Fort Vancouver Cultural Landscape Report

Administrative and Political Context
(continued)

Puget's Sound Agricultural Company

In March of 1832 Chief Factor McLoughlin and several other officers of the Hudson's Bay Company issued a prospectus for "The Oragon Beef and Tallow Company," which would not be associated in any way with the Hudson's Bay Company, but rather would be a private venture financed and operated by McLoughlin and his colleagues. McLoughlin confided to young doctor William Tolmie in the spring of 1833 that "...he [McLoughlin] thinks that when the trade in furs is knocked up which at no very distant day must happen, the servants of Coy. may turn their attention to the rearing of cattle for the sake of the hides and tallow, in which he says business could be carried on to a greater amount, than that of the furs collected west of the Rocky Mountains..." [110] The prospectus described a joint stock company designed for "an export trade with England and elsewhere in tallow, beef, hides, horns &c.," which would be developed through the purchase of seven to eight hundred head of California cattle for breeding stock to be raised and slaughtered in the Oregon Country. [111]

A copy of the prospectus was sent to Governor Simpson who, in the summer of 1834, forwarded it on to London with a recommendation that the Company--not Company employees engaged in a private enterprise--embark on such an undertaking. London flatly rejected the idea of its employees forming their own concern, but did embrace the idea of entering the cattle-raising business for profit, rather than as just a means to self-sufficiency for their Columbia Department--Simpson had actually mentioned the idea of eventually exporting foodstuffs raised in the Columbia to London after his west coast trip in 1824. [112] With the urging of Simpson, who believed cattle could become a "highly" profitable trade for the Company, the Governor and Committee now authorized £300 for McLoughlin to buy cattle--for the Company--but did not direct that the purchase be made immediately. McLoughlin saw no merit in pursuing his ideas for the benefit of the Company, and did not aggressively search for new stock. For a few years the idea was dropped; it was to resurface with the incarnation of the Puget's Sound Agricultural Company in 1838-39. [113]

Although the Hudson's Bay Company's exclusive license for English trade west of the Rockies was not due to expire until 1842, the Governor and Committee decided in 1837 to attempt to secure license renewal, before a change in government could adversely affect the Company's monopoly. At the time, the Company's arrangement with the British government was under fire in Parliament, particularly since fur-trading was not seen as compatible with colonization. [114] To bolster its request, the Company stressed its intent to promote settlement and develop export trade through expansion of agricultural efforts, thereby increasing British interests and influence in the region and reinforcing its physical possession of the territory under dispute with the United States. Simpson reported from his North American headquarters that at Fort Vancouver, "...we are directing our attention to agriculture on a large scale, and there is every prospect that we shall soon be able to establish important branches of export trade from thence in the articles of wool, tallow, hides, tobacco, and grain of various kinds." [115]

The Hudson's Bay Company's changing relationship with the Russian American Company in Alaska provided an additional impetus for expanding agricultural efforts in the Pacific Northwest during this period. For several years the two firms had been engaged in resolving territorial fur trade disputes, and Baron Ferdinand Wrangell of the Russian American Company had expressed an interest in obtaining both British manufactured trade goods and foodstuffs from the Company. [116] Although a formal agreement was not reached until February of 1839, the Governor and Committee were, a year earlier at least, anticipating an agreement which would commit the Company to supplying the Russians with foodstuffs, and not incidentally, exclude American traders in the region. In May of 1838 a new license for a twenty-one year term was granted by the British Government, committing the Company to agricultural expansion.

In the spring and summer of 1838, Chief Factor McLoughlin, on leave in London, met with the Governor and Committee and George Simpson to discuss expanding agricultural efforts in the Columbia Department. To avoid possibly invalidating the Company's charter, which did not provide for using capital for agricultural purposes, a subsidiary enterprise, the Puget's Sound Agricultural Company, was formed; only stockholders and officers of the Hudson's Bay Company were allowed to purchase stock in the new concern. [117] A prospectus for the new business was adopted by a committee of Hudson's Bay Company officers in London on February 27, 1839, with Governor John H. Pelly, Andrew Colvile, and George Simpson listed as the Puget's Sound Agricultural Company's first agents. Under the provisions of the prospectus, the new company would purchase livestock, tools and other agricultural material from the Hudson's Bay Company. Chief Factor McLoughlin was appointed to supervise the new company, in addition to his duties to its parent concern, and was given a £500 annual raise.

