douglas and
MCLoughlin decided they had better see to the fort's defenses.

     The establishment was a more imposing aggregate of buildings than most of
the emigrants from the American Midwest had ever before encountered.  The
stockade of sharpened pickets was the only defense, however, and the men at
the fort suspected they were really quite vulnerable.

     A forest fire carelessly set by Indians in September 1844 brought the
problem acutely home.  Only a desperate effort checked the flames before they
swept across the stockade into the closely packed wooden buildings.  If an
accidental Conflagration could Create such threats, what might arson do?

     As a means of warding off such attempts Company workers erected during
the winter of 1844-45 an imposing three-story bastion of heavy timbers at the
northwest corner of the stockade, the direction, presumably, from which
attacks were likely to come.  The structure's two lower stories were loopholed
for rifles.  Its massive octagonal top story contained gun ports so that the
approaches to the stockade's western and northern walls could be swept, if
necessary, with shot from several small cannon.

     Once again appearances were deceptive.  Despite the bastion, Vancouver
was a fort only in name.  The French Canadians and the Hawaiians who
Constituted the bulk of its population were not oriented toward fighting,
whereas most of the American pioneers were experts with firearms.  Defense
accordingly had to depend mostly on bluff, as represented by the blockhouse,
plus quiet precautions and Cooperation with the Provisional Government that
the American settlers had formed in 1843 to handle civil affairs until
national jurisdiction was determined.

     To reduce the risk of loss through enemy action or looting, furs were
shipped as soon as they were collected to Fort Victoria, recently built by
James Douglas on Vancouver Island s southern end.  All merchandise except that
needed for current use was stored at the same place.  As a protection against
squatters, the fields around Fort Vancouver were divided into nine 260-
hectare (640-acre) claims and registered with the Provisional Government in
the names of nine company employees.

     This acceptance of the Provisional Government came reluctantly.  At first
McLoughlin, working through the Catholic priests in the area, had sought to
keep the valley's French Canadians from participating with the immigrants.
When it became evident, however, that the Canadians needed protection,
particularly in respect to land titles, he allowed them to accept the
government's jurisdiction with the proviso that the step should not prejudice
their rights as British Citizens.  In 1845 he and Douglas compromised still
further when they agreed to a limited extension of the Provisional
Government's powers to the north side of the Columbia.

     When the decision was made to accept the authority of the Provisional
Government, John McLoughlin was no longer in sole charge of the Columbia
district.  Although he did not learn of it until later, the chief factor had
been demoted, During the preceding months the governor and committee in London
had grown disenchanted with his work.  Reports that should have been devoted
to business affairs were filled with attacks on Simpson and demands for
justice in the matter of his son's murder.  The credits he had advanced to
immigrants and his expenditures on the Oregon City claim far exceeded amounts
the Committee thought were reasonable.  He had not closed the San Francisco
store as instructed; revenues in the Columbia district were dropping; the
Puget's Sound Agricultural Company was not meeting expectations.  Accordingly
the committee decided to end his special salary of 500 pounds a year as
manager of the agricultural firm and place the Columbia under the supervision
of a three-man board consisting of Peter Ogden, James Douglas, and McLoughlin.

     Word of the demotion reached McLoughlin in June 1845.  Shortly thereafter
came news of disaster in San Francisco.  He had not kept in close touch with
the post director there, his unstable son-in-law, William Rae.  Perhaps
missing the supervision he needed, or for whatever reasons, Rae took to
drinking.  He also furnished arms to what proved to be the losing side in one
of California's many revolutions, Fearing reprisals, Rae committed suicide,
and it became necessary to hurry a representative south to close the business
McLoughlin had been directed to end years earlier.

     The final blow was the company's acceptance of his offer to buy the
Oregon City claims.  Circumstances had changed radically even while the
muddled letter containing the proposal was on its way to England.  His salary
had been cut, and the animosity of many settlers toward any Briton holding so
valuable a piece of property in territory already deemed American had
increased markedly.  In view of these things he probably would have backed
away from the offer if he could have, But Simpson took the opportunity to
outmaneuver him.  He accepted the proposal and in effect forced McLoughlin to
resign from the company so that he would be free to manage the property that
in his own eyes he had been "tricked" into accepting.

     After a period of such deep depression that his friends worried about his
health, his pride reasserted itself.  He built a fine white house on the river
bank near the mills and moved into it with his wife and bereaved daughter in
January 1846.  As for retirement pay, the company treated him handsomely.  His
own business ventures succeeded well.  As soon as he could, he became an
American citizen, but hostility persisted.  In 1850, Oregon's first
territorial delegate to Congress, Samuel Thurston, succeeded in inserting into
a land bill a clause that deprived the "Father of Oregon" of his claim.  The
injustice was so flagrant that his neighbors protested on his behalf and he
was never actually turned out of his home.  In time his heirs obtained
redress.  But for himself there was constant struggle and sorrow, and when he
died September 3, 1857, it was with a bitter heart over the treatment accorded
him in both countries of which he had been a Citizen.

