Mackenzie's Successors
The Spaniards of California had been aware in the middle of the eighteenth century that there was a big river entering the sea to the north of the savage country known as Oregon. The estuary of this river was reached in May, 1792, by an American sea captain of a whaling ship—ROBERT GRAY, of Boston. He crossed the bar, and named the great stream after his own ship, the Columbia. Five months afterwards (October, 1792) Lieutenant BROUGHTON, of the Vancouver expedition, entered the Columbia from the sea, explored it upstream for a hundred miles, and formally took possession of it for the King of Great Britain. The news of this discovery reached Alexander Mackenzie (no doubt after his return from his overland journey to the Pacific coast), and he at once jumped to the conclusion that the powerful stream he had discovered in the heart of the Rocky Mountains, and had partially followed on its way to the Pacific, must be the Columbia. As a matter of fact it was the river afterwards called Fraser.
If you look at the map of British North America, and then at the map of Russian Asia—Siberia—you will notice a marked difference in the arrangement of the waterways. Those of the Canadian Dominion, on the whole, flow more eastwards and westwards, or at any rate radiate in all directions, so as to constitute the most wonderful system of natural canals possessed by any country or continent. On the contrary, the rivers of Siberia flow usually in somewhat parallel lines from south to north. Siberia also is far less well provided than British North America with an abundance of navigable rivers, streams, and great lakes. Therefore the traveller in pre-railway days wishing to cross Siberia from west to east or east to west was obliged to have recourse to wheeled traffic, to ride, or to walk. Consequently, until the beginning of the twentieth century, the "exploitation" (or turning to useful account) of Siberia was a far more difficult process than the development of North America, once the question of British versus French or Spanish was settled. Siberia at one time was almost as rich in fur-bearing animals as British North America; yet so difficult was transport (and so severe were the rigours of the climate) that the Russians, once they reached the shores of the Pacific at the beginning of the eighteenth century, began to stretch out their influence to the opposite peninsula of Alaska mainly on account of the fur trade. For it was easier and less expensive to bring furs from Alaska round Cape Horn, or the Cape of Good Hope, to Europe than to convey them overland from eastern Siberia. Then, also, the Chinese market was becoming of importance to the fur trade. Already Mackenzie, at the end of the eighteenth century, is found considering whether a sea trade between China and a British port on the North Pacific coast could not be arranged so as to develop a profitable market among the mandarins and grandees of the Celestial Empire for a good proportion of the North-west Company's skins.
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Peter Pond, already referred to on p. [278], is said to have expressed his intention (in 1788) of going to treat with the Empress Catherine II for a Russian occupation of the Alaskan and Columbian coasts. For this reason, or the mere desire to have a proportion of this fur-producing country, the Emperor Paul, in 1799, created a Russian Chartered Company to occupy the Alaska and north Columbian coasts. Great Britain offered no objection—in spite of having acquired some rights here by an agreement with Spain—and that is why, when you look at the map of the vast Canadian Dominion, you find with surprise that it has been robbed (one might almost say) of at least half of its legitimate Pacific seaboard. The Russian Company was allowed to claim the north Columbian coast between Alaska proper and Queen Charlotte Islands.
In 1867 the Russian Government sold all Alaska and the north Columbian coast to the United States, partly to annoy Great Britain, whom it had not forgiven for the Crimean War.
You will have noticed that quite a number of United States citizens (mostly born British subjects in New England) had taken part in the north-west fur trade immediately after the British conquest of Canada disposed of French monopolies. There were Jonathan Carver and Peter Pond, for example; and a much more worthy person than the last named—Daniel W. Harmon, a New Englander, who entered the service of the North-west Company in 1800, and followed in Mackenzie's footsteps to the upper Fraser River and the vicinity of the Skeena. Simon Fraser also, whose tracing of the Fraser River from its upper waters to the Pacific coast we shall presently deal with, was a native of Vermont, though his father came from Scotland. The furs which began to penetrate into the United States by way of Detroit and Niagara, the rising scale of luxury in dress in the towns of the eastern seaboard of the United States, the voyages of American whalers up the west coast of North America (including the discovery of the Columbia River in 1792 by Captain Robert Gray), the purchase of Louisiana from the Emperor Napoleon in 1804—with the vague claim it gave to the coast line of Oregon on the Pacific: all these circumstances inspired far-sighted persons in the United States at the beginning of the nineteenth century with a wish to secure for their Government and commerce a share in the fur trade and in these wonderful new lands of the Pacific watershed. American ships (whaling ships) had already become accustomed to sail round Cape Horn and to visit the Oregon and Alaskan coasts. The American Government therefore, immediately after the Louisiana purchase, dispatched an American expedition under Captains Meriwether Lewis and Jonathan Clarke to travel up the Missouri River and so across the mountains to the coast of Oregon, a wonderful expedition, which they carried out with great success in two years (1804-6), reaching the lower Columbia River and following it down to the sea.
Consequently, with all this in the air, it is not very surprising that the far-sighted John Jacob Astor, a wealthy German merchant of New York, should have conceived the idea of founding a great American fur-trading company and of establishing it at the mouth of the Columbia River.