Came also in October, 1845, two special commissioners from the Hudson’s Bay Company to report on Oregon. The report was sent back without McLoughlin’s inspection. They had reported against him for favoring the American settlers. Knowing well this was the beginning of the end, McLoughlin sent for Douglas to come down and take charge. The mail of the following spring dismissed McLoughlin from the service. That is not the way it was put. It was suggested he should retire. McLoughlin gave up the reins in 1846 and withdrew from Vancouver Fort to live among the settlers he had befriended at Oregon City on the Willamette. He died there in 1857. It is unnecessary to express an opinion on his character. The record of his rule in Oregon is the truest verdict on his character. His was one of the rare spirits in this world that not only followed right, but followed right when there was no reward; that not only did right, but did right when it meant positive loss to himself and the stabs of malignity from ungrateful people whom he had benefited. The most of people can act saintly when a Heaven of prizes is dangling just in front of the Trail, but fewer people can follow the narrow way when it leads to loss and pain and ignominy. McLoughlin could, and that Christ-like quality in his character places him second to none among the heroes of American history. As Selkirk’s name is indissolubly connected with the hero-days of Red River, so McLoughlin’s is enshrined in the heroic past of Oregon. In Hudson’s Bay House, London, I looked in vain for portraits or marble busts of these men. Portraits there are of bewigged and beruffled princes and dukes who ruled over estates that would barely make a back-door patch to Red River or Oregon; but not a sign to commemorate the fame of the two men who founded empires in America, greater in area than Great Britain and France and Germany and Spain combined.
It would be interesting from a colonial point of view to know just what qualifications the British Government thought Commander Gordon of the Pacific Squadron and his officers, Lieut. William Peel, son of Sir Robert Peel, and Lieutenant Parke of the Royal Marines, possessed to judge whether Oregon was worth keeping or not. It would be interesting from a purely Canadian point of view. American historians, who ought to be profoundly grateful to Gordon for his blunders, pronounce him the most consummate bungler ever sent on an International mission. Reference has been made in an introductory chapter as to how these naval officers dealt with the matter and the grave injustice they did the Hudson’s Bay Company. Parke and Peel came down to the Columbia and passed some weeks on hunting expeditions up the Walla Walla and the Willamette. They surveyed Fort Vancouver and laughed. All the international pother about that wooden clutter! They observed the colonists and laughed! Why, five hundred marines from any one of their fifteen war ships lying in Puget Sound could send these barefooted, buckskin-clad, tobacco-spitting settlers skipping back over the mountains to the United States like deer before the hunt in English parks! To the two naval officers, these people were but low-living peasants. It did not enter into the narrow vision of their insular minds that out of just such material as these rough pioneers do new nations grow. The two gentlemen regarded the whole expedition as a holiday lark. They had a good time! Up on Puget Sound Gordon was serving the British Government still more worthily. He had landed at the Hudson’s Bay Company’s new post of Victoria—of which more anon. He was given the best that the fur post could offer—table of wild fowl and the Company’s best wines, but Half-breed servants do not wait on a table like an English butler; and berth bunks are not English feather beds; and an ocean full of water is not an English bath. Alas and alas, poor gentleman! Such sacrifices is he called to make for his country’s service! Then my gentleman demands what sport. “Deer,” says Finlayson, “or bear hunting; or fishing.”
“Do you use flies or bait?” asks Gordon with a due sense of condescension for having deigned to enquire about this barbarous land’s sport at all. Finlayson must have had some trouble not to choke with laughter when my gentleman insists on fishing with flies in streams where salmon could be scooped in tubfuls. Later, he deigns to go hunting and insists that deer be run down in the open as they hunt in enclosed Scottish game preserves, not still-hunted, which is a barbarous way; with the consequence that Gordon does not get a shot. In vain Finlayson and Douglas, who comes North, try to please this mannikin in gold braid. In response to their admiration of the mighty mountains, he makes answer that goes down to history for civility—“that he would not give the bleakest knoll on the bleakest hill of Scotland for all these mountains in a heap.”
