Archeology and the Employees and Families of the Village

European fur traders arrived in the area now known as the Pacific Northwest of North America with an important goal in mind: to build alliances and relationships with indigenous groups so they could secure furs and other resources to sell at a profit. The Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) was just one of many enterprises that established this policy, creating a culture in which indigenous people became increasingly significant to the continuation of the British colonial system. The local indigenous groups of the Pacific Northwest became the main suppliers for Fort Vancouver, the headquarters and supply depot for HBC’s vast Columbia Department, but many other tribes were also employed (see the park’s brochure). The fur trade grew into a massive venture that involved people of diverse backgrounds from not only North America and Europe, but the Hawaiian Islands as well, culminating in the Pacific West’s largest colonial community preceding American expansion.

In 1821, the HBC merged with the North West Company. HBC Governor George Simpson recommended that fifteen Hawaiians be hired as crewmen. By 1824, the HBC employed thirty-five Hawaiians. That year, the HBC established the Fort Vancouver supply depot. Rebuilt in 1829 at a more convenient location, furs were trapped and traded by HBC employees at this fort and then loaded onto company ships and transported to London. The more the HBC expanded its operations, specifically in the agricultural sector, the more Hawaiians they employed. These men were soon referred to as “Kanakas,” which means human being in the Hawaiian language. The elite class, or “gentlemen” of the Fort lived and worked inside the stockade, while Hawaiians, French-Canadians, Métis, and other indigenous laborers worked outside the stockade wall under English and Scottish managers. Much of this workforce lived at the Fort, in the cluster of houses west of the Fort stockade known as the Company Village, which was eventually shortened to the Village. George Gibbs, an American who visited the Village in the 1850s, referred to it (perhaps in a derogatory manner) as “Kanaka Village” or “Kanaka Town.” However, the residents of the community simply called their home the Village because there was no need for any other name.

Village House #1, originally built around the 1830s, was reconstructed in 2006-2007 by the University of Oregon Field School. It was designed to evoke the style and scale of a typical employee residence that existed during the HBC era. NPS photo.

As furs became less desirable trade commodities, Fort Vancouver transitioned into the rising export business of agricultural production, resulting in a larger reliance on Hawaiian laborers who lived in the Village. Hawaiians eventually exceeded the number of French Canadians at Fort Vancouver.

The Village was a fur trade settlement comprised of diverse employees and their families. Population estimates for the Village vary considerably, but there were several hundred men, women, and children living there at its peak in the 1830s. The HBC approved of and even encouraged employees to marry into tribes for strategic advantages, resulting in colonial policies that tolerated interethnic marriages and the formation of mixed families. Because of this, several different Native ethnicities are described in the available church burial records, including members of tribes from the eastern US, like the Haudenosaunee. The HBC established a school in 1832 to accommodate the increasing number of families settling in the Village.

William R. Kaulehelehe and his wife, Mary Kaai, in an undated photograph. NPS photo.

Although extremely efficient as employees of the Company, much of the Hawaiian community at the Fort resisted early attempts to convert to Christianity. HBC policy demanded that efforts be made to missionize all Company employees, which included the Village families. Since the missionaries met with such little success, the Company eventually decided to recruit a Native Hawaiian clergyman to help facilitate religious conversion. In 1844, the HBC hired William R. Kaulehelehe, often called “Kanaka William,” to serve in this role and assist in the education of Hawaiian families at the fort. William preached in Owyhee Church inside the fort gate and was tasked with “keeping the Hawaiians in line” while also inculcating certain values and behaviors in the Village that the Company wanted the employees and their families to emulate.

All this was about to change, as incoming American settlers resented the Fort as a symbol of British power. The HBC set up stores along the Oregon Trail that sold goods to migrants, but the encroachment of the American government in the 1840s began the erasure of HBC employees. In 1846, the US-Canada boundary was settled and the Fort became US territory. The HBC administrative headquarters moved to Canada and the US Army established a post at Fort Vancouver in 1849. The Fort deteriorated as Village residents started abandoning their homes, and army teamsters purposefully knocked down vacant houses for sport. Some Hawaiians, like the Kalama family, permanently settled in the lower Columbia region. Others, like Frank Kanah, returned home to Hawaii.

The Americans hoped to disrupt the British colonial system and disperse the laborers affiliated with the fort. William did his best to hold the community together, officiating at religious services in the Owyhee Church until his congregation dwindled by the 1850s. But in 1855, William and his wife, Mary Kaai, were the only reported Hawaiians left at the Fort. Owyhee Church was demolished in 1858 and the Fort was decommissioned in 1860. On March 20, 1860, William and Mary Kaai watched as military personnel burned their house to the ground. They were allowed to briefly live in an old house at the Fort before relocating to Fort Victoria.

