The fort itself is an oblong square two hundred and fifty yards in length, by one hundred and fifty in breadth, enclosed by pickets twenty feet in height. The area within is divided into two courts, around which are arranged thirty-five wooden buildings, used as officers’ dwellings, lodging apartment for clerks, storehouses for furs, goods, and grains; and as workshops for carpenters, blacksmiths, coopers, tinners, wheelwrights, &c. One building near the rear gate is occupied as a school-house; and a brick structure as a powder-magazine. The wooden buildings are constructed in the following manner. Posts are raised at convenient intervals, with grooves in the facing sides; in these grooves planks are inserted horizontally; and the walls are complete. Rafters raised upon plates in the usual way, and covered with boards, form the roofs.
Six hundred yards below the fort, and on the bank of the river, is a village of fifty-three wooden houses, generally constructed {265} like those within the pickets. In these live the Company’s servants. Among them is a hospital, in which those who become diseased are humanely treated. At the back, and a little east of the fort, is a barn containing a mammoth threshing machine; and near this are a number of long sheds, used for storing grain in the sheaf. And behold the Vancouver farm, stretching up and down the river (3,000 acres, fenced into beautiful fields) sprinkled with dairy houses, and herdsmen and shepherds’ cottages! A busy place.
The farmer on horseback at break of day, summons one hundred half-breeds and Iroquois Indians from their cabins to the fields. Twenty or thirty ploughs tear open the generous soil; the sowers follow with their seed, and pressing on them come a dozen harrows to cover it; and thus thirty or forty acres are planted in a day, till the immense farm is under crop. The season passes on, teeming with daily industry, until the harvest waves on all these fields. Then sickle and hoe glisten in tireless activity to gather in the rich reward of this toil; the food of seven hundred at this post, and of thousands more at the posts on the deserts in the east and {266} north. The saw mill, too, is a scene of constant toil. Thirty or forty Sandwich Islanders are felling the pines and dragging them to the mill; sets of hands are plying two gangs of saws by night and day. Three thousand feet of lumber per day; nine hundred thousand feet per annum; are constantly being shipped to foreign ports.
The grist mill is not idle. It must furnish bread stuff for the posts, and the Russian market in the north-west. And its deep music is heard daily and nightly half the year.
We will now enter the fort. The blacksmith is repairing ploughshares, harrow teeth, chains and mill irons; the tinman is making cups for the Indians, and camp-kettles, &c.; the wheelwright is making waggons, and the wood parts of ploughs and harrows; the carpenter is repairing houses and building new ones; the cooper is making barrels for pickling salmon and packing furs; the clerks are posting books, and preparing the annual returns to the board in London; the salesmen are receiving beaver and dealing out goods. Listen to the voices of those children from the school house. They are the half-breed offspring of the gentlemen and servants of {267} the Company, educated at the Company’s expense, preparatory to their being apprenticed to trades in Canada. They learn the English language, writing, arithmetic and geography. The gardener, too, is singing out his honest satisfaction, as he surveys from the northern gate ten acres of apple trees laden with fruit, his bowers of grapevines, his beds of vegetables and flowers. The bell rings for dinner; we will now pay a visit to the “Hall” and its convivialities.
The dining-hall is a spacious room on the second floor, ceiled with pine above and at the sides. In the southwest corner of it is a large close stove, giving out sufficient caloric to make it comfortable.
At the end of a table twenty feet in length stands Governor McLaughlin, directing guests and gentlemen from neighbouring posts to their places; and chief-traders, traders, the physician, clerks, and the farmer, slide respectfully to their places, at distances from the Governor corresponding to the dignity of their rank in the service. Thanks are given to God, and all are seated. Roast beef and pork, boiled mutton, baked salmon, boiled ham; beets, carrots, turnips, cabbage and potatoes, and wheaten bread, are tastefully distributed {268} over the table among a dinner-set of elegant queen’s ware, burnished with glittering glasses and decanters of various-coloured Italian wines. Course after course goes round, and the Governor fills to his guests and friends; and each gentleman in turn vies with him in diffusing around the board a most generous allowance of viands, wines, and warm fellow-feeling. The cloth and wines are removed together, cigars are lighted, and a strolling smoke about the premises, enlivened by a courteous discussion of some mooted point of natural history or politics, closes the ceremonies of the dinner hour at Fort Vancouver. These are some of the incidents of life at Vancouver.
But we moor on the lower point of Wappatoo Island, to regale ourselves with food and fire. This is the highest point of it, and is said to be never overflown. A bold rocky shore, and the water is deep enough to float the largest vessels, indicate it to be a site for the commercial mart of the island. But the southern shore of the river, half a mile below, is past a doubt the most important point for a town site on the Columbia.[83] It lies at the lower mouth of the Willamette, the natural outlet of the best agricultural district of {269} Oregon. It is a hillside of gentle acclivity, covered with pine forests. There is a gorge in the mountains through which a road from it to the prairies on the south can easily be constructed. At this place the Hudson’s Bay Company have erected a house, and occupy it with one of their servants.