PWAC Victoria: Tom Koppel, Writing Sample

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The Fort That Fur Built

by Tom Koppel ©

Visit Washington State's Fort Vancouver and learn how men's hats helped open the American West. Published in Historic Traveler, Feb. 1998.

The Union Jack snaps in the breeze above the high wooden walls of the huge stockade. A bag-piper in kilt and tartan cap strikes up "God Save the Queen." Several hundred people, many of them in 19th-century dress, sing along to celebrate Queen Victoria's birthday.

"Give three cheers for her Majesty," cries out a man portraying Captain Thomas Baillie of the Royal Navy. He bakes under the hot May sun in his dark blue uniform with woolen vest and gold-trimmed hat. But he stands ramrod straight with a very British stiff upper lip. His English accent is authentic. "Hip, hip, hurrah," echoes the crowd. The piper strikes up "Scotland the Brave." Then Captain Baillie toasts the Queen and gives a short speech warning the United States not to trifle with Britain.

We are at Fort Vancouver, a former Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) depot and fur trading post overlooking the Columbia River in Vancouver, Washington. Today, reconstructed from photos, drawings and archeology, it is a U.S. National Historic site where park rangers and local volunteers in period costume show what the fur trade was like in 1845. We're here to re-live a unique time in American history--when French, Hawaiian and Iroquois were spoken in Washington and Oregon, when the Royal Navy flexed its muscles on the west coast and when, but for the stroke of a diplomat's pen, Canada almost extended to the banks of the Columbia.

The fort has long held a special fascination for me. I researched and wrote a book on the little-known tale of Hawaiian pioneers in the West; most came to North America as contract laborers with the HBC. I browsed the HBC journals and pored over the handwritten account books listing the names, wages and skills of the hundreds of men who toiled here--the dry, sketchy details of long-forgotten lives.

But only now--walking into the vertical-log stockade, as large as four football fields, with substantial hewn-log workshops, warehouses and residences--do I fully grasp the ambitious scale of the enterprise. Outside the walls, a period garden and orchard hint at what was once miles of farmland. In the 1840s this remote outpost of the British Empire was the largest and most cosmopolitan settlement between San Francisco and Sitka, Alaska. It was the fur trade, far in advance of homesteaders and miners, that really opened the West. And all to satisfy a fashion for tall, elegant hats of beaver skin.

European hatmakers pressed the thick underhair of beaver into a velvety, waterproof felt that lasted a lifetime. The hapless rodents were trapped to extinction in England by the 16th century, but beaver pelts from eastern Canada and upstate New York soon filled the void. In 17th-century London, beaver was so valuable the floors of hatter shops were scoured for lost hairs. Hats cost so much they were willed from father to son.

To satisfy this lucrative market, investors with a royal charter established the first HBC posts on Hudson Bay in 1670. Trading knives, axes, guns and blankets to Indian trappers, they shipped hundreds of thousands of beaver pelts a year back to London. For 150 years the HBC pushed its network westward into virgin fur territory, competing first with freelance French voyageurs and then with the well-organized Montreal-based North West Company. Farther south, American traders, or "mountain men," moved up the Missouri to exploit the beaver ponds of the Rockies.

The last big prize was the vast Columbia drainage basin. In 1811, tycoon John Jacob Astor established the first American posts there, but these were captured by the Nor' Westers in the War of 1812. The HBC absorbed the North West Company in 1821, creating a quasi-military business empire with 173 posts stretching over nearly three million square miles. By then, Britain and the U.S. had agreed to "joint occupancy" of the Columbia region. But in 1825 the HBC, determined to dominate, built Fort Vancouver one hundred miles above the mouth of the Columbia and intentionally trapped out beaver stocks in advance of American penetration. For two wildly profitable decades, furs flowed into the fort from some two dozen posts in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and British Columbia.