Two Hudson's Bay Company establishments were sold to the Puget's Sound Agricultural Company. In March, 1839, McLoughlin was directed to begin aggressive agricultural operations at Cowlitz and at Fort Nisqually, near the present-day towns of Toledo and DuPont, Washington, respectively. Both properties were legally transferred to the Puget's Sound Agricultural Company after the British government granted the company deed of settlement, dated December 23, 1840.

The Hudson's Bay Company was politically committed to encouraging settlement. In addition, it was evident colonists were needed to develop the territory's agricultural potential. However, the Company was adverse to any disruption of the fur trade, and wished to control the number of settlers and their impact on the Company. The terms for immigrant settlers were generous with the loan of seed, livestock, and materials, but the offer allowed only for a lease of land, and one-half of any increase in livestock or agricultural produce, the Puget's Sound Agricultural Company to take the remaining half. [118]

The Company believed its former employees already established on farms in the Willamette Valley were one source of settlers for the lands north of the Columbia River. French Canadians on the Willamette had repeatedly requested the services of a priest from the Bishop of Juliopolis, head of the Roman Catholic missions east of the Rockies, located at the Red River settlement in what is now Canada. [119] In 1837 the Bishop asked the Company to assist the overland passage of two Roman Catholic priests to the Columbia region, which the Company agreed to do if the priests would persuade the Willamette settlers to relocate to the new farm areas north of the Columbia, conditions which were accepted. [120] However, these settlers had no interest in leaving their established and freely-owned farms and nascent communities. As McLoughlin wrote to London in 1840:

If there were more Prairie Land at the Cowelitz it would be possible to encourage emigration to that place but the Puget Sound Association requires all there is and though the soil is equally as good as that of the Wallamette the large extent of the Prairies of the Wallamette and the great abundance of Deer on them and their more beautiful Scenery causes them to be preferred to the Cowelitz and Settlers will never settle on it till the Wallamette is settled or till the wood at the Cowelitz comes in demand... [121]

In an attempt to reinforce Company claims north of the Columbia, responding to indications that a large number of Americans would be migrating to the Oregon Country in 1840 and to a series of resolutions introduced to the United States senate calling for assertion of title to the "Territory of Oregon" in 1838 and 1839, the Company began, in 1839, a campaign to encourage families at its troublesome Red River colony in Rupert's Land to migrate to the Cowlitz. Upon the unsanctioned reassurances by Chief Factor Duncan Finlayson that the colonists' new lands would be sold, rather than leased to them upon settlement of the boundary issue, in the spring of 1841 twenty-one families left Red River under the leadership of James Sinclair. After their arrival at Fort Vancouver they waited for a number of weeks before the party was divided, with fourteen families sent to Nisqually, and the rest to Cowlitz. [122] By the fall of 1843, all the families at Nisqually had left for the Willamette Valley, due to poor weather and subsequent poor crops, livestock disease, and lack of amelioration of their terms by the Company.

Ultimately, the Company's desire to protects its fur-trading interests--viewed as inimicable to settlement--subsumed the political and economic reasons for encouraging settlement by British subjects, and its colonization policy became one of resistance, rather than encouragement. The Puget's Sound Agricultural Company's objectives became strictly economic in nature, and its farms devoted to increasing trade and fulfilling the Russian American Company contract. During this period, the Company sent a small number of skilled laborers--shepherds, dairymen and the like--and families from England to assist with the Puget Sound Agricultural Company's farm projects; these were almost unilaterally engaged under labor contracts, as direct employees of the company.

By 1841 the Hudson's Bay Company's policy was to strictly limit agriculture at the Company fur-trading posts--including Fort Vancouver--to supplying the posts' own needs and for that of the shipping trade. The Puget's Sound Agricultural Company's farms were to be devoted to fulfilling its agricultural contracts and developing an export trade in "...wool, hides, tallow etc..." [123] In practice, however, the officers and servants who worked on the Puget's Sound Agricultural Company's farms, and the equipment used on the farms, were carried on the Hudson's Bay Company books. In addition, farming at the Columbia Department posts capable of producing dairy, beef, grain, and other products was not, during this period, reduced. Although production of grain and other crops increased steadily at Cowlitz Farm and livestock production and processing, particularly sheep and cattle, grew rapidly at Fort Nisqually, the annual results were not sufficient to fulfill the Company's contract with the Russian American Company or other planned export markets on their own, and were supplemented by production from the Hudson's Bay Company post farms, primarily Fort Vancouver, and through Company purchase of wheat from settlers in the Willamette Valley.

