Unit 2 reflection

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Chapter Title: Assertion and Division: Oregon and the Northern Boundary

Book Title: The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History Book Subtitle: Volume 2: Continental America, 18001867 Book Author(s): D. W. MEINIG Published by: . (1993) Yale University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hk0p1.12

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ASSERTION AND DIVISION: OREGON 103

Rush that actually broke down the barrier. Squatters swarmed into the area, and before any further negotiations with the Indians had been undertaken, before any land was legally open to Whites, Congress took all of the land north of 37°N between the Missouri and the Continental Divide and created Kansas and Ne^ braska territories. The immediate result was anarchy: a lawless scramble for lands, bloody competition between organized groups (that between pro-slavery and free- soil settlers being the only part commonly featured in American histories), and relentless despoliation of Indians and their properties. Amid this disaster, treaties of removal, drastic reduction, or individual allotment were forced upon every tribe north of the Neosho. By the time federally surveyed land was actually put on the market in late 1856 there were tens of thousands of White residents, a dozen substantial towns, and a major settlement district extending as far west as the new army post of Fort Riley at the head of navigation on the Kaw.

And so the basic concept of the West as a designated geopolitical territory for the "Preservation and Civilization of the Indians" was shattered. The Indian titles to these lands in the West were even less substantial than they had been in the East because they "had no foundation in antiquity. The Government gave them and, when it so pleased, defied them. As a consequence, before the primary removals had all taken place, the secondary had begun, and the land that was to belong to the Indian in perpetuity was in the white man's market." This Indian Territory was a formal official protectorate (or, more accurately, a set of protectorates), but the United States refused to uphold its part of the treaty obligations. It was a deliberate dereliction. When the Indian commissioner and his agents pleaded for help in stemming the turmoil, the secretary of the Interior (to whose department the Indian Office had been transferred in 1849) advised President Franklin Pierce that it was not appropriate to use the military forces at Fort Leavenworth to expel squatters and trespassers because such action would be "discordant to the feelings of the people of the United States."

6. Assertion and Division: Oregon and the Northern Boundary

In 1830 an eighty-page booklet entitled A Geographical Sketch of that Part of North America Catted Oregon appeared in Boston bookshops. As the title might suggest, it dealt with an area uncertain in name or nature to Americans. The booklet was a propaganda tract by Hall Jackson Kelley, a Massachusetts schoolman who had become obsessed with the topic of Oregon. Its descriptions were crafted for use in fervent discussions and agitations, and it helped confirm that name as well as assert American claims to the Northwest Coast.

The word Oregon was of obscure, apparently Indian, origin. Although it had

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104 EXTENSION: A CONTINENTAL EMPIRE

appeared occasionally in some form, it had remained unfamiliar to the general public until it resounded in William Cullen Bryant's poem Thanatopsis in 1817 (the very year Hall Kelley first read Lewis and Clark and underwent a change of life). Thereafter it began to emerge as the preferred American term for this large, ambiguous area. Congressman John Floyd's bill in 1822 had proposed the creation of a "Territory of Origon." A few years later William Darby included notice of the "Basin of Columbia, or Territory of Oregon" in his View of the United States, Historical Geographical, and Statistical (1828)—but gave it only 4 of his 634 pages because "that imperfectly explored territory. . . appears at present as if on another planet." The name continued to be applied to the river (as in Thanatopsis) as well as the region, but the American designation "Columbia" was more generally accepted in Europe and America for the famous River of the'West. However, the main settlement of that territory asserted, quite by design (and to Kelley's alarm), another presence: Fort Vancouver—so named, as the governor of the Hudson's Bay Company put it, "to identify our Claim to the Soil and Trade with Lt. Broughton's [of Captain George Vancouver's expedition] discovery and Survey." In the 1830s this expanding cluster of facilities and fields overlooking the Columbia (and over- looked from either side by the towering snow-capped peaks bearing other pres- tigious British names: St. Helens [after the ambassador to Madrid] and Hood [Lord of the Admiralty]—Kelley tried to get these renamed for American presidents) would become a major focus of the geopolitical competition implicit in this regional toponymy.

