Fort Vancouver Cultural Landscape Report

Administrative and Political Context

During this period Fort Vancouver served as the administrative center for the company's posts west of the Rocky Mountains. While American fur traders periodically mounted expeditions into the west, the Hudson's Bay Company, with its increasing number of trading posts--both on the coast and inland--and with established methods and routes for trade goods, fur processing and export, and a sufficient means of provisioning its posts and employees, dominated the trade in peltries until the rich fur resources of the region finally began to give out. Simpson's policy of increasing the supply of "in-country" produce, reducing the reliance on imported provisions, spurred the development of agriculture and other industries under Company aegis, which ultimately led, in the late 1830s, to the establishment of the Puget's Sound Agricultural Company (P.S.A.C.), a subsidiary of the Hudson's Bay Company. This, in turn, made the Company the major player in Pacific Coast trade.

Early American missionaries in the Pacific Northwest ended their arduous overland treks and ocean voyages at Fort Vancouver, the principal settlement in the region in the 1830s, where they received necessary supplies, livestock and equipment to begin their own establishments. They were instrumental in publicizing the attractions of the rich Willamette Valley to land-hungry Americans in the States; in the late 1830s, the first wave of settlers reached the Oregon Country. Up until 1842-43, Fort Vancouver served as the principal supplier of food, clothing and materials to start a farm; the Company expanded its merchandizing and milling operations, opening stores in San Francisco, Oregon City and the Willamette Valley, and mills in Oregon City and Champoeg.

The principal political backdrop during this period was the uncertainty regarding the final location of the boundary between British and American territory in the Pacific Northwest In August of 1827 the joint occupation agreement regarding the disputed land was indefinitely extended, leading the Hudson's Bay Company to augment operations at Fort Vancouver's strategic Columbia River location, and for some years it was generally believed the boundary would be established along the lower Columbia River, leaving Fort Vancouver in British territory. By the 1840s, with the influx of American settlers into the Oregon Country, British assumptions regarding the boundary became increasingly unrealistic. In 1846 the Oregon Treaty was signed, establishing the boundary at the 49th parallel, legally ending British dominion over lands the Company had developed and exploited for over twenty years.

Seat of Columbia Department

Fort Vancouver became the supply center and administrative locus for an expanding number of fur-trading posts and two agricultural outposts. Returns from the Columbia Department and New Caledonia fur brigades were shipped via canoe and bateaux to Fort Vancouver, where they were inspected, prepared for shipment and recorded, and then loaded on the annual supply ships sent from London. From Fort Vancouver, annual supplies and trade goods for each post were ordered from London, and repacked, invoiced and shipped out to the posts. Under McLoughlin's direction, fur brigades were sent from the various posts to trap out the areas south and east of the Columbia River region, creating a "fur desert," which, combined with control of the Indians and various sales and bidding strategies for furs, was largely successful in ruining American competitors in the region. 103 By the early 1830s the rich fur resources of the Snake River region had been decimated by the Company, and by the early '40s, fur brigades to California, which had been conducted annually since 1835, ceased to be profitable.

A number of new posts were established during this period, including Fort Boise, in what is now Idaho, Fort Simpson, on the Nass River in Alaska (1831); Fort McLoughlin on Millbanke Sound (1833), and Fort Nisqually and Cowlitz Farm, the latter two principally as agricultural centers. At the end of this period, the Columbia Department posts administered from Fort Vancouver included the aforementioned forts, as well as Fort George, Fort The Dalles, Fort Nez Perces, Fort Okanogan, Fort Colvile, Fort Flathead, Fort Kootenai, Fort Langley, Fort Rupert, Fort Umpqua, and Fort Victoria.

Over time each post within the Department came to rely more on produce raised "in country," including cattle, grain, and so forth, either from its own location, or from other posts, particularly Fort Vancouver, and later Cowlitz Farm and Fort Nisqually, a result of the policy formulated by Simpson and London to reduce the expense of transporting foodstuffs from London. McLoughlin's letters to chief factors and chief traders at various posts during this period often include specific instructions for agricultural production, for intra-post shipment of produce, seed and livestock, and for repairs of tools, structures and expensive manufactured items.