Disappearance and Reconstruction

     The outbreak of war with Mexico and liberalized British trade laws that
allowed American farmers to tap new markets in England led the United States
to back away from its extreme alternatives of '54 degrees 40 minutes or fight'
concerning Oregon.  In June 1846, Great Britain and the United States signed a
treaty establishing the 49th parallel as the boundary between the crest of the
Rockies and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, At the strait the line dipped south so
as to give England all Vancouver Island, where the Hudson's Bay Company's new
Fort Victoria was located.

     Partly because of some ambiguities in the treaty regarding British
property, the company decided to try selling its properties south of the 49th
parallel to the United States government.  Progress proved slow, however, and
during the years of uncertainty that followed, the men at Fort Vancouver were
forced to get along with their rambunctious neighbors as best they could.  At
first they did very well.  Although a writer in the Oregon Spectator spoke for
many would-be merchants when he decried the difficulties of competing with
"the monster Hudson's Bay Company," most observers agreed with the assessment
of the company's economic role made early in 1847 by Lt. Neil Howison of the
United States Navy.  Any "sudden withdrawal of the Company from Oregon,"
Howison predicted, "would be forcibly and disadvantageously felt throughout
the land."

     Nor was the firm's influence limited to economics.  Inland, in the
vicinity of the Whitman Mission beside the Walla Walla River, the Cayuse
Indians were developing an intense hatred toward the migrating Americans who
each fall poured through their lands.  The animosities peaked in 1847 when
measles picked up from a passing wagon train raged through the tribe like
wildfire.  Because the Cayuses had never developed a resistance to the
disease, dozens died.  Most sick whites recovered, however, and the Indians
believed they were being poisoned by Americans eager to take over their lands.

     On November 29 they retaliated by attacking the mission, where several
ill and weary travelers were resting.  They killed 13 persons, including
Marcus and Narcissa Whitman.  One man drowned trying to escape.  A total of 47
persons, 34 of them children, were taken captive.  Two of the latter, ill with
measles, died of exposure.

     A Hudson's Bay Company trader stationed nearby rushed word of the tragedy
to Fort Vancouver.  The men in charge of the post never hesitated. Although
the affair was essentially an American problem, they feared that the Oregon
settlers would send a punitive expedition against the Cayuses and that a
general war would result.  During a fight the captives might be slain and the
company's posts in the interior overrun.

     To prevent this Ogden and 16 men went upstream with $500 worth of shirts,
blankets, guns, ammunition, and tobacco to be used as ransom.  The Cayuse
chiefs surrendered the captives, even though Ogden said he would not take the
Indians' side in a quarrel with the Americans.  For these services the company
neither asked nor received payment.

     In time the Indians surrendered five men who they said were primarily
responsible for the massacre.  All five were hanged, and tempers quieted.

     A more important result of the massacre was the spur it gave to the
laggard U.S. Congress.  Because of debates concerning the extension of slavery
into lands recently acquired in the West, nothing had been done about
organizing territorial governments.  The massacre prompted the Oregon
Provisional Government to draw up still more petitions requesting American
jurisdiction and military aid.  An American mountainman named Joe Meek,
accompanied by a small party wearing the distinctive Scotch caps and red belts
of the Hudson's Bay Company, carried the documents overland in the dead of
winter.

     The upshot was a bill, passed in the summer of 1848, that created Oregon
Territory out of the lands won by treaty from Great Britain.  Joseph Lane, an
Indiana politician and veteran of the war with Mexico, was named territorial
governor; Meek was appointed federal marshal.

     The same petitions also served to speed the military's plans for the
Northwest.  In the fall of 1848 two companies of artillery boarded the steamer
Massachusetts in New York and sailed by way of Cape Horn and Honolulu to the
Columbia.  On May 13, 1849, six months after its departure from the East, the
Massachusetts docked beside Fort Vancouver's old salmon-curing house, and the
sea-weary soldiers marched to the top of a low bluff overlooking the stockades
and the river beyond.  A convenient fir was cleared of its branches, and a
14-year-old drummer boy shimmied to its top to put halyards in position.  The
Stars and Stripes went up, and Camp Columbia was declared in existence.  They
then marched down the slope and pitched their tents near the stockade.

     The choice of the spot for a military installation confirmed John
McLoughlin's wisdom in placing the Northwest's major fur trading post on the
site a quarter of a Century earlier: no other location served so well as a
center for far-flung, complex activities.  But there was irony in the timing
of the Army's arrival.  For almost simultaneously Douglas and John Work moved
the Hudson's Bay Company's administrative headquarters from Fort Vancouver to
Fort Victoria.  Thereafter Fort Vancouver functioned as the depot for a small
new unit called the Oregon District.  The Oregon District's first board of
managers consisted of Dugald McTavish and Peter Skene Ogden.

The pair got on well with the artillerymen, whose first job was to construct
quarters for themselves and for a regiment scheduled to march overland from
Missouri to Oregon during the summer of 1849.  The post managers allowed the
Army to place its buildings along the rim of the bluff, with the understanding
that the company was yielding none of its rights.  They rented to the soldiers
ten buildings outside the stockade.  The soldiers used the company's mill for
cutting timber, and the boards were rafted down the river to the company's
dock.