The founding of Fort Vancouver marked a change in regional strategies. The initial focus had been upon the obvious: the mouth of*the Columbia River. That seemed the key point for competitive continental programs, as Astoria—Fort George and repeated calls in Congress for a military post there attested. But experience in that locale and expanding knowledge of the Pacific Slope brought a shift to a site upriver. The important difference was not in the river itself but in climate and countryside. It was a change from the beclouded, rain-soaked, densely forested, coastal region (Lewis and Clark had reported at length on their miserable winter there) to the great lowland in the lee of that rugged margin, a region with half the rainfall and considerably more sunshine, yet still shielded by the even greater mountain wall to the east from the drier, hotter, and colder conditions of the continental interior. This lowland area was part of the remarkably mild mar- itime zone blessed with "that surprising difference between the climates on the western and eastern sides of the continent"; this northwest coast, it soon became common to observe, had "a climate much like England" (two centuries earlier, Western Europeans had been surprised—shocked—at the harshness of climate they had found on the eastern side of North America). This moderation of climate was accompanied by a more attractive landscape, intermediate in kind between the

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ASSERTION AND DIVISION: OREGON 105

almost impenetrable rain forests of the coastal margins and the extensive deserts and grasslands east of the Cascade Range, and best exhibited in the Willamette Valley (Kelley's Multnomah valley: the two names, both Indian in origin, were used interchangeably for several decades), a broad lowland extending 100 miles south from Fort Vancouver. The mountains bounding the valley were luxuriantly covered in fir, spruce, and cedar, but its floodplain and valley floor, isolated buttes, and gentle foothills carried a mixture of oak woodlands and open prairies, laced with many streams and offering a variety of soils. The Willamette Valley was the southern section of a great structural trough between the Coast Range and the Cascade Range. To the north the wetter, more forested and gravelly Cowlitz Plains led to the deepened and largely drowned glaciated lowlands of Puget Sound, which was itself the southerly compartment of the spectacular landscapes of deep water, towering forests, and mountain walls extending northward to Alaska

(%. ID. Fort Vancouver was located, therefore, at the intersection of the two great

natural axes of the Oregon country: where the mighty Columbia flowing westward through the mountains to the sea crossed the north-south lowland trough—and, more exactly, a location almost opposite the junction of the Willamette and Columbia rivers. By the mid-1830s, a decade after its founding, many of the virtues of this district were apparent in the considerable complex spread along the north bank of the Columbia. The main post was a large stockaded rectangle enclosing offices, stores, workshops, and residences of company officers. Nearby were the workers* cabins aligned on broad streets ("the whole looks like a very neat and beautiful village"), more workshops, bams, and a boathouse, and farther out a busy sawmill (with mainly Hawaiian laborers). About 1,000 acres were under cultiva- tion, yielding grain, peas, potatoes, garden and orchard produce; 2,000 more were enclosed for livestock. Twenty miles to the south, at the Falls of the Willamette, a gristmill and sawmill had been set up, and farther on, where the valley suddenly broadens, was an informal settlement of French Canadians—retired employees of the Hudson's Bay Company. In total nearly 1,000 people resided in and around this primary focus of the Northwest Coast, the center of a geographic system gathering produce from much of the Pacific Slope, trading with Alaska, California, and Hawaii, and maintaining annual contact with London, York Factory, and Montreal (Governor Simpson's winter residence).

Fort Vancouver was an impressive, thriving nucleus, the capital of an immense region, but it is important to understand that it was also something else: it was a company town, not a rooted colony (fig. 12). It was the creation of private enter- prise, its purpose was profit, its people were intended to be sojourners not settlers, personnel on assignment who were subject to recall and reassignment to other stations. The thriving farms and mills were a branch of the fur business, designed to

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11. Oregon Borderlands.

