To have a luminous mind concerning Fort Vancouver it is better not to get the place mixed with Vancouver Island, or with the modern seaport of Vancouver upon the adjacent mainland. The old capital of British Oregon—a city stands there now—was on the northern bank of the Columbia where a natural park of pasturage and timber sloped upwards from the river. Upstream the valley was barred by lofty forests, and from north to south no less than seven white immense volcanoes appeared to float above a sea of mist.
The village on the river bank had three dozen log cabins, very neatly kept by Indian housewives, their men being Shetlanders and Orkneymen, French-Canadians and Métis, Kanakas and Iroquois. The offspring attended school, where Solomon Smith taught American, singing, deportment, and morality. Behind the village rose the stockade 20 feet high, quadrangular, and in extent 750 feet by 450. It was not really a fort, having neither bastions, galleries, guns, nor even loopholes, for indeed a wooden popgun would suffice to terrorize the Chinooks. Facing the main gate was the chief factor's house, a French-Canadian manor, its white veranda trellised for vines which yielded purple grapes. Between two flights of steps forming a horseshoe stood a 24-pounder gun, with a mortar on either side, and pyramids of shot, to frighten children away from the geranium beds. On either side of the great house extended the officers' mess, anteroom, library, a range of officers' quarters, and houses for the guests. Fronting these were the big warehouses, store, ration house, hospital, and shops for the artificers, the tailor, the turner, the cobbler, the smith who made fifty hatchets a day in his spare time, the bakers who supplied hard biscuits to the Company's ships, and the Indians who beat the furs each week to rid them of moth and dust. On the lawn which covered the main square stood the bell-house and the flag-staff. Outside the stockade was the stead, with a threshing floor worked by oxen, the orchard where all the trees had props to help them carry their load, and the farm of seven hundred acres. Beyond was pasturage where the sheep yielded twelve-pound fleeces, and the growing herd of cattle was kept sacred for the future prosperity of Oregon. Downstream a couple of miles an Hawaiian herder tended the pigs in the oak woods. Upstream was the sawmill which furnished cargoes of lumber to the Sandwich Islands. In all that husbandry the figs and lemons were the only failures; but Mr. Bruce, the gardener, had an exchange of seeds with the Duke of Devonshire's place over at Chiswick-on-Thames, and yielded to no man in strawberries or Juan Fernandez peaches. Outlying this capital of the fur trade was old Astoria, an American fort bought by the Company during the American-British War of 1812, but now in ruins. A white man lived there to tend the four-acre garden and report the arrival of ships. On Puget Sound was Fort Nisqually, and farther up the coast Forts Langley, McLoughlin, Simpson, and Stickeen, which last had been leased from the Russians. Up the Columbia Valley was Fort Walla Walla, from whence a trail went eastward a couple of thousand miles to the United States, then spreading steadily up the Missouri Valley. Northward of Walla Walla was Fort Okanagan, which had stockaded outposts on the Spokane River, Lake Pend d'Oreille and Flathead River, with others farther on in what is now Canadian territory. Fort Colville, near the present boundary, and on the main stream of the Columbia, was second only to the capital, and thence the annual brigade of cargo boats went by river to Hudson's Bay. Southward of Vancouver about two hundred miles there was an outpost, and beyond that, six hundred miles or so, was the little Mexican presidio of San Francisco.
In theory the country was held jointly by Great Britain and the United States, but in fact it was British Oregon. The Hudson's Bay voyageurs retired, who farmed in the Willamette, were hardly as yet a colony, nor did the Company project large settlements to disturb the Indians or the fur trade. The time was a golden age of progress, prosperity, sane government, and unbroken peace, the sole creation of one man, Chief Factor David McLoughlin, Father of Oregon.
This gentleman was Irish on the father's and French-Canadian on the mother's side, Canadian born, and held a degree in medicine from the Faculty of Paris. He stood six feet six inches, powerfully built, strikingly handsome, with long hair iron-gray. One would compare him, in stern probity, with Washington, in charm with Lincoln, but not by any means with lesser men than these. His enemies testify to his hospitality, his delight fulness as a host, his generosity. People who came out of the wilderness or from the sea were charmed with the officers' mess, with its willow-pattern crockery salved in 1825 from a wrecked Chinese junk, the English cut glass, the bright silver, the flowers, the gracious ease, the sparkling conversation. And after dinner, Dr. McLoughlin, who had one glass of wine when a ship came in, would ring the bell for Bruce the gardener, who presented him with the snuff box. The pinch of snuff was a solemnity, a signal which sent the officers to their work, and the guests for a ride, or in wet weather to the library.
The pioneer serpents in this Paradise were the Reverend Herbert Beaver, Church of England chaplain, and Mrs. Beaver, the first white woman in Oregon. Beaver had been an army chaplain in the West Indies, a fox-hunting vicar at home, always more horse-proud than church-proud. He was a little man of light complexion, a feminine voice, an oratorical manner, flippant and arrogant, who hunted every morning and baptized the heathen in drill time all the afternoon. He was appalled by the discovery that each of the twenty officers, the doctor included, had an Indian woman in quarters, a half-breed family, not married. It did not occur to him that the Indian marriage was sacred to the Indians, and that himself was the first priest with power to celebrate the Christian rite for the men. With one exception, they refused his services as an insult. Beaver would not associate with immoral women, or Mrs. Beaver with lewd, adulterous men. They said so. Indeed, the pair made themselves variously and acutely unpleasant, and that in the name of Christ.
The American missionaries who followed them developed deadly treachery against the doctor; the American pioneers, all pleasantly uncouth, wrested the country from its British owners, but the English Beavers were first to undermine the happiness of Oregon, and it was their advent which closed the golden age.
III
H.B.C. brigantine Beaver, all shiny with fresh paint and burnished brass, dipped her ensign to the fort, fired her salute of guns, dropped anchor abreast of the village, reported to the chief factor, and sent ashore all sorts of reading matter and other precious treasure. Then she proceeded to turn herself into a little paddle boat, the pioneer steamer of the Pacific Ocean. It was on the 14th of June, 1836, that she took the gentlemen of the fort on an excursion all round Wapato Island. After that came her maiden voyage under steam of 800 miles to Milbank Sound, and the first filling of her little bunkers at the Nanaimo coal seam. So she passes out of our story.
Meanwhile, at his first obeisance to the chief factor, Captain Home made report with much pomp and circumstance that he had a prisoner in irons awaiting commitment on the horrible charge of murdering his parents. The doctor advised him to see Mr. Douglas, Justice of the Peace.
Black Douglas, scarce less tall and imposing of presence than the doctor himself, received the little fuss box with an amiable grin, read over the newspaper cutting with some slight impatience, and remarked that Bill Fright seemed to have a jolly good case for criminal libel against the London Advertiser. The captain was disgusted, and presently consoled himself by telling Mr. Beaver all about it.