The Gibraltar of the Columbia
Washington
At the place where the Walla Walla River meets the Columbia, the North West Company built a fort in eighteen eighteen that its own factor described as the Gibraltar of the Columbia. That was not modesty. Donald McKenzie supervised the construction of palisade walls twenty feet high and six inches thick, with bastions housing cannon and water tanks kept ready against fire. It was the most formidable fur-trade post in the Pacific Northwest.
The name was confusing from the start. Fort Nez Percés stood not in Nez Perce territory but on land belonging to the Walla Walla people, whose river ran alongside it. The naming reflected a fur-trade geography of convenience rather than careful ethnographic attention. The Walla Walla themselves traded at the post, as did peoples from across the Columbia Plateau, and for nearly four decades the fort was the pivot point of commerce and power in this corner of the continent.
When the North West Company merged with the Hudson's Bay Company in eighteen twenty-one, the HBC took over operations. The wooden fort burned in eighteen forty-one, shortly after an American naval expedition passed through during the great Wilkes Expedition survey of the Pacific Northwest. The HBC rebuilt it in adobe brick and renamed it Fort Walla Walla. From its walls the company ran intensive beaver-trapping campaigns across the Snake River country, part of a deliberate strategy to trap the region clean as a buffer against American expansion.
The strategy delayed but did not stop American settlement. After the Cayuse War and the violence that followed the Whitman Mission massacre in eighteen forty-seven, the region became untenable for the HBC. The Hudson's Bay Company gave up Fort Walla Walla in eighteen fifty-seven, after it was burned again at the start of the Yakima War. The site is now submerged beneath Lake Wallula, the reservoir created by McNary Dam in nineteen fifty-four.
Nothing remains above water. But the place where the Gibraltar of the Columbia once stood is still out there, beneath the surface of the river, at the exact confluence that made it matter.