Apparently the Puget's Sound Agricultural Company sold its produce to the Hudson's Bay Company, which then marketed and distributed it. In 1844 the Puget's Sound Agricultural Company listed a profit for the first time, and in 1845-46 its shareholders received their first dividend. [124] However, accounting procedures for the divisions between the two companies appear not to have been clear cut--in 1841 the Governor and Committee told Simpson they wanted the departmental accounts between the two companies more distinguished--and it is not clear if the debt owed the Hudson's Bay Company for its initial transfer of livestock, agricultural materials and tools and labor, was ever completely repaid. [125] Because Fort Vancouver was the Columbia Department's principal depot and by far its largest farming operation, the division between Puget's Sound Agricultural Company activities at the post and the post's farming to supply in-country and shipping needs is not clear, but it is evident that Fort Vancouver plains were used to pasture Puget's Sound Agricultural Company sheep, and probably cattle, and that Fort Vancouver grain and other agricultural products, not grown on the account of the Puget's Sound Agricultural Company, were used to fulfill contracts with the Russians and to send to other markets. Likewise, the dairies at Fort Vancouver were established and operated to fulfill the Russian American Company contract.

One goal of the Puget's Sound Agricultural Company was to produce wool for the English market. A large number of sheep were imported from California, most of which were situated at Fort Nisqually, where eventually two Scottish shepherds were sent by London to improve wool production, and purebred rams and ewes were shipped from Great Britain in an attempt to improve the local stock. In 1839, 2,435 pounds of wool from Fort Vancouver were sent to London, followed in successive years by wool produced primarily at Nisqually. The ovine products were not a great commercial success. In 1844, the 8,000 or so pounds of wool and 608 sheepskins shipped from the Columbia were judged as wildly uneven in quality and size by experts examining it in London. [126] Although the sheep business came to be located primarily at Fort Nisqually, sheep farming continued to be a major activity at Fort Vancouver, at least through 1846. In the 1840s, a sheep farm was listed in Fort Vancouver account books, credited "on account" of the Puget's Sound Agricultural Company; in Outfit 1845, six employees, including two shepherds, on the Fort Vancouver labor rolls were employed by the agricultural company. [127] Governor Pelly reported to Lord Palmerston of the British Foreign Office in July of 1846, that the Puget's Sound Agricultural Company had 1,977 sheep at Fort Vancouver, valued at £2,037.

Fort Nisqually

Fort Nisqually, located on the bank of Puget Sound, had been established as a Hudson's Bay Company fur-trading post in 1833, and was selected as a Puget's Sound Agricultural Company farm in 1839 because its site, near large, open plains, was suitable for grazing large numbers of livestock. In the winter of 1840-41 it was transferred from the Hudson's Bay Company to the Puget's Sound Agricultural Company.

Ultimately the farm at Nisqually may have included a total of 261 square miles--at least that was the claim in later testimony. [128] Similar to Fort Vancouver at the peak of its development, the farm at Fort Nisqually included sub-units or farms at varying distances from the main post and development. The post at Fort Nisqually was moved between 1841 and 1843 one mile north of its original site, where water was more readily available; development of the farm and its structures spanned over ten years. By the late 1840s, the central farm included a partially stockaded fort, with residences and storehouses for produce, gardens, about 220 acres of cultivated fields, barns, a slaughter house, sheepfolds, a piggery, a number of livestock pens, and a dairy, and dwellings and outbuildings at its satellite farms.

Before McLoughlin left Fort Vancouver on furlough in the spring of 1838, he sent Captain William Brotchie on the Neriede to Hawaii with a cargo of Fort Vancouver produce and timber, and instructions to purchase sheep. Brotchie eventually purchased sheep from General Vallejo in California, 634 of which survived the voyage north, and were landed at Fort Nisqually in the summer. [129] These rough California woolies became the foundation flock for the P.S.A.C. After the Company committed to large-scale farming, McLoughlin, as manager of the Puget's Sound Agricultural Company, began to enlarge the Company's herds and flocks. Apparently, McLoughlin had been told to move cattle and sheep from Fort Vancouver to Nisqually and the Cowlitz Farm late in 1839; in March of 1840 he wrote Simpson, explaining he had not transferred the livestock to the Puget's Sound Agricultural Company because driving the cattle north in the winter would have resulted in the loss of many animals; he stated he would move them after an inventory at Fort Vancouver was completed, presumably that spring. [130] That summer, he sent clerk Alexander Simpson and the English farmer, James Steel, to California to purchase more sheep for the P.S.A.C.: they bought seven hundred ewes which were loaded on the Columbia at San Francisco Bay, and were brought back to Fort Vancouver in September. They were probably later driven to Cowlitz or Nisqually. In September of 1841 McLoughlin notified London that sheep and cattle were enroute from the south bank of the Columbia to Nisqually, after being delayed by spring floods and the need to keep herders at Fort Vancouver to work the annual summer harvest. [131]