     The first building to go up was an 11-room, sharply peaked, shingle-
roofed log unit 27 meters (90 feet) long by 8 meters (25 feet) wide.  It was
to serve as district headquarters' office as well as provide living space for
officers.  Work was also begun on a hospital, mess halls, kitchens, a bake
house, and facilities for laundresses.

     Though Ogden helped the commanding officer, Capt.  Rufus Ingalls, hire
Indians as extra laborers, work progressed slowly.  In July one of the
companies of artillerymen moved on to Puget Sound to build Fort Steilacoom.
That same summer the California gold rush drained hundreds of men southward,
created acute supply shortages, and sent prices sky high.  Within months the
retail store at Fort Vancouver cleared 17,000 pounds.

     In the fall one-armed Col. W. W. Loring's soldiers reached Camp Columbia
by way of the overland trail.  Because barracks for the newcomers had not been
completed, many of the men had to be housed in rented quarters in Oregon City,
where their disorderly conduct offended local residents.  Deserters headed for
California had to be pursued and brought back under guard.

     When the rainy season ended, the regiment returned to the north side of
the Columbia.  There men who volunteered to help with the construction
received a bonus of one dollar a day.  By the spring of 1851 the rough work
was finished, though years passed before the lines of the timbers were
softened with weatherboarding and paint.  In the interim the name of the
installation was changed to Columbia Barracks.

     As the gold fever burned out, Oregonians who had joined the rush returned
home in search of more stable occupations.  About the same time, 1850,
Congress passed a Donation Land Law that confirmed titles issued by the
Provisional Government and promised, free of charge, 65 hectares (160 acres)
to each male citizen 21 or older, or 130 hectares (320 acres) to each married
couple who settled in Oregon between December 1850 and December 1853, a time
limit later extended to 1855.

     A small stampede developed.  In 1851 more immigrants traveled to Oregon
than to California, During those years several land seekers invaded the fields
claimed by the Hudson's Bay Company.  They appropriated outlying structures,
tore down fences, and sold hay from the company's meadows.  To check the
trespasses Colonel Loring laid out a military reservation six kilometers (4
miles) to the side - 4,143 hectares (10,240 acres) - and the name of the post
became Fort Vancouver Military Reservation.  For a while thereafter would-be
squatters were less obstreperous.

     By this time nine officers' houses, each with a wide veranda, ranged
along the bluff.  The original headquarters post stood exactly in the middle
of them.  It is now called the "Grant House" because local legend says that
one of its occupants during 1852-53 was Ulysses S. Grant, future general and
President of the United States, In front of the houses was a broad drive.
Farther down the slopes were barracks for enlisted men and a parade ground.
Beyond that was the stockaded Hudson's Bay post.  To the south-west of the
stockade were riverside structures and docks shared by two strange bedfellows
a U.S. Army regiment and traders of a private British commercial concern.

     The protection afforded by the Army did not last.  By 1853 enough persons
had crossed the Columbia so that they were able to set up the Territory of
Washington.  Clark County, Oregon Territory, became Clark County, Washington
Territory, and established as its county seat the village of Vancouver
pressing hard against the bounds of the military reserve.  The clamor for more
space reached such a pitch that the new commanding officer, Lt. Col. B.L.E.
Bonneville, was instructed to reduce the reserve to 260 hectares (640 acres).

     The next year Peter Ogden, who had shown an amiable ability to get along
with the Americans died.  In 1855 Indian wars swept the interior, Numbers of
troops poured through the post, commanded by anti-British officers unfamiliar
with the situation that had allowed an alien trading firm and a U.S. military
installation to exist peacefully side by side.  Despite repeated protests by
company officials, the new troopers began appropriating fields they wanted for
parade grounds and demolished such structures as stood in the way of their
projects.

     Ground cultivated by the company shrank from 495 to 27 hectares (1,200 to
66 acres), livestock from more than 5,000 animals to barely enough for
maintaining a work force of 14 men, all that remained of the 200 or more hands
of McLoughlin's day.  Deciding that it would be better to retire north of the
boundary "rather than to remain here on sufferance to be carved to pieces
according to arbitrary Caprice," the Company in 1860 loaded its valuables onto
the steamship Otter and departed.

     In 1863 the way was finally cleared for a commission of arbitration to
determine the worth of the possessory rights" of both the Hudson's Bay and
Puget's Sound Agricultural companies.  The sum awarded to the former was
$450,000; to the latter, $200,000.  By the time the payments were Completed in
1871, the last vestiges of the English post had disappeared.  The Army removed
several buildings, most of them already badly decayed.  In 1866 fire consumed
the rest.  Constant plowing of the area for crops, the Construction of
drainage ditches and a railroad embankment, and even Occasional artillery
practice obliterated the last traces of the foundation.

     Fort Vancouver, or Vancouver Barracks as it became, now meant only the
very neat row of treeshaded officers' houses along the bluff and the
installations that spread from there to the railroad, The old British fur-
trading post was gone.