Fur, Flags, and the Oregon Country

In the spring of eighteen eleven, a brigade of Pacific Fur Company traders, working for John Jacob Astor, paddled up the Columbia River from the coast and built a trading post at the confluence of the Okanogan River. They called it Fort Okanogan, and it was the first permanent American settlement in what would one day become Washington State, though at the time, neither Americans nor British could say for certain whose land it was.

For the first half of the nineteenth century, this entire corner of the continent was simply called the Oregon Country, and it belonged, by treaty, jointly to the United States and Great Britain. That arrangement suited the Hudson's Bay Company fine. The Company ran the region like a private empire from Fort Vancouver, just across the Columbia from present-day Portland. Its chief factor, John McLoughlin, a towering white-haired man called the White-Headed Eagle by the local tribes, dispensed credit, medicine, and authority to trappers, settlers, and chiefs alike.

The great game of the fur trade was beaver. European and American hatmakers could not get enough of the dense, felted pelts, and the Company's brigades stripped the streams of the Pacific Northwest with systematic efficiency. By the eighteen thirties the beaver were thinning, and so was the Company's monopoly on influence.

American missionaries and settlers began arriving in the late eighteen thirties. Marcus and Narcissa Whitman established a mission near present-day Walla Walla in eighteen thirty-six. Then came the Oregon Trail emigrants, thousands of them by the mid-eighteen forties, and suddenly joint occupation was untenable. The boundary was settled in eighteen forty-six: the forty-ninth parallel from the Rockies to the Strait of Georgia, with a dip around Vancouver Island. The Hudson's Bay Company moved its Pacific headquarters north. Washington Territory was organized in eighteen fifty-three. The era of competing empires gave way, slowly, to the era of American settlement.