Fort Vancouver National Historic Site at Vancouver, Washington

“Green Douglas firs where the waters cut through.

Down her wild mountains and canyons she flew.

Canadian Northwest to the ocean so blue,

Roll on, Columbia, roll on!

CHORUS: Roll on, Columbia, roll on.

Roll on, Columbia, roll on.

Your power is turning our darkness to dawn,

Roll on, Columbia, roll on.”

Words by Woody Guthrie, music based on "Goodnight, Irene" (Huddie Ledbetter and John Lomax)

The Columbia River rolls on -- as Woody Guthrie has noted. It dominates the landscape and nurtures the Native American civilizations which have lived in the region for thousands of years. It provides routes of transportation, sustenance, and spirituality to the peoples of the region. It is truly one of the mightiest rivers in the United States.

Europeans first entered the Pacific Northwest by ship in the late 18^th century. Then the new United States of America made an entry with the Corps of Discovery’s expedition. Led by Lewis and Clark (see previous blog), they explored the river in 1805-06. Once these explorers published their reports of the rich wildlife they found, particularly of the beaver and other fur pelts, trappers moved into the region. By the 1820s, the English Hudson Bay Company (HBC) established its presence on the Columbia River and eventually claimed 700,000 square miles in the American West, from British Columbia to Spanish California and from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. The HBC oversaw the “Columbian Department” with its two dozen forts and outposts and its 1,000 employees who gathered the abundant fur.

 

Walkway to Fort Vancouver with garden on left (Photo by Hunner)

Beaver reigned supreme in the fashions of Europe in the first half of the 19^th century (see the Grand Portage blog on April 4^th, 2016). To satisfy the lust for beaver, the HBC established its headquarters on the banks of the mighty Columbia River. Accessible by sea and servicing the inland water ways, Ft. Vancouver prospered for a while and then in an unintended way, opened up the region to the United States in the middle of the 19^th century.

Chief Factor Dr. John McLoughlin's House (Photo by Hunner)

The main administrator at Fort Vancouver, called the Chief Factor, managed the far flung activities of HBC’s Columbian Department. Perhaps HBC’s most important administrator was Dr. John McLoughlin who started with them as a physician and eventually became the Factor at Fort Vancouver. The site’s NPS brochure notes that his job “was to keep peace with the Indians, squeeze Americans out of the market, and firmly establish the British claim to all of Oregon.” However, the compassionate McLoughlin could not turn away the ragged Oregon Trail emigrants who straggled into his Fort and provided aid to these destitute travelers. As Fort volunteer Ron Cronin mentioned: McLoughlin “served the seeds of the removal of the British from here.” After his time as Factor, McLoughlin moved to Oregon City and became a U.S. citizen. The waves of U.S. farmers and merchants washed over both the HBC and the region’s Native Americans, neither who could do little to prevent American occupation and then ownership.

Volunteer Ron Cronin attends at the company store (Photo by Hunner)

As the first permanent European settlement in the Northwest, Ft. Vancouver was a lively mixture of many peoples, and the vigorous trade in furs drove many at the Fort. It was a diverse group of peoples—thirty-five different Native American tribes, Scottish, English, Americans, even a large contingent of Hawaiian Islanders. The multicultural country that the U.S. is today was mirrored in the collection of peoples who resided at Fort Vancouver in the 1840s. These different peoples used a language called Chinook Trade jargon to communicate. NPS volunteer Betty Meeks, who was stationed at the Surgeon’s House when I visited, spoke some phrases for me. She said: “Muck a muck some chug” translated into “Drink some water.”

Inside the palisades lived the British residents including the Factor, clerks, storekeepers, blacksmiths, and physicians. In the Village outside of the fort’s walls, up to 300 people of mixed ethnicities resided. An interesting contingent in the Village was the Sandwich (or Hawaiian) Islanders, who followed the British to Fort Vancouver because of their contact with HBC through their Pacific Ocean trading ships.