A trace of the Village map drawn by Richard Covington in the 1840s. NPS photo.

The Village is a locus for exploring colonial identity and change associated with the globalized fur trade. The material culture tells us about human use of space, investment in their houses, and ceramic usage. Most inhabitants of the Village were illiterate, providing an opportunity for archeological resources to augment and test the narratives built from the historical records of colonial elites.

As far as archeologists can tell, the HBC did not assist in the development of the Village structures, so employees likely constructed these homes for themselves and their families on their days off. The people built their houses in a smaller, rustic style compared to the larger dwellings and offices inside the Fort. These homes were often single-family households, but there is evidence to suggest that two or three families might live together in one house, or that female kin might live in the same house or group of adjacent houses. Archeological investigations have hinted at the class and cultural distinctions between the officers within the stockade and the employees outside it, suggesting the spatial layout reinforced a social hierarchy. The Village’s location, physically separated from the Fort by agricultural fields and gardens, served as a symbolic separation of the elite English, Scottish, and Canadian officers and the non-elite employees.

House 7 indicated on an 1851 sketch of the Village by A. B. Roberts. NPS photo.

Inside the Fort, buildings conformed to the French-Canadian architectural style that included pieux-en-terre (“pile in the ground”) and poteaux-sur-sole (“post on sill”) styles of foundation. However, the Village houses varied architecturally and high employee turnover led to new people occupying older houses. Families of this diverse community upgraded their homes to suit their individual needs and tastes with unique renovations that reflected their respective cultural backgrounds.

Houses 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 were identified archeologically based on the distribution of square nails, both hand-wrought and machine-cut, and associated “halos” of trash surrounding their locations. An unexpected richness of broken ceramic vessels lies in their halos, including tea wares such as teacups, saucers, slop bowls, and tea pots. Archeologists frequently find ceramics since they are so durable, but the recovery of large numbers of these wares shows surprising similarities to those found in elite household assemblages within the stockade, indicating Village households also acquired these expensive goods.

This hearth was uncovered during the House 7 excavation and is believed to be an outdoor cooking facility for the house residents. NPS photo.

The excavation of House 7 yielded a dense deposit of HBC artifacts found along the house floor. Besides architectural debris, such as nails and window glass, archeologists found personal items such as buttons, buckles, and mirror glass. Artifacts related to firearms were also found, including lead shot, a gun flint, and a percussion cap. The people who lived in House 7 traded in glass beads, or at least kept some, and smoked clay tobacco pipes, based on some of the fragments left behind. The House 7 residents also enjoyed a wide variety of ceramic wares, particularly bandedware, cottageware, mochaware, transfer-printed earthenware, and Chinese exported porcelain. A 70-cm-diameter hearth was identified and is likely an outdoor cooking facility, since macrobotanical food remains and calcined, or burnt, bones were found nearby. Archeologists uncovered Feature 135, a dog burial, wrapped in what appears to be the remains of a green fabric blanket.

This ceramic transfer-print vessel was found within the trash scatter of HBC artifacts associated with House 7. Its reconstruction is in progress. NPS photo.

Despite the employees’ low wages, an abundance of Staffordshire transfer-printed whiteware ceramics were present in the Village households. At this time, new technology and increased transportation capabilities in England resulted in a near worldwide dominance of Staffordshire potteries' shipments. These high-priced ceramic wares were shipped to HBC forts and were available to purchase from the Fort Vancouver Sale Shop, the only place where employees could use their credits. The laborers of the Village were never paid in cash, so they had no option to purchase cheaper goods somewhere else. Given that the average number of broken vessels per household had a greater economic value than the estimated yearly household income, a significant social value was placed on goods the community could not reasonably afford.

By acquiring and using English-made ceramic wares, the wives of the voyageurs, trappers, and craftsmen who lived in the Village were probably reinforcing their social standing in an ever-"whitening" society. The purchase of certain ceramics might have been an attempt by the women of the Village households to train their children in the proper etiquette of an English tea ceremony, a practice of the fur trade elite that was clearly also an important part of the lifeways in the Village.

In 2011, a public archeology field school brought students and archeologists together to explore the Village area and interpret their findings to visitors. NPS photo.

While the elites of the Hudson’s Bay Company imposed the structure of the Fort and maintained an economic and social hierarchy, the homes of the Village reflect a separate community that supported the economic endeavors of the company while also wielding its own social power. The Villagers built homes in a variety of styles and adjusted their community as the Company changed, utilizing a variety of activity spaces that appear to represent endeavors outside of work. Mixed-ethnicity families might have purchased expensive transfer-printed earthenware to compete for status in the rapidly changing social order of fur trade society, or to “become more white” by adopting the behaviors of Victorianism as a strategy for survival in a colonized world. The Village residents were like people today, whose ability to adapt to new economic and social conditions reflects the need to construct identity and community in a strange new place, whether that involves absorbing into white or indigenous communities, immigrating to Canada, or returning to their homelands.