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ASSERTION AND DIVISION: OREGON 107

reduce the costs of the main enterprise. The settlement up the Willamette was a reluctant answer to a social problem: what to do with retired employees and their Indian wives and mixed-blood children. Setting them up on farms in the valley was not calculated to initiate a colony in a strategic area; it was designed to remove them far enough away so as not to be a nuisance around the main base of opera- tions. That Fort Vancouver and its Willamette outliers might be transformed into something more permanent, that indeed it was becoming more and more like a commercial town and colonial nucleus, that, given the quasi-governmental role of the Hudson's Bay Company, there was a good deal of the symbol and substance of

12. Fort Vancouver. About 1845 an unknown artist painted this portrait of the headquarters of the Columbia Department at the peak of its development. The view is from the higher terrace on the north (where the U.S. Army would later establish Vancouver Barracks) overlooking the majestic Columbia. The Willamette, running along the foot of the low mountains in the background, converges with the main river about four miles downstream to the right. In the foreground are two common sights of this British North American system: a high-wheeled Red River cart, and an Indian or metis man on horseback with his woman following on foot. (Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)

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108 EXTENSION: A CONTINENTAL EMPIRE

empire about it, that such a British nucleus must have some bearing upon an eventual partition of Oregon were matters of which the Hudson's Bay Company leaders were well aware and increasingly concerned. In 1838 the governor and committee summoned George Simpson, governor of American operations, and John McLoughlin, chief factor at Fort Vancouver, to London for consultation on geopolitical strategies to cope with impending problems in their Columbia Depart- ment.

At that time there were probably fewer than forty Americans—men, women, and children—in all of Oregon, none of whom had been there for more than three or four years. Out of such a meager presence was an American pressure generated. Indeed, one might say that American success in the competition for Oregon came very directly out of apparent American failures—even an interrelated set of fail- ures.

One of these notable and pertinent failures was Hall Jackson Kelley, the man who worked so relentlessly for an American Oregon. He had prospered enough from the writing of school textbooks to devote his attention to the cause. He lobbied in Washington for government aid in establishing a colony, organized the American Society for Encouraging the Settlement of the Oregon Territory, and shortly after publication of his Geographical Sketch issued "A General Circular to all Persons of good character who wish to Emigrate. . . ," inviting them to join him in forming a settlement uto be commenced in the Spring of 1832, on the delightful and fertile banks of the Columbia River." But no government aid was forthcoming, and his attempts to form an expedition were unsuccessful; Kelley himself got there after a dispiriting journey of two years by way of New Orleans, Mexico, and California, yet he was considered by those in charge at Fort Vancouver to be as sick in mind as he obviously was in body, and after four strained months they shipped him back to Boston.

But Kelley had a direct influence upon a fellow Yankee of different talents and temperament: Nathaniel Wyeth, a prosperous young Cambridge entrepreneur (his ingenuity had helped "create an extensive export ice business). Wyeth became interested in Oregon through Kelley but soon gave up on him as an expedition leader, organized his own company, raised capital, and set out in 1832 to engage in the fur business. He joined the annual caravan to the Rocky Mountain rendezvous, and with the help of some experienced trappers, he and a few companions even- tually arrived at Fort Vancouver, only to find that the supply ship he had sent out from Boston had been lost. Wyeth spent several months in Oregon and saw enough to induce him to return to Boston, reorganize, and set out again in 1834 with a larger company that included two eminent scientists (a botanist and an ornitholo- gist) and five Methodist missionaries. Unable to sell a load of trade goods to the American company at the rendezvous, as he had expected, Wyeth built his own

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ASSERTION AND DIVISION: OREGON 109

post, Fort Hall, on the upper Snake River, Moving on to the Columbia, he constructed Fort William on an island at the mouth of the Willamette (six miles from Fort Vancouver) and set about developing a salmon fishery and a sawmill. Wyeth soon found that although he was hospitably received and given some assistance by the chief factor, he was dogged with difficulties (seventeen of his men died from disease or accidents) and quite unable to compete in the fur trade or sustain his other enterprises, and in 1836 he gave up, sold out to the British company, and returned home. As a commercial challenge, Wyeth's adventure had been no more effective than other occasional American interlopers1 forays into Hudson's Bay Company territories.