Houses in the Village with the Fort in the background (Photo by Hunner)

The Fort not only collected the furs from the vast hinterlands of the Columbian Department, it also provisioned the trappers and the sailors who worked for the HBC. Two ovens manned by four bakers cooked biscuits and hard tack for the fort’s 200 to 600 inhabitants as well as for the trappers, traders, and ship crews all involved with gathering and transporting the fur bounty from the Northwest to England.

Volunteer Dennis Torresdal hammers iron into an ax head
(Photo by Hunner)

Volunteer John Prutman demonstrates how a beaver trap works
(Photo by Hunner)

More Fort volunteers manned the blacksmith shop. John Prutsman kept up a lively patter as Dennis Torresdal fashioned an iron ax head taken red hot out of the coal fires. the smell of coal burning permeated parts of Fort Vancouver. Dennis quietly hammered and pumped the bellows while front man John demonstrated a beaver trap to a lady from east Texas. Other essential shops included the carpenter works which made items for the Fort, its ships, and the fur trade. The master volunteers at Fort Vancouver (as at most of the NPS sites I visited) bring life to these places. Without them, visitors like me would be less engaged and the NPS less meaningful.

An extensive garden outside the Fort’s walls (run today by volunteers) made the post self-sufficient. Fences surrounded the “English garden in the Wilderness” which grew peas, oats, barley, wheat, beans, squash, artichokes, apples, pears, peaches, plums, cherries, and other food. For the Fort’s residents as well as the 1,000 or so employees of the HBC in the Northwest, the garden provided welcome variety to the daily meal. Accounts by missionary Henry Spalding of this lush garden helped establish the agricultural attraction of Oregon. He praised the garden, writing about the “five acres laid out in good order stored with almost every species of vegetables, fruit, trees and flowers.”[1] Today’s Park Rangers claim that an apple tree near the Village is from the HBC period, and that it was the first such fruit tree in a region now known for its apples.

Part of the recreated Garden at the Fort (Photo by Hunner)

The British gave up its claim to Oregon with the U.S./British treaty of 1846 which made the international boundary at the 49^th parallel. The HBC moved its headquarters to Victoria, British Columbia. The U.S. Army took over the fort then and in 1866, the old Fort Vancouver burned. Barracks, officers’ quarters, post administrative buildings, and an air field were eventually added. In fact, in World War I, Fort Vancouver had the largest spruce lumber mill in the country to build bi-planes for action in France. The Army transferred their ownership of Fort Vancouver to the NPS on Memorial Day 2012.

The NPS begun its amazing reconstruction of Fort Vancouver in 1953. As with all such structures operated by the NPS, and all such places this that I have seen on my travels, upkeep is a constant issue. at the time of my visit, contractors were replacing many of the log palisades of the perimeter walls as well as the main gate into the Fort. The backlog of the maintenance for all of the 400 plus sites that the NPS operates is estimated at $12 billion. We have a lot of differences in our nation, and that is healthy for a democracy. I suspect we could agree to fund this backlog to preserve the historic and natural wonders of our republic.

Ongoing maintenance of the log structures in Oregon weather is a must. Here some of the logs in the palisades are replaced. (Photo by Hunner)

Fort Vancouver National Historic Site encompasses the main themes of Driven by History —migration, commerce, exchange. A global economy established itself early on in North America-- at Santa Fe, at Jamestown, at Grand Portage, and even at the far reaches of the Pacific Northwest. The British at Fort Vancouver tried to challenge the growing dominance of the United States in the region, but ultimately, they had to retreat to the island of Victoria to manage the fur trade. Having opened up the Northwest to European activities, the HBC could not secure its British monopoly and left the region to the United States.

Fort Vancouver was dedicated on June 19, 1948 as a National Monument and on June 30, 1961 as a National Historic Site.

View from the southwest bastion of the interior of Fort Vancouver (Photo by Hunner)

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[1] Exhibit text at Fort Vancouver NHS.