Through archeology, we understand more about the spatial arrangement, landscape use, and development of the Village over time, the residents’ investment in and maintenance of their homes, and the relationship of ceramics to ethnicity and economic status. Research at places like the Village can explore the lives of poorly documented people whose histories often go unwritten or untold, proving that artifacts are more than simply fragments of old trash but provide a glimpse into the life histories of past people.

While diversity in the fur trade is not unique, an extraordinary breadth of people from across the globe operated the Fort and inhabited the Village. These material remains give us a chance to further understand the community separate from the historical record, an independent measure that can supplement, enlarge, and decolonize history. By shifting the focus from the Fort itself to the entanglement of peoples and cultures that made up this unique community, archeology deepens the context of the place and links us to an ancestral past, connecting large, widespread, and varied indigenous and fur trade descendant audiences.

Sources:

Deur, Douglas
2012 An Ethnohistorical Overview of Groups with Ties to Fort Vancouver National Historic Site. Northwest Cultural Resources Institute, Report No. 15. National Park Service, Pacific West Region.

Gembala, Danielle D. M., Robert J. Cromwell, and Douglas C. Wilson
2004 Results of the Systemwide Archaeological Inventory Project Excavations in the HBC Village Site (45CL300) Fort Vancouver National Historic Site 2001–2003. Draft Report. Manuscript, Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, Vancouver, WA.

Hebert, James Michael
2007 Culture Built Upon the Land: A Predictive Model of Nineteenth-century Canadien/Métis Farmsteads. Master’s thesis, Department of Anthropology, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR.

Holschuh, Dana L.
2013 An Archaeology of Capitalism: Exploring Ideology through Ceramics from the Fort Vancouver and Village Sites. Master’s thesis, Department of Anthropology, Portland State University, Portland, OR.

Little, Kainoa L.
2016 A Search for Hawaiian Cultural Persistence in the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Fort Vancouver. Master’s thesis, Department of Applied Anthropology, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ.

Mullaley, Meredith J.
2011 Rebuilding the Architectural History of the Fort Vancouver Village. Master’s thesis, Department of Anthropology, Portland State University, Portland, OR.

Rogers, D. J.
1993 Ku on the Columbia: Hawaiian Laborers in the Pacific Northwest Fur Industry. Master’s thesis, Department of Anthropology, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR.

Taber, Emily C., Douglas C. Wilson, Robert Cromwell, Katie A. Wynia, and Alice Knowles
2019 Transfer-Printed Gastroliths and Identity at Fort Vancouver’s Village. Historical Archaeology, vol. 53, no. 1, pp. 86-102.

Thomas, Bryn, and Charles Hibbs
1984 Report of Investigations of Excavations at Kanaka Village, Vancouver Barracks, Washington 1980/1981, Vols. 1 and 2. Report to the Washington Department of Transportation, Olympia, WA, from Archaeological and Historical Services, Eastern Washington University, Cheney, WA.

Wilson, Douglas C.
2021 Public and Community Archaeology in the Pacific Northwest. Unpublished manuscript.
2018 The Fort and the Village: Landscape and Identity in the Colonial Period of Fort Vancouver. In British Forts and Their Communities, Christopher R. DeCorse and Zachary Beier, editors, pp. 91–125. University Press of Florida, Gainesville, FL.
2015 A Mongrel Crowd of Canadians, Kanakas, and Indians: The United States National Park Service Public Archaeology Programme and For Vancouver’s Village. Journal of Community Archaeology and Heritage, vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 221–237.
2014 The Decline and Fall of the Hudson’s Bay Company Village at Fort Vancouver. Alis Volat Propriis: Tales from the Oregon Territory 1859, pp. 21-42.

Wilson, Douglas C., Amy Clearman, and Kaitlyn Hosken
2021 Decolonizing Fort Vancouver through Archaeological Interpretation. Unpublished manuscript.

Wilson, Douglas C., Katie A. Wynia, Meagan Huff, Theresa E. Langford, and Amy Clearman
2021 Decolonizing Fort Vancouver: Archaeology’s Role in Interpreting Colonial Heritage Sites. Unpublished manuscript.

Wynia, Katie A.
2013 The Spatial Distribution of Tobacco Pipe Fragments at the Hudson’s Bay Company Fort Vancouver Village Site: Smoking as a Shared and Social Practice. Master’s thesis, Department of Anthropology, Portland State University, Portland, OR.