As the years progressed, Fort Vancouver, under John McLoughlin's administration, and following policies established by Governor George Simpson and the Company's London directors, became the principal manufacturing and agricultural center in the Pacific Northwest. Eventually, products from cattle, swine and sheep were used not only to sustain the Company's posts, but to barter and sell to immigrants and to export markets. Commodities harvested and produced at posts other than Fort Vancouver, such as salmon from Fort Langley, were part of the Columbia Department's production; the operations were overseen by McLoughlin at Fort Vancouver. Agricultural operations--tares, clover and other crops to sustain livestock, and a significant amount of wheat for milling and marketing to local consumers and for export--continued to expand throughout this period, overseen by the offices at Fort Vancouver. In addition, the Company's Pacific Coast trade--the operation of ships servicing Company posts and carrying exported and imported goods--was directed from Fort Vancouver.

As the Company's principal administrative representative in the region and head of the Columbia Department, Chief Factor John McLoughlin directed every aspect of Company operations, from relations with Indians and American immigrants, to quantities and methods of agricultural production at the various posts. Because Fort Vancouver was the Company's principal west coast center for import and export, Fort Vancouver clerks kept accounts and records of all orders and shipments in furs, produce and manufactured items received from, or sent, abroad or sold in-country in the Columbia Department. The scope and power lodged in McLoughlin, as the Columbia Department's Chief Factor during this period, is illustrated by arrangements made for administration while McLoughlin was on leave in 1838. While he was absent the posts on the upper Columbia were administered by one chief factor, Samuel Black; the maritime trade and expeditions and posts on the lower Columbia, including Fort Vancouver, were placed under the control of Chief Trader James Douglas; and the administration of New Caledonia, an area where McLoughlin apparently spent little administrative energies, was directed by Chief Factor Peter Skene Ogden, who already operated it on a mostly autonomous basis. When McLoughlin returned from his furlough in the fall of 1839, he resumed direction of these various operations, with the additional charge of heading the administration of the newly-established Puget's Sound Agricultural Company.

Fort Vancouver, as the Columbia Department depot, also administered a relatively short-lived merchandising venture in San Francisco (1841-45), and a trading establishment in the Hawaiian Islands (1833-1844). [104]

During the first few years of the 1840s, London began to express concern over some of McLoughlin's actions in the Columbia Department, including unauthorized expenditures at Oregon City and the credit advances he had been giving settlers. The Governor and Committee were also dissatisfied with the decline in revenues in the Department, and the failure of the Puget's Sound Agricultural Company to bring in projected profits. In 1841 George Simpson returned to the Columbia for the first time since 1828-29. He and Chief Factor McLoughlin disagreed on the operations of the coastal trade, and their increasingly bitter discussions ended in a quarrel. Then, in 1842, Simpson found upon revisiting Fort Stikine, where John McLoughlin, Jr., was in charge, that the Chief Factor's son had been murdered by his own men. Simpson's handling of the affair was unacceptable to McLoughlin, who then conducted his own inquiry into the matter, arrested the men involved in his son's death, and insisted they be tried for murder. His letters to the Governor and Committee over the next four years were full of references to his progress in his murder investigation, and of accusations against Simpson's handling of the affair, including lodging responsibility for the murder with Simpson, who he claimed had left his son in charge of Stikine without adequate help. London directed McLoughlin to resolve his differences with Simpson, but McLoughlin ignored the direction. In 1844 McLoughlin was removed as sole administrative head of the Columbia Department; a joint administrative board for the department was established, to take effect in 1844-45, with McLoughlin sharing administrative tasks with Chief Factors James Douglas and Peter Skene Ogden. Using McLoughlin's purchase of land in Oregon City--which he made, ostensibly, in the name of the Company to protect its interests under the Oregon territorial donation land claim law--as a wedge, Simpson was able to force McLoughlin into retirement. The Chief Factor left Fort Vancouver in January of 1846.