In spite of Cook’s discovery it took some years for trade to get brisk on this distant coast. No names need concern us in this period except that of John Meares, since it is through him, as Philip Parrish has said in Before The Covered Wagon, “that the current of history runs.” Meares is famed for a number of things, including the launching on this bleak northern shore of the first boat to be built on the Pacific coast; built moreover by fifty Cantonese—the first Chinese laborers to be brought to this country. Word of Meares’s activities up north got about among the Mexican and California Spaniards, and they sent a company north to seize ships, build forts, and in general make it plain to the British that these waters belonged to Spain. Meares heard of it in China and took home a full and angry report to London. It almost caused a European war. Meares insisted that he had purchased Nootka Sound—so named by Captain Cook who spelled it as he thought the Indians pronounced it—and there was no one to prove that he hadn’t, so in the end after some hot words and musket brandishing Spain relinquished her claims. The Nootka Sound Controversy brought Captain George Vancouver up the coast, as representative for England, and Vancouver can never be forgotten here because he managed to give geographic names that have stuck all these years: the mountains Rainier and Baker, Hood Canal, the islands of Whidby and Vashon, Port Townsend and Port Orchard, Admiralty Inlet, Bellingham Bay, and Howe Sound. Vancouver’s lieutenant, William Broughton, named a point on the Columbia River for his master and gave the snowcap he saw in the distance the name of Mt. Hood.
While Spain and England were arguing over their rights, these western waters had begun to give anchorage to Yankee ships whose crews also bartered for furs in summer and wintered in Hawaii. The stage was slowly being set for that markedly bloodless quarrel by which mighty expanding England and the still insignificant but ambitious United States were to determine whose country this Pacific Northwest really was.
THE RIVER OF FABLE THAT REALLY EXISTED
For many years it seemed likely that the tale of a mighty westward-flowing river, rising in a mountain of shining stones and emptying into the great sunset ocean, was but another compound of Indian myth and white man’s dreamings. Perhaps no river in history has enjoyed so much enshrouding of mystery as the Columbia, long called the Oregan or Oregon—a name whose genesis is lost.
There was a Yazoo chief named Moncacht-apé who—sometime during the middle of the eighteenth century—got bored with his restricted life in the valley of the Mississippi and set out to verify tales he’d heard of great oceans to the east and west. He went first to see the Atlantic and reported to a French explorer, who has told his tale for posterity, that his “eyes were too small for his soul’s ease.” He then set off promptly to find the great western body of salt water. He said he got to the Pacific by way of a great westward-flowing river, and if one believes the tale at all it seems likely that this was the Columbia.
Even while the British were still looking for that long-sought Northwest Passage by way of Hudson’s Bay, a Connecticut captain named Jonathan Carver had returned from extensive travels in the interior of America with tales of a great river which he called the Oregan—a name he claimed to have got from Indians. Carver had maps, too, somewhat fanciful ones, and he took his maps and his tales and his mysterious river name with him to London, where perhaps he imagined he would have a better audience. Carver averred that the British planned to send an expedition down this river and establish forts at its mouth. But Captain Cook’s unwitting discovery of fortunes in furs had already begun to turn a tide of mariners toward the Northwest coast. Unhappily for England’s plans the American colonies decided to break their bonds with the mother country and it remained for a Boston fur trader, Robert Gray, to immortalize himself in 1792 by discovering the fabled river—and naming it for his hardy little craft, the Columbia.
Gray, undaunted by the names Cape Disappointment and Deception Bay, with which the explorer Meares left record of his failure to find the River of the West, succeeded in putting his little ship over the bar that hid with such wild fury of foam and wave the spot where the Columbia met the Pacific. Gray sailed twenty-five miles upriver, hoisted the American flag, and planted some Pine Tree shillings in the soil. Vancouver sent an expedition under Broughton up the stream much farther than Gray had gone, to lend weight to England’s possible claims. But the fact that Gray—though only a fur trader without government authority—had been there first was to prove helpful later in establishing America’s colonization rights by virtue of “discovery” rights.
EXPLORERS ON FOOT
No expedition by foot across uncharted terrain can compare in human interest with an American expedition of 1804 and 1805 made by two Virginia gentlemen (one with chronic melancholia), a party of twenty-nine ill-assorted men, and Sacajawea, an Indian woman won for small change in a gambling game. This was the Lewis and Clark expedition which the farsighted president, Jefferson, organized to explore the western part of the American continent, to which he thought the United States had as good a right as any other country. Shrewd Mr. Jefferson concealed his real intentions under a display of interest—quite sincere but secondary—in mastodon bones, botanical specimens, and commercial treaties with the Indians, but he apparently had it in his mind to get Americans into the valley of the Columbia in order to add some “rights by exploration” to that “right by discovery” which Gray’s river trip was believed to be.
Jefferson’s interest in this remote land was probably given impetus by the enthusiasms of an unusual character named John Ledyard whom he met in Paris while serving as ambassador. Ledyard was a well-born adventurer who, though American, had served under English flags and had made the trip with Captain Cook when the possibilities of the fur trade were first perceived. When Jefferson knew Ledyard, he was full of a plan to cross Europe and Siberia to Kamchatka, enlist there on a Russian trader, desert ship somewhere on the west coast, and come back on foot to the American colonies. Poor Ledyard died before he accomplished any of his plans, but he is believed to have sowed in Jefferson’s mind the first seed of the idea of an overland expedition.
The Lewis and Clark trip cost twenty-five thousand dollars and took two years. The leaders left a journal which, oddly enough, had to wait one hundred years for publication. This journal remains one of the great chronicles of human endurance and sound psychological practices under trying conditions. Clark had his negro, York, with him and York was a famous dancer. His solo numbers never failed to please the Indians they encountered en route. In fact York’s black skin, Lewis’s red hair, the company’s possession of such miraculous objects as a compass, a magnet, and a spyglass, played no small part in aweing the Indians into hospitality whenever Sacajawea’s helpful family connections weren’t enough to smooth the way. The company also had a violinist and the violin survived the trip out and back and was often pressed into use to raise the spirits of the men when they flagged from weariness. There were certain medicine show aspects to this important early expedition; the dancing, the freaks, and the distribution by Lewis to the Indians of ointments, eye wash, and Rush’s pills. Lewis and Clark observed Christmas as best they could. Even at Fort Clatsop in sodden weather when they were ridden with fleas, and the only food was moldy elk’s meat, bad fish, and a few roots, they exchanged gifts. Sacajawea, or “Janey” as the Journals sometimes refer to her, gave Clark two dozen white weasel tails, while Lewis offered fleece underwear, and all the men received either tobacco or handkerchiefs.
When Meriwether Lewis got back to the States and made his report to the president, a good part of it was taken up with an analysis of the conditions for fur trading in the far west, and to suggestions as to where and how to establish centers for carrying on a business which was bound to grow increasingly profitable as the use of furs ceased to be a luxury—possible only for the very rich in Europe—and began, instead, to be a fashion.
FURS
In the early years of the fur trade on the west coast the deck of the vessel was the place of business. Bold seamen and traders wove a strange and colorful embroidery of old and new, East and West; London, Canton, Boston, St. Petersburg, Nootka Sound, and the Sandwich Islands. There were chiefs from Owyhee, as