I peek into the baling room, where a young man in French-style cap and sash shows me a beaver skin stretched on a hoop. "The fur brigades would bring in 90-lb. bales of furs," says summer ranger Jon Burpee, who portrays one of the many French-Canadian employees, Joseph Bull. "A clerk would grade them, and laborers like me--they were called engagés, or milieus, for the middle position in a canoe--would take them outside and beat out all the moths and flies and fleas," then repack them for shipment to London. "For Joseph Bull," he smiles, "this would have been a good day. He didn't have to work on Queen Victoria's birthday, and there would have been an allotment of rum."

"Bonjour, Père Blanchet," he calls out to a chunky bearded French-Canadian priest in black cassock, "comment allez-vous." Also speaking French were the Métis from the Canadian prairies, people of mixed white and Indian blood who were famed for their canoeing skills. Another large contingent of laborers was British, mainly Scots from the Hebrides and Orkney islands. There were also Iroquois Indians from eastern Canada.

But the largest group at Fort Vancouver was the Hawaiians, who called themselves "Kanakas," the Hawaiian word for "person" or "human being." The HBC even hired a native Hawaiian minister and gave him his own Owhyhee church within the stockade. I first heard about the Hawaiians on the west coast when I moved to British Columbia and was caretaker of a small island. To my amazement, I learned that its first owner was a Hawaiian, one of dozens who homesteaded in B.C. after working for the HBC.

By 1845-46, Hawaiians were almost half the labor force at Fort Vancouver. Nearly all ships sailing to the northwest coast stopped in Honolulu, where an HBC office recruited young men looking for work and adventure. They proved to be excellent seamen and loyal fighters for the HBC. One fur trade clerk described them as "not wanting in courage, particularly against the Indians, for whom they entertain a very cordial contempt, and if they were let loose against them, they rush upon them like tigers."

Like the Métis and whites, though, including HBC officers, many Hawaiians took Native American wives--either in sanctified marriages or common-law--and had children. Like all laborers, they lived outside the stockade in a scattering of shacks and cabins called the Kanaka Village. Their wives cooked for them and tended small garden plots to supplement their HBC food ration. The men hunted and fished in their spare time. Many never returned to Hawaii, but after fur trade service settled throughout the northwest. Kalama, Washington is named for a Hawaiian who settled there. Kanaka descendants in Washington and B.C. gather annually for a bash cum luau, complete with hula dancing. A plaque at Fort Vancouver commemorates the Hawaiian legacy.

As I stroll around the compound, the mountains of hand-split firewood and shout of commands help me imagine the drudgery and abasement these men faced. The work day, marked by tolling the bell atop its tall tower, went from dawn to dusk, six days a week. Infractions of the army-like discipline were punished by tying the culprit to a cannon in front of the Chief Factor's residence and flogging him mercilessly.

It was very different for the traders, clerks, doctors, ship's officers and other HBC "gentlemen," virtually all of them Englishmen or Scots. They lived within the stockade and enjoyed sumptuous meals and fine wines in the attractive Chief Factor's house with its elegant windows and shaded porch festooned with grape vines. "It was really a duplex," says Andrew Reed, who portrays a clerk. "The Chief Factor, Dr. John McLoughlin, and his assistant, James Douglas, both lived there with their wives and children."

Women also worked inside the fort. In the adjacent kitchen, the part-Indian "country wife" of an engagé heats water over an open fire. Portrayed by volunteer Barbara Dalenberg, she cleans up after baking the "Queen's Cake," a sweet, unleavened loaf of flour, sugar, cream, eggs and currants that was served on festive occasions. A separate bakehouse nearby, with larger ovens, turns out great quantities of sea biscuits, a durable flat cracker that was an important ration for post laborers, canoe brigades and sailors.

Tagging along with a group of school children, I squeeze into the gentlemen's hospital, where surgeon Forbes Barkley (portrayed by volunteer Fred Bridges), proudly displays his diploma from the University of Edinburgh. Small labeled drawers contain his medicines: spermiceti, mercurial ointment, sulfate of magnesia, Spanish soap and dozens of other exotic ingredients. "Here's some mint tea I've made," he says to a young visitor. "This will take care of your headache--unless someone whacks you on the head with a club." "Back then," he adds, "they'd often bleed people." He pulls out a couple of egg-sized glass bleeder cups. "I'd open up a vein and heat a cup, which then made a vacuum when it cooled. The blood would be sucked up into the cup. The idea was to remove the bad blood from the body." The listening children laugh nervously. "Probably a number of my patients died earlier than they should have," he quips.

