The Columbia River: Its History, Its Myths, Its Scenery, Its Commerce

by William Denison Lyman

Portland, Oregon, in 1851.
From an Old Print.

While the River was now nominally in possession of the United States, it was practically under the control of the British fur companies. The Pacific Fur Company ceased to operate, and the North-westers entered upon active work both by sea and land in exploring the vast and profitable domain which the misfortunes of their American rivals, supplemented in a most timely manner by the treachery of McDougall and McKenzie, had put within their power. The canny Scotchmen, McDougall, McTavish, McKenzie, McDonald, and the various other Macs who now guided the plans of the North-westers, signalled their entrance into power by despatching companies to the various pivotal points of the great Columbia Basin, the Walla Walla, Yakima, Okanogan, Spokane, and Snake rivers. Two incidents may be related to illustrate the character of people and the conditions of that wilderness period.

A party of ninety men in ten canoes left Astoria for up-river points on April 4, 1814. While passing the mouth of the Yakima, about three hundred and fifty miles up the River, the men were surprised to see three canoes putting out from shore and to hear a child’s voice calling out, “Arretez donc! arretez donc!” Stopping to investigate, the party found in one of the boats the Indian wife of Pierre Dorion, with her children. Dorion, with five other Canadians, had gone the previous summer with a party under command of John Reed of the Astor Company. While trapping and hunting, deep in the mountains of Snake River, the party had been massacred by Indians. The woman and her two boys had alone escaped the massacre. It was the dead of winter and the snows lay deep on the Blue Mountains. But the wife of Dorion found shelter in a remote fastness of the mountains, putting up a bark hut for a shelter and subsisting on the carcasses of some of her horses. In the spring, the pitiful little company of mother and children descended to Walla Walla and found there more kindly disposed natives, who cared for them and turned them over to the protection of the whites. A more thrilling story of suffering and heroism than this of Madame Dorion and her children has never come up from the chronicles of the wild West.

Equally illustrative of the life of the fur-traders is the account given by Alexander Ross of one of his many adventures in the Columbia country. In 1814 Ross went from Okanogan to Yakima to secure horses. With him were four other whites and three Indian women. The Yakima Valley was then as now a paradise of the Indians. There the tribes gathered by the thousands in the spring to dig camas, to race horses, and to gamble, as well as to form alliances and make plans for war. When the little company of traders reached the encampment, they discovered to their astonishment that it was a veritable city. Six thousand men, women, and children, with ten thousand horses, and uncounted dogs and many shackled bears and wolves, were strewn across the plain. It was a dangerous situation for the traders, for it became plain to them that the Indians were unfriendly. But assuming an air of careless bravado, Ross proceeded to display his store of trinkets for the purpose of starting a traffic in horses. Assuming a very hilarious manner the Indians would seize and drive away the animals as fast as the white men got them. Then the Indians began to deprive them of clothes and food. Finally they made ready to seize their three women as slaves. Ross managed to have the women escape temporarily, but then the savages were worse than ever. Matters reached a crisis when an obstreperous chief named Yaktana snatched a knife from the hands of one of the Canadians. A desperate struggle was just at the point of breaking out, which would inevitably have resulted in the death of all the white men, when a sudden intuition flashed through the quick mind of Ross, and rushing between the combatants he handed his own knife, a much more elegant one, to Yaktana, saying in a friendly tone, “This is a chief’s knife. Take it and give back the other.” There was an instant revulsion. Yaktana was so much flattered that he turned at once into a stanch supporter of the shrewd trader. Food was brought. The horses were restored. Equipment was provided. The three women were regained, and the company made their way without further trouble to Okanogan.

We have already mentioned the important fact that in 1821 the two great Canadian Companies, the North-western and the Hudson’s Bay, decided to unite. With the union, the great era of fur-trade in the Columbia Basin fairly began, to continue about twenty-five years, yielding then to the American immigrant. That twenty-five years of the dominance of the great Fur Company contained nearly all the poetry and romance as well as the profit and statesmanship of the business. The entire region of the River, as well as that of the Puget Sound country, was mapped out in a most systematic manner with one chief central fort, Vancouver on the Columbia. A more magnificent location for the purpose cannot be conceived. It is now the site of a flourishing city and of the United States Fort Headquarters for the North-west, generally conceded to be the finest fort location in the United States. Fort Vancouver was established in 1825 upon a superb bench of land gently sloping back from the River for two miles. Great trees fringed the site, Mt. Hood lifted its pinnacled majesty sixty miles to the eastward, the sinuous mazes of the Willamette Valley stretched out far southward, while the lordly River was in full view a dozen miles up and down. Every natural advantage and delight which wild nature could offer was here in fullness. Ships could readily ascend the hundred miles from the ocean to unload their merchandise and take on their cargoes of precious furs, the furs collected at the outlay of so much toil and suffering over the area of hundreds of miles. Every species of game and fish abounded in the waters and along the banks of the River. Deer and elk tossed their antlers between the stately firs of the upland, and pheasant and grouse whirred among the branches. Geese, cranes, ducks, and swans, in countless numbers, darkened the lagoons amid the many islands enclosed by the mouths of the Willamette and the adjacent waters of the larger stream. Fish of many varieties, the royal Chinook salmon, king of food fish, being at the head in beauty and edibility, though surpassed in size by the gigantic sturgeon, which sometimes weighed a thousand pounds, abounded in the River. No epicure of the world’s capitals could command such viands as nature brought to the doors of the denizens of Fort Vancouver.

The fort itself was laid out on a scale of amplitude suitable to the spaciousness of the site. It was enclosed with a picket wall twenty feet high, with massive buttresses of timber inside. This enclosure was a parallelogram seven hundred and fifty by five hundred feet. Inside were about forty buildings, the governor’s residence of generous dimensions being in the centre. Two chapels provided for the spiritual needs of the company, while schoolhouse, stores, “bachelors’ halls,” and shops of various kinds attested the variety of the needs. Along the bank of the River, outside the enclosure, lay quite a village of cottages for the married employees, together with hospital, boathouses, granaries, warehouses, threshing mills, and dairy buildings.

Taken altogether Fort Vancouver was the model fort of the western slope. Moreover, the fertile soil and genial, humid climate soon encouraged the factors of the Company to experiment with gardens and orchards, and, within a few years after founding, fifteen hundred acres of land were in the finest state of productivity, while three thousand head of cattle, twenty-five hundred sheep, three hundred brood mares, and over a hundred milch cows, added their bounteous contributions to the already plentiful resources of the fort.

With this rich larder, with the spacious buildings, with the annual arrivals and departures of ships by sea and fleets of bateaux by river, with hunting trips and Indian policies, with the intercoast traffic with the Russians on the north and the Spaniards on the south,—there was as much to engage and delight the minds of these people as if they had lived in the heart of civilisation.

Any account of Fort Vancouver would be incomplete without some reference to Dr. John McLoughlin, chief factor of the Company in the Columbia district from 1824 to the time of his retirement from the Company in 1846 and settlement at Oregon City, Oregon, as an American citizen. Rarely has any one in the stormy history of the Columbia Basin received such unvarying and unqualified praise as has this truly great man. Physically, mentally, and morally, Dr. McLoughlin was altogether exceptional among the mixed population that gathered about the emporium of the traders. Six feet four inches in height, his noble and expressive face crowned with a great cascade of snowy hair, firm yet kindly, prompt and businesslike yet sympathetic and helpful, “Old Whitehead” or “White Eagle,” as the Indians called him, was a true-born king of men.