The Rev. Jason Lee and his Methodist brethren who attached themselves to the Wyeth expedition were intending to establish a mission in the upper Columbia country. They were responding to what had been interpreted and widely publicized as a call from some Flathead Indians for Christian teachers, but after a stay at Fort Vancouver they decided for various reasons to begin their work in the Willamette Valley near a small Calapooya Indian village on the edge of French Prairie, the Canadian retiree settlement. There were in fact few Indians left in the valley or lower Columbia following devastating epidemics in 1829-32 (McLoughlin esti- mated that nine out of ten had died); and in terms of Christianizing the native population, this Methodist effort, as well as that of several other Protestant mis- sions soon initiated east of the Cascades, was a failure. But these mission stations were intended to support the missionaries as well as to teach the arts of Christian civilization to the Indians, and as agricultural settlements those in the Willamette Valley were not only successful, they were soon famous as such.

Despite its failures, the second Wyeth expedition may be seen as a telling display of the range of American interests in Oregon: fur trade, salmon fishery, lumbering, Pacific commerce, farming, science, Christian philanthropy, and all of this in some degree suffused with an American national purpose so shrilly proclaimed by Hall Keliey and other expansionists. Because of the national attention they attracted, these unsuccessful private initiatives helped mightily to impel the kind of Ameri- can reach for Oregon that Congress had so far failed to undertake. Wyeth's testi- mony as to the character of Oregon was drawn upon by various congressional committees, and it was more reliable than most. He offered a reasonable appraisal of its regional qualities, emphasized the power of the Hudson's Bay Company, and stated bluntly that insofar as relations with the Indians were concerned, "the Americans are unknown as a nation, and, as individuals, their power is despised by the natives of the land." In late 1835 President Jackson, responding in part to the returned Keliey's cries about British tyrannical domination, commissioned William Slacum as his personal agent to inquire about the settlements on the "Oregon or Columbia river." Slacum arrived there by ship in December 1836 and

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110 EXTENSION: A CONTINENTAL EMPIRE

stayed just three weeks, but he was thereby able to testify about the "extraordinary mildness of the climate" and richness of the pastures even in winter, as well as the thriving activities in and around Fort Vancouver. The missionaries wrote many letters and reports that were widely reprinted in eastern papers and thereby greatly magnified public interest in, and information about, Oregon. In 1838 Jason Lee returned East for an extensive lecture tour and lured reinforcements for the Meth- odist program as well as a small party of settlers from Illinois. By then it was becoming clear that the Oregon mission had evolved into an American agri- cultural colony. The settlers themselves had no doubt about what they were creating; as their petition to Congress seeking the extension of American laws and courts phrased it: "We flatter ourselves that we are the germe of a great State." Senator Lewis Linn of Missouri had already begun a major push in Congress to assure them of that, with a bill calling for the formal establishment of Oregon Territory, a port of entry, and military occupation.

The Hudson's Bay Company thus had good reason to reassess its position on th Northwest Coast. The fur resources of the Columbia country were no longer of great value (and changes in fashion were depressing the market for beaver), but the Columbia River remained the trunk line of operations on the Pacific Slope, Fort Vancouver the key location (and a major investment), and the sustained British presence a powerful claim to territory. If there was no way the company could stem the influx of emigrants from the United States who were responding to "the overcharged pictures of [Oregon's] fertility and commercial importance," there was a reasonable hope of holding the Americans south of the Columbia. To do so the British position north of the river would need to be substantially augmented. Accordingly, the Puget Sound Agricultural Company was organized as a subsidiary to develop a large livestock operation at Nisqually (an earlier outpost near the southern end of the sound) and a colony of farmer-settlers in the lowland corridor at Cowlitz. There was a new economic rationale for this program, for the Hudson's Bay Company had signed a contract with the Russian American Company to provide subsistence for the latter's Alaskan operations. But the main concern was geopolitical, as the directors reaffirmed in a letter to McLoughlin: "We consider it of the utmost importance for various reasons, but especially in a political point of view to form a large settlement at the Cowlitz portage as early as possible, as the fact of a numerous British agricultural population being actually in possession there would operate strongly in favor of our claims to the territory on the Northern bank of the Columbia River." Their first thought was to bring in colonists from Scotland and England, but they soon turned to a more ready source of experienced North American farmers: the Red River Settlement. The first contingent (21 families, 116 persons) arrived overland from Assiniboia in 1841 and was apportioned be- tween Nisqually and Cowlitz. At the same time, two Roman Catholic priests sent

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ASSERTION AND DIVISION: OREGON 111

out earlier from Red River were called upon to help induce the retired employees in the Willamette Valley to move north to the Cowlitz colony.