Acrid coal smoke pours from the chimneys of the blacksmith shop, run by the Fort Vancouver Blacksmiths' Guild. "This was the largest manufacturing facility west of the Rockies," says volunteer Don McDonald. "The blacksmiths made tools of all kinds, repaired the traps and kept them in working order." He shows me a nasty-looking handmade beaver trap and explains how the spring-loaded contraption was set near a beaver den. A piece of wood was scented with oil from a beaver's musk gland and hung over the trap to lure the animal to its demise.

All the coal and iron for the smiths came around Cape Horn from England, two ships a year. The sandbar blocking the mouth of the Columbia was a major problem. "One ship waited out on the ocean for two months to get over the bar," says McDonald. "Conditions just weren't right." Finally, it gave up, sailed to Hawaii and sold its cargo. "So the supplies the blacksmiths were waiting for never got here. It took two years between the time you ordered something and the time you expected to see it here. If it was sold someplace else, it took two years more."

These long supply lines were a weak link for the HBC on the west coast. Moreover, by the mid-1840s the best furs were gone, and the HBC was becoming more of an agricultural and mercantile operation. Fort Vancouver's grazing lands had thousands of head of cattle and sheep, enough to feed itself and sell surpluses to the Russians in Alaska. Its sawmill sent shiploads of lumber to fast-growing Honolulu. And, increasingly, it sold tools, ammunition and other basic supplies to the thousands of American settlers who were pouring over the Rockies and into Oregon's lush Willamette Valley.

American expansion proved to be Fort Vancouver's undoing. The election of 1844 brought President James Polk to office on the campaign slogan "54-40 or fight." This meant a U.S. claim to all land from northern California to Alaska. Britain was willing to concede today's Oregon but expected the boundary to follow the Columbia River, leaving it what is now Washington and B.C. While negotiations dragged on, Britain anchored the 18-gun sloop Modeste below Fort Vancouver as a deterrent.

Which is why, on Queen Victoria's birthday, 1845, the Modeste's Captain Baillie (portrayed by English-born Nick Peck, president of the volunteer Friends of Fort Vancouver), feels obliged to add a sobering note to his speech honoring the queen. "I want you to know," he tells the crowd, "that in this corner of the British Empire, her Majesty's interests are well represented by the presence of my ship. Although we are armed and ready, should there be any cause for a confrontation, we are here in peace. And if any of you Americans are sending word back to Mr. Polk, please tell him that negotiations should concentrate on a line farther south than 54-40." Shouts of "hear! hear!" arise from the clusters of gentlemen and engagés alike.

In the end, though, a lone gunboat was no match for the spirit of manifest destiny backed by a flood of American settlers. To avoid war, Britain and the U.S. compromised. The Oregon Treaty of 1846 established today's border along the 49th parallel of latitude. The HBC gradually withdrew northward, moving its western headquarters to Fort Victoria on Vancouver Island. The Chief Factor of 1845, Dr. McLoughlin, quit the HBC, became an American citizen and settled nearby as the "Father of Oregon." His assistant, James Douglas, moved north and became the first Governor of British Columbia.

The fort itself was neglected as the HBC scaled down its operations, then turned the post over to the U.S. Army in 1860. With no use for the old, rotting structures, the stockade and buildings were eventually torn down and burned. But the ongoing modern reconstruction gives us a poignant glimpse of the fort's last years of glory.

I climb the stairs of the three-storey bastion and sight along the small cannons that command all approaches. It dawns on me that these guns were never fired in anger. Instead, for all the fortification and preparedness, all the pomp and grandeur, Fort Vancouver slipped peacefully into oblivion, doomed not by direct attack or commercial failure, but by considerations of geopolitics negotiated a continent away. Like General Douglas MacArthur's old soldiers who never die, it just faded away.

Tom Koppel
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Last updated: April 22, 2002 http://www.islandnet.com/pwacvic/koppel04.html