Fort Vancouver Cultural Landscape Report

Operations at Fort Vancouver

On March 19, 1825, George Simpson recorded in his journal:

At Sun rise mustered all the people to hoist the Flag Staff of the new Establishment and in presence of the Gentlemen, Servants, Chiefs & Indians I Baptised it by breaking a Bottle of Rum on the Flag Staff and repeating the following words in a loud voice, "In behalf of the On Hudsons Bay Coy I hereby name this Establishment Fort Vancouver God Save King George the 4th" with three cheers. Gave a couple of Drams to the people and Indians on the occasion. The object of naming it after that distinguished navigator is to identify our claim to the Soil and Trade with his discovery of the River and Coast on behalf of Gt Britain. If the Honble Committee however do not approve the Name it can be altered. At 9 o'Clock A.M. took leave of our Friend the Dr, embarked and continued our Voyage... [22]

With that, Simpson departed for the east, leaving Chief Factor John McLoughlin in charge.

Simpson left specific instructions for operating the new post and the trade, and he continued to supervise operations from afar in the following years. Among the instructions included directions to send all available men out on fur-trading expeditions, in part to exploit the fur regions to the south, before the boundary settlement. This left Fort Vancouver short of manpower to complete construction of the post in 1825, and to perform the agricultural tasks to which Simpson had assigned it. In the summer of 1825, McLoughlin reported to London that the staff at the post consisted of himself, a clerk, and nine others. The rest were out on expedition.

Between 1824 and 1827, the settlement of the boundary issue still hung over the new post. McLoughlin limited development of the post--"I erected only such Buildings at this place as are immediately required..." he told London in a September, 1826 letter--apparently anticipating a settlement in which the Columbia would become the boundary, and fur-trading to the south would become impossible, making Fort Vancouver's location at the south edge of the British territory operationally inefficient. However, in August of 1827 the joint-occupation of the disputed territory was indefinitely extended, and it was clear Fort Vancouver could continue to act as a locus from which fur brigades could be sent south, as well as north and east. [23]

Headquarters of the Columbia Department

Details regarding the development of the new post in its first few years are incomplete. It is evident, however, that at that time McLoughlin knew Simpson planned to establish the principal depot of the Columbia Department at the Fraser River, and that Fort Vancouver was only to serve as a temporary depot. This plan was abandoned after Simpson himself, enroute on a return visit to Fort Vancouver in the fall of 1828, determined that the river was unnavigable during his dangerous descent of it. During Simpson's stay at Fort Vancouver in 1828, Fort Vancouver was made the permanent headquarters for the Columbia Department, ensuring its primacy as the principal establishment in the Pacific Northwest and contributing to the decision to move the site of the stockade in 1828-29.

In 1827 the financial accounts of New Caledonia and the Columbia Department were merged--as noted earlier, the two districts were united in terms of provisioning in 1825. To some extent, then, Fort Vancouver, as the principal depot of the Columbia Department, was also the administrative headquarters for New Caledonia, although McLoughlin, as Chief Factor of Fort Vancouver, and later as chief manager of the Columbia Department, did not exercise much administrative control over New Caledonia, apparently by choice, and the chief factors of that district continued to operate without much oversight by McLoughlin throughout McLoughlin's tenure at Fort Vancouver. While Simpson referred to McLoughlin as the "head factor and chief resident-Manager of the Hudson's Bay Company on the western coast of the continent" in 1829, it was not until the 1840s that McLoughlin began to establish policy on his own, and that, ultimately, contributed to his dismissal, or "retirement," from the Company. Nonetheless, by 1829, Fort Vancouver was the headquarters for the Company's operations west of the Rocky Mountains.

From Fort Vancouver, McLoughlin, under Simpson's orders, founded a new post about 28 miles above the mouth of the Fraser River--Fort Langley--in 1827. It was the first of many to be established by McLoughlin, eventually spreading as far as Alaska, all administered from the headquarters at Fort Vancouver.

New Projects

Agricultural operations at Fort Vancouver slowly expanded. From an initial harvest of 900 barrels of potatoes and 9 1/2 bushels of peas in the fall of 1825, by 1828, the post was producing between 800 and 1000 bushels of wheat, "making good flour," and McLoughlin reported yields from fourteen acres of peas, eight acres of oats and four or five acres of barley. [24] The first wheat was planted in in the spring of 1826, and is considered to be the beginning of wheat cultivation in Washington state. In the winter of 1828-29, George Simpson, on a return visit to Fort Vancouver, determined that the Columbia Department was "...independent of foreign aid in regard to the means of subsistence." [25]

One of Simpson's and London's goals was the development of the coastal trade, and to this end the London supply vessel, the William and Ann, was dispatched north to trade for furs in the summer of 1825; it met with little success. The following year retired British navy Lieutenant Aemilius Simpson arrived at Fort Vancouver to captain a vessel being sent from London for use on the coast. Simpson was to report to McLoughlin, and McLoughlin was to direct the Company's west coast trade from that point on. In 1827 a thirty-ton sloop--the Broughton--was built at Fort Vancouver; in 1828 a sixty-ton craft, the Vancouver, was launched. The coastal trade was limited until the 1830s, due to lack of manpower, lack of trade goods, and lack of adequate vessels, but a small start was made in the late 1820s. [26]

In 1826 McLoughlin asked London to ship barrels of salt to Fort Vancouver for use in preserving salmon, for which he felt there might be a market in California. In 1827 he shipped barrels of salted salmon to California, and later to the Hawaiian Islands, although much of the fish was used as provisions for the Company's posts. While Fort Langley became the principal producer of salted salmon, Fort Vancouver was also the site of the first large-scale commercial salmon industry in the Pacific Northwest. McLoughlin also experimented with brewing, using barley grown at Fort Vancouver, apparently as early as 1827. [27]

Flour was apparently produced after the first wheat harvest. Oral tradition claims the first flour mill in Washington state was built at Fort Vancouver by millwright William Cannon; its location at the post is not known. Sometime around 1828-29, a horse or oxen-powered gristmill was built on Fort Plain, north of the new or soon-to-be erected stockade. [28] Also, by 1828, a sawmill was operating on Mill Creek, six miles east of the stockade; plans were already underway to market the milled planks in Hawaii and California, where the price in 1827 for lumber was between forty and fifty dollars per thousand feet. [29]