Farming operations at Fort Nisqually were closely supervised by McLoughlin and, by 1842, by Chief Factor James Douglas, also stationed at Fort Vancouver. In 1841-42 Douglas sent a series of missives to the superintendent at Nisqually, Angus McDonald, with specific instructions; for example: "I wrote you on the 16th December to have the wheat field at the Dairy sown with Timothy seed and Clover, and also to set out turnip and Cole roots for seed plants, but I have yet to learn when these objects are likely to receive attention...it is essential to the prosperity of the future crops that the seed be in the ground at the very earliest season. The land should also be manured or the crop will yield a poor return: with this view the strongest of the cattle may be penned at the dairy, as early as the middle of February unless the weather should be severe, when it should be manured and ploughed for the purpose..." [132]

In an attempt to bolster British claims to the area north of the lower Columbia River, the Company brought colonists from the Canadian Red River settlement to Nisqually and to the Cowlitz Farm. The settlers were not impressed with the opportunities offered them, which included plows and other farming tools, loans of pigs, cattle and working oxen, and of seed for cultivation. In the fall of 1842 McLoughlin told London that wheat and pea crops in the Columbia Department were "not so good as usual..." and that the crops of the Red River settlers at Nisqually were "very bad," prompting five to leave for the Willamette Valley. McLoughlin said, "no man who can take a Farm in the Wallamette will remain at the Cowelitz or Nisqually..." [133]

However, livestock production on the Puget's Sound Agricultural Company farm increased steadily in the 1840s. The number of sheep at Nisqually rose steadily: in 1840, there were a little less than one thousand sheep pastured at the post; by 1845, there were almost six thousand sheep at the farm, and almost two thousand head of cattle, both numbers far exceeding the quantity of livestock located at any other post in the Columbia Department, including Fort Vancouver. [134] The shepherds at their outlying stations, were lodged in small wooden houses on wheels, which could be moved from area to area, along with the sheep, which were penned at night to protect them from wolves. The houses were prefabricated at Fort Vancouver in 1842, and shipped from there via the Cadboro to Nisqually. [135]

Cowlitz Farm

Cowlitz portage was the termination point of river travel from the Columbia, and the embarkation stage for the overland route north to Puget Sound. A large prairie was located about a mile from the landing, and from the mid-1830s on, cattle from Fort Vancouver were driven to the site to graze. In the summer of 1838, while Chief Factor McLoughlin was on furlough, James Douglas sent a herd of cattle to the Cowlitz from Fort Vancouver, with "Mr. Ross & eight men with a number of agricultural implements." [136] Farming at the new establishment was already underway when Chief Factor McLoughlin returned to the Columbia from England in 1839, with the instructions to begin intensive farming operations at the Cowlitz, which the Hudson's Bay Company sold to the Puget's Sound Agricultural Company. Chief Trader John Tod had been sent to superintend establishment of the farm in the fall of 1838, and by the time McLoughlin arrived at the Cowlitz in November of 1839: "...[I] found that Mr. Chief Trader Tod had sown 275 bushels of Wheat, which looked as well as any I ever saw he had 200 acres of new land ploughed and which has been cross ploughed during the winter and 135 acres broken up and rails cut and carted to fence these fields." [137] Hudson's Bay Company clerk John Work wrote a colleague, Edward Ermatinger, that fall: "Our friend Tod is superintending a newly established farm on an extensive scale at the Cowlitz..." [138]

The soil at Cowlitz was rich, and far better suited than that of Nisqually's for crop production. Over the years, the Cowlitz farm became the chief grain producer for the P.S.A.C. Land was rapidly put into production: by the spring of 1840, six hundred acres had been ploughed, and by the fall of 1841 one thousand acres were under cultivation. At the time of the 1846-47 inventory, 1,432 1/2 acres were under cultivation. [139] Crops included wheat, oats, barley, peas, turnips, beans, cole seed and potatoes. During later testimony before the British and American Joint Commission, a former employee stated that in 1846 about twelve hundred acres were enclosed "...and subdivided by fences and ditches, into fields of convenient size, say from fifty to one hundred acres. Portions of this land were laid down under cultivated grasses, and the pastures were fully stocked." [140]