Fort William: Wyeth's Gamble on the Columbia

In eighteen thirty-four, a Boston ice merchant named Nathaniel Wyeth built a fur-trading post called Fort William on Wappatoo Island in what is now the Portland area. Wyeth had arrived with a large party of men and horses, convinced he could challenge the British Hudson's Bay Company for control of the Pacific fur trade. He could not.

The Hudson's Bay Company undercut him at every turn from its base at Fort Vancouver. In eighteen thirty-five the fort was the site of a murder, and the resulting trial became the first Euro-American legal proceeding held in what is now Oregon. By eighteen thirty-seven, Wyeth gave up and leased the post to the very Hudson's Bay Company he had come to beat.

Fort William vanished. Wyeth went home to Cambridge and returned to selling ice.