CHAPTER IV

FIRST OCCUPATION OF THE COLUMBIA

THE Occupation of Columbia River was effected because of conditions similar to those which produced the first settlements on the Hudson and the Mississippi. The motive of colonization was the fur trade. For in the northern part of the North American continent fur-bearing animals. abounded, and the skins could be procured from Indian trappers in exchange for articles of small value. Indeed, in the annals of the fur trading companies may be read the early history of that part of the continent which is designated the Pacific Northwest.

In the forests of British America, operating from the Atlantic side, were thousands of men who were solely engaged in exploiting the streams rising in the interior, along whose courses abounded the beaver, whose skin was very valuable, as well as other animals. From the earliest settlement of Canada, this fur trade of the great water courses was the leading interest of that region, and promoted a very rapid advance inland. Champlain, the father of Canada, explored the route of the Ottawa to Lake Huron, and sent his agents as far west as Wisconsin; before the seventeenth century ended French traders had explored the Great Lakes to their western extremity, and had passed over to the waters of the Mississippi. From Lake Superior they had gradually pushed farther westward, until, at the close of the French rule in 1763, the chain of trading posts extended along

Saskatchewan River almost to the foot of the Rocky Mountains. It had been the ambition of these French trappers to extend their exploration across the mountain barrier to the Western Ocean; but this achievement was reserved for another nation.

The change of sovereignty over Canada, resulting from the British conquest, for a time demoralized this wilderness commerce, but gradually it was restored, Britons taking the places of importance instead of the French merchants formerly in control, though the traders and most of the subordinate employés were French.

Another serious shock to the northern fur trade was caused by the American Revolution; but the chief obstacle to its prosperity, after the coming of the British, in the period following 1763, was the unrelenting and often sanguinary competition which prevailed among the numerous companies engaged in the trade. These trading companies paid little heed to law or justice, and descended to the basest methods of defeating rival parties. As a result of this warfare, profits decreased until it seemed as if the fur business would have to be abandoned. Impelled by these considerations, several of the leading merchants formed in 1783 a trading association, which four years later developed into the Northwest Company, and soon controlled almost the entire region formerly exploited by the French.

After the formation of the company, the business became very profitable, and efforts were made to extend operations into the yet unoccupied territories farther to the north and An additional motive for exploration was the desire to discover a route to the Pacific.

west.

The rival of the Northwest Company was the Hudson's Bay Company, and this corporation had gained greatly through the explorations of Samuel Hearne. Not to be outdone, the Northwest Company determined to undertake a similar exploration. By good fortune, they had in their association a man every way qualified for the task, Alexander-afterward Sir Alexander-Mackenzie, who in 1787

was sent from Montreal to take charge of the most western department of the trade.

In 1789, Mackenzie set out from Fort Chipewyan, on Lake Athabasca, with a small party embarked in canoes, and, circling Great Slave Lake, discovered a river flowing northward. This he descended to the Arctic Ocean, making the entire voyage in forty days. Returning, he immediately prepared to push the trade of the company along the line of his new discoveries. This voyage Mackenzie believed would settle the question of the impracticability of the Northwest Passage, for on reaching the sea, about latitude sixty-nine degrees, in the month of July, he found it choked with ice; moreover, he discerned dimly, in the west, a chain of mountains, running still farther toward the north.

Three years later, Mackenzie, having meantime spent a winter in London studying the use of astronomical instruments to fit himself better for the work of exploration, entered upon a new and more difficult undertaking. Since he had decided that it was not possible to find a passage around the continent, he considered it all-important to discover one leading across it. Mackenzie proposed to reach the Pacific by ascending Peace River, which enters Lake Athabasca from the west, and from its sources to cross the Rocky Mountains to some westward flowing stream. This feat he actually accomplished, after a succession of difficulties which it would be nearly impossible to exaggerate. In the autumn of 1792 he ascended Peace River to the base of the Rockies, where he wintered. On the 9th of May following, he resumed the journey. The party, consisting of ten men, crossed the mountains, and finally, on the 18th of June, 1793, discovered a navigable river having a true western course. They descended the stream for twenty-five days, but, becoming dissatisfied with the slowness of navigation, determined to take a more direct route to the west. By following an old trail, and afterward descending a small river, the party reached the coast of the Western Ocean in latitude fifty-two degrees twenty minutes, at a place which

had recently been surveyed by Captain Vancouver and called Cascade Canal. Here, on the even surface of an overhanging cliff, the British explorer left a memorial of his discovery in the legend: "Alexander Mackenzie, from Canada, by land, the twenty-second of July, one thousand seven hundred and ninety-three."

Mackenzie supposed that the stream down which he had floated for so many days was the long sought River of the West, and in the map published with Mackenzie's Voyages in 1801, the river partially explored by him is called the Columbia, a dotted line representing its conjectured course from the point reached above to its mouth in latitude fortysix degrees ten minutes. Acting upon this erroneous belief, Mackenzie developed in his book a vast commercial scheme, the outlines of which foreshadow in a remarkable way the course of historical evolution in the fur trade. The scope of country now rendered accessible was so great that it could be successfully exploited only by a concern which commanded an enormous capital. Even the association represented by him, on account of the inconvenient course of transportation by Montreal, to which it was limited, would find itself embarrassed in undertaking such a project, and Mackenzie therefore proposed a union of the Northwest and Hudson's Bay companies. He suggested centring the entire trade, from the Rockies east, at the mouth of Nelson River, on Hudson Bay, by the line of Lake Winnipeg and the Saskatchewan. From the source of the last named river he would pass, either directly west or by the more northerly route discovered in 1793, to the headwaters of the Columbia, which "is the line of communication from the Pacific pointed out by nature, . . . By opening this intercourse between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans,' he says, "and forming regular establishments through the interior, and at both extremes, as well as along the coasts and islands, the entire command of the fur trade of North America might be obtained, from latitude forty-eight degrees north [evidently a misprint for forty-five degrees] to the

pole, except that portion of it which the Russians have in the Pacific. To this may be added the fishing in both seas and the markets of the four quarters of the globe." By this means Great Britain would be recompensed for her heavy expense in exploring the Pacific coast; and the irresponsible American traders would, Mackenzie said," instantly disappear before a well-regulated trade."

Should the Hudson's Bay Company decline to enter into a combination for these beneficent national purposes, so Mackenzie argued, then that corporation ought to be strictly confined, by law, to the territory through which it had been accustomed to operate; and the government ought to concede to the Northwest Company, in view of its assumption of the larger enterprise, a right of way, for transport only, through Nelson River basin to the Atlantic.

Neither of these projects was at once realized and the field west of the Rockies lay uncultivated for more than a decade after Mackenzie's journey to the Pacific. The expedition of Lewis and Clark, who met British traders at Fort Mandan during the winter of 1804-1805, stimulated the "Northwesters" to extraordinary exertions, and in 1806 Simon Fraser, of the Northwest Company, built the first trading post on the "Tacouche Tesse," in about latitude fifty-four degrees. Fraser, like Mackenzie, supposed that this river was the Columbia, until in 1808 he descended to its mouth and reached the ocean in latitude forty-nine degrees instead of forty-six degrees. The stream was then given Fraser's name.

By 1808, the Northwest Company maintained several posts on Fraser River. The region west of the Rockies was known as New Caledonia, and it seemed as if the Canadians were destined soon to reach and overspread the Columbia valley also. Before this could be consummated significant operations elsewhere seriously affected the plans of the British trading company.

The most important immediate effect of the Lewis and Clark expedition was the stimulation of the American fur