“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 18th 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 19th century (see the Grand Portage blog on April
4th, 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 19th 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 49th
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) |