Thus, thirty years after the brief encounter between the Astorians and Nor'westers a new confrontation in the Columbia country was apparent. The ventures of a miscellany of Americans in the British company's monopoly territory had turned into competitive colonizations—and Christianizations, for the Protes- tant and Roman Catholic missionaries had a keen competitive, national, geo- strategic view of their tasks. Rather suddenly, momentarily, there seemed to be a balance of forces and an obvious basis for geographical partition (fig. 13). Two notable visitors to Oregon in that year, 1841, were important representatives of these contending powers. Sir George Simpson arrived overland from Montreal and paused to assess the state of affairs in the Columbia Department en route to inspect new company trading posts in Alaska and California (San Francisco Bay). At Fort Vancouver he encountered Lieutenant Charles Wilkes and various members of the United States Exploring Expedition. Wiikes was the naval commander of this American undertaking modeled on the great geographic expeditions of James Cook and the comte de La Perouse. Carrying an impressive array of natural scien- tists, topographers, and artists, it was a conscious assertion of national power and pride. Authorized by President Jackson in 1836, the fleet of six ships had sailed from Norfolk in 1838, made extensive surveys of Antarctica, the South Pacific, and the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), and was now carrying out its orders "to direct your course to the Northwest Coast of America" and make a careful examination of "the territory of the United States on the seaboard, and of the Columbia River." Simpson and Wilkes were both strong, assertive personalities, and they had little time for each other, but they exchanged some views, and the very presence of such an official American party making an extensive reconnaissance of Oregon (several detachments ranged into the interior east of the mountains), together with the growing American presence in the Willamette, had an effect upon Simpson. He was not ready to yield on the Columbia as the appropriate boundary between the two sovereignties, but he was now less confident, and as a precautionary measure, he urged that an alternative base be set up on Vancouver Island. That idea had been proposed as early as 1839 when it became apparent that "the influx of strangers to the Columbia" might endanger the company's operations even if the river did become the boundary. Wilkes, on the other hand, while not a forceful advocate for the American colonists (having received the hospitality and as- sistance of the British company at every post, he thought the settlers' complaints were petty or unfounded), was outspoken in his view that the United States must never give up Puget Sound, an opinion based on the expedition's confirmation of its magnificent harbors and the experience of losing a ship trying to enter the Columbia ("mere description can give little idea of the terrors of the bar of the

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ASSERTION AND DIVISION: OREGON 113

Columbia"). Thus the British expert turned to a strategy of retreat from positions long held, while the American Official asserted the national necessity of lands never occupied by its citizens.

From this point, developments in Oregon, in national politics, and in diplo- matic relations between the two powers rapidly brought the issue to a decision. The trickle of American farmer-emigrants became a flood. A party of a hundred or so arrived in 1842, getting wagons as far as Fort Hall. Some were dissatisfied with what they found and left for California, but that fall the St. Louis newspapers reported that much larger emigrations "to that celebrated region" were being organized, and throughout the western states "the Oregon fever" was raging. In 1843 the first "great migration"—nearly 1,000 people—took place (getting their wagons, for the first time, as far as The Dalles, from where they were floated downriver), in the following year 1,000 more arrived, and in the next, perhaps 3,000 (by several routes, and getting at least some of their wagons across the Cascades). By 1845 American settlers occupied attractive sites for sixty miles above the Falls of the Willamette. The original Methodist mission had been relocated and redirected entirely to serve the American settlement: "there was no mission in Oregon at all; there was only a replica of frontier Methodism complete with itinerants and a church"—and, it may be added, with a gristmill, sawmill, school, and plans for a town. Furthermore, the attractions of the Willamette Valley lured more than Americans; they completely subverted the Hudson's Bay Company's "countering migration" north of the Columbia, for the Red River emigrants, dissatisfied with their lands and chafing under the company's restrictions (leaseholds and rents), soon packed up and moved south to join their compatriots in and around French Prairie (none of whom had been induced by the company to resettle in the Cowlitz).

