Fort Vancouver: Capital of the Oregon Country

Before there was a United States west of the Rockies, there was Fort Vancouver. And for two decades, it was the most powerful institution on the Pacific Coast.

The Hudson's Bay Company established the fort on the north bank of the Columbia in the winter of eighteen twenty-four to eighteen twenty-five. They chose the site deliberately: near enough to the river's mouth for ocean shipping, central enough to control the fur trade from California to Alaska. George Simpson, the company's North American governor, was instrumental in its founding.

For twenty years, Fort Vancouver's chief factor was Dr. John McLoughlin, an Irish-Canadian physician turned fur trader whom Americans would come to call the Father of Oregon. McLoughlin ran an operation that included a school, library, sawmill, and orchards, staffed by workers from many different ethnic and tribal groups. Ships from Hawaii, London, and Boston called regularly at Fort Vancouver's riverfront warehouses.

And then the Oregon Trail migrants began arriving. McLoughlin had been instructed by the Hudson's Bay Company to discourage American settlement, since Britain and the United States still disputed the Oregon Country. McLoughlin ignored those instructions. When exhausted, half-starved wagon trains stumbled into the valley, he reportedly extended them credit and seed and advised them where to farm. He viewed it as humanitarian obligation. The company viewed it as insubordination.

By eighteen forty-six, the boundary treaty placed Fort Vancouver firmly on American soil. The company decamped north to Victoria. McLoughlin left the company and retired to Oregon City, having lost the company's favor over his generosity to the Americans whose settlement had ended British dominion over this coast.

The fort has been reconstructed as a National Historic Site. Walking its palisade walls, you stand at the place where the modern Pacific Northwest began.