Oregon’s provisional government forced the boundary dispute to an issue. It must be settled. The Hudson’s Bay Company press their case, pleading that if the American colonists are to retain all south of the Columbia, then the Company, having settlers between the Columbia and Puget Sound, should retain all between Columbia River and Puget Sound. The case hangs fire. Gordon is called in. In language which I have given in a former chapter, he declares the country is not worth keeping. Naturally, Aberdeen listens to his own brother’s opinion and Peel to his son’s. By treaty of June, 1846, England relinquishes claims to all territory south of 49°. Gradually fur trader is crowded out by settler. In 1860, Fort Vancouver is dismantled and taken over as a military station by the United States. Ermatinger, for having joined the Oregon government, is packed off to a post in Athabasca. Ogden saves himself from punishment by following McLoughlin’s example and resigning to become a settler on the Willamette. For the Puget Sound farms, the Company receives compensation of $450,000 and $200,000 from the American Government; the former amount payable to the Hudson’s Bay Company proper, the latter to the Puget Sound Company, though the shareholders were nominally the same persons.
So ended the glories of the fur trade in Oregon. It still had a few years to run in British Columbia. Long ago McLoughlin had plainly seen the beginning of the end in Oregon and sent Douglas to spy out the site of a permanent fort north of 49°.
It is really one of the most interesting studies in American history to observe—if it can be done without prejudice or prepossession—how when this great Company, changing in its personnel but ever carrying down in its apostolic succession the same traditions of statecraft, of obedience, of secrecy, of diplomacy—how when this great Company had to take a kick, it took it gracefully and always made it a point of being kicked up, not down. This is illustrated by the Company’s policy now.
Cruising north in June of ’42, Douglas notices two magnificent bays north of 49°, on the south end of Vancouver Island opposite what is now British Columbia. The easterly bay named by the Indians, Camosun, meaning rush of waters, offers splendid sea space combined with a shore of plains interspread with good building timber. Also, there are fresh-water streams. The other bay, three miles west, called Esquimalt—the place of gathering of roots—is a better, more land-locked harbor but more difficult of anchorage for small boats. Simpson and McLoughlin decide to build a new fort at Camosun—the modern Victoria. Those, who know the region, need no description of its beauty. To those who do not, descriptions can convey but a faint picture. Islands ever green, in a climate ever mild, dot the far-rolling blue of a summer sea; and where the clouds skirt the water’s horizon, there breaks through mid-heaven, aërial and unreal, the fiery and opal dome of Mt. Baker, or the rifted shimmering, ragged peaks of the Olympic Range in Washington. So far are the mountains, so soft the air, that not a shadow, not a line, of the middle heights appear, only the snowy peaks, dazzling and opalescent, with the primrose tinge of the sheet lightning at play like the color waves of Northern Lights. Westward is the sea; eastward, the rolling hills, the forested islands, unexpected vistas of sea among the forests, of precipices rising sheer as wall from the water. Hither comes Douglas to lay the foundations of a new empire.
To Hubert Howe Bancroft the world is indebted for details of the founding of Victoria. Bancroft obtained the facts first-hand from the manuscripts of Douglas, himself. Fifteen men led by Douglas left the Columbia in March, ’43. Proceeding up the Cowlitz, they obtained provisions from the Puget Sound Company at Nisqually and embarking on The Beaver, March the 13th, at ten A. M., steamed northward for Vancouver Island. At four o’clock, the next afternoon, they anchored just outside Camosun Bay. “On the morning of the 15th of March, Douglas set out from the steamer in a small boat to examine the shore.... With the expedition was a Jesuit missionary, Bolduc.... Repairing to the great house of the Indian village, the priest harangued the people ... and baptized them till arrested by sheer exhaustion. The 16th, having determined on a site, Douglas put his men at work squaring timbers and digging a well. He explained to the natives that he had come to build among them, whereat they were greatly pleased and pressed their assistance on the fort builders, who employed them at the rate of a blanket for every forty pickets they would bring.... Sunday, the 19th, Bolduc decided to celebrate mass. Douglas supplied him with men to aid in the holy work. A rustic chapel was improvised; a boat’s awning serving as canopy, branches of fir trees enclosing the sides. No cathedral bell was heard that Sabbath morning ... and yet the Songhies, Clallams, and Cowichins were there, friends and bloody enemies.... Bolduc, desirous of carrying the gospel to Whidby Island, was paddled thence on the 24th....”