Nearly two hundred years passed before the first settlement on the Californian coast was made by Spanish missionaries from Mexico. That was in 1770. Farther north, not a white man was to be found when Captain Cook arrived on his famous voyage in 1778. James Cook, the runaway son of an English laborer, had already earned the gratitude of his fellow-citizens. Exploring vast breadths of southern sea, he had added Australia to our Empire. The northern sea next attracted him; at that time the prize offered by the British Government for the finding of a North-west Passage was $100,000.
Sailing up the Pacific as far as Behring Straits, he did [a]Spaniards Claim the Coast] not find what he sought; but, by peering into every river mouth and inlet, he added much to men’s knowledge of the present British Columbia.
Ten years later another inquisitive Englishman visited these coasts; in fact, Captain Meares went so far as to build a house on Nootka Sound. The Spaniards, who claimed the whole Pacific side of the continent as the French had claimed the centre, warned off the “trespassers,” seized several British ships, and in 1790 planted a little Spanish settlement on the disputed shore. The governments of the two countries then came to a makeshift agreement that neither should interfere with the settlements of the other till the ownership of the soil could be decided. The naval representatives of Spain and England met on the spot, dined in each other’s cabins, went on exploring expeditions together, and joined their names in the title of “Vancouver-Cuadra” Island. Beyond this the rival powers could not get. The Spanish settlement, however, was soon abandoned.
In 1819 Spain gave up to the United States all her claims to the Pacific coast north of Mexico; but the British claims north of California remained, and for twenty-seven years the two English-speaking governments, at Westminster and Washington, exercised joint control over what was known as the “Oregon Territory.”
In the early forties, however, so many Americans had arrived and settled in the neutral territory that it could be left neutral no longer. The United States government not only withdrew from the joint arrangement, but claimed the whole territory between California and Alaska for itself. This would have shut off the British colonies from all access to the Pacific Ocean, as [a]United States Frontier Fixed] absolutely as the French claims a century before would have shut off the Americans.
To guard against emergencies, and if possible to find a peaceful way out of the difficulty, a ship of the British Navy, the American, in 1845 visited Vancouver Island, and Captain Gordon is reported to have exclaimed, “I would not give one of the bleakest knolls of all the bleak hills of Scotland for twenty islands arrayed like this in barbaric glories.” The captain’s brother, Lord Aberdeen, was Foreign Minister, but happily he did not throw away the future of British America because its glories at that time were “barbaric.”
The trouble was ended in 1846 by a compromise. All the western territories north of the 49th degree of latitude (except, of course, Alaska) were to belong to Britain, and all south of that degree to the United States. It was the most charmingly simple way of creating a frontier that could be imagined: rule a straight line across the map from Lake of the Woods to the Pacific shore, a line 1,200 miles long without a break, and the thing is done.
Between that 1,200-mile boundary and the Arctic Ocean the British power was represented by a great trading corporation. The Hudson’s Bay Company, as you will remember, had had its commercial monopoly extended to the Pacific shore as early as 1821, and it was no more anxious for the spread of settlement among the mountains and on the western islands than it had been on the prairie and in the woodland of the interior. The rising tide of white population would drive away the game and demoralize the native hunters.
A little agriculture was indulged in, so that the [a]Dogs Bred for Their Wool] Company’s forts should not go without fresh vegetables, and early in the nineteenth century a certain number of farmers were encouraged to take up land because the Company had contracted to feed the Russian fur traders up in Alaska. On Puget Sound, when the artist Kane reached the coast in 1847, a ranching company had about 6,000 sheep and 2,000 cattle. The wool found its way to England by the Company’s ships—the cattle were killed and salted for the Sandwich Islands and the Russian territory.
“A Babel of Languages” met the artist’s ears when he reached Fort Vancouver, as the inhabitants were a mixture of English, French, Iroquois from Eastern Canada, Crees from the Centre, and Chinooks of the west coast, with Sandwich Islanders from Hawaii. “The buildings,” he says, “are enclosed by strong pickets about sixteen feet high, with bastions for cannon at the corners.” The Company’s 200 voyageurs, with their Indian wives, lived in a little village of log huts near the bank of the river.