The Americans had also taken the lead in forming a government. When the

13. The Lower Columbia River. Those "beautifully conspicuous" volcanic cones towering over the lower Columbia are car- tographically conspicuous on this map of the great artery downriver from Walla Walla (at the top of the map—the view is straight east) that was included as an inset on the "Map of Oregon Territory," in volume 4 of Lieutenant Wilkes's Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition. What is curiously missing is the name Fort Vancouver, even though it is prominent on the main map and its location is clearly shown here in the set of squares just above the mouth of the Willamette. By this time a number of other settlements have appeared, including three Method- ist missions, a Catholic mission (at French Prairie), and the HBC Cowlitz Farm. Note the absence of Indian villages below the Cascades ("Head of Navigation") and the cluster of them around prime salmon fishing sites upriver, especially at The Dalles. (Courtesy of the George Arents Research Library, Syracuse University)

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114 EXTENSION: A CONTINENTAL EMPIRE

Linn bill to establish an Oregon Territory failed in Congress, the settlers, con- cerned about law and order and especially about titles to their lands, held a mass meeting at Champoeg ("Champooing" on the Wilkes map), the river landing at French Prairie, which led to the drawing up of a constitution and legal code, and to the delimitation of a set of counties for "Oregon Territory" to be in force until the U.S. government extended jurisdiction. The French metis and Hudson's Bay Company officials were wary but did not dare ignore completely or resist directly for fear of endangering their rights and properties. In response to these obvious differ- ences in allegiance, the agreement was carefully worded so that participation would be construed as being consistent with the duties of a citizen of the United States or of a subject of Great Britain. In 1845 this compact was further elaborated with the creation of the office of governor and designation of Oregon City (at the falls) as the capital.

By 1844 Oregon had become a major issue in American national politics. Extreme expansionists called for the annexation of all of Oregon and Texas. President James Polk, in his inaugural address, declared that the American title to "the country [he didn't say the 'whole'] of the Oregon is clear and unquestionable." Such, of course, was not at all the case. The British were adamant that the United States had no claim at all on a large part of Oregon. Actually each country had strong claims only to part of the region, and the expectation of a division of the whole had been present from the earliest discussions of the matter. The issue, therefore, was where to draw the line: the United States insisted on an extension of the Forty-ninth parallel boundary from the Rocky Mountains to the sea; Great Britain insisted on the lower Columbia River as the appropriate division. The territorial dispute therefore was centered on the 200-mile strip between those lines, which included the whole of Puget Sound.

The United States advanced the idea of the Forty-ninth parallel without any extensive rationale. Some Americans evidently believed that such a boundary was implicit in early spheres of influence; it had actually appeared on some United States maps as early as 1806; John Melish imprinted it on his first map of 1816 as the presumed ultimate arrangement even though "towards the Pacific Ocean, we have no very correct data for forming an opinion as to the boundaries." But there was no historical precedent nor American activity on which to base a strong claim, and the American case rested on simple concepts of "extension," "contiguity," or the old colonial precedent of latitudinal sea-to-sea charters. In the 1820s some Ameri- cans began to specify the hazards of the Columbia Bar as a reason why that river was unacceptable as a boundary. But that was a controversial topic even among Ameri- cans who knew something about it. The Columbia entrance could be dangerous, but it could also be managed at other times without problem, and the possibilities for improvement through lighthouses, dredging, and breakwaters were argued.

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ASSERTION AND DIVISION: OREGON 115

Those who emphasized the inadequacies pointed to the need for harbors on the Strait of Juan de Fuca (and thus the Forty-ninth parallel boundary). In an extensive series of articles, a knowledgeable Bostonian strongly recommended Port Discov- ery as the best place for a naval station. This concern for American harbors was argued not on the need for an alternative entrance into, nor colonization of, the Oregon country, but on the need to provide a haven for American whaling and shipping in the Pacific and, in some accounts, to keep the Russians and the British from closing the Americans out of the Northwest Coast. At the time such views were not incongruent with the conviction of many persons (and especially New Englanders) that this remote Pacific seaboard could never become an integral part of the American nation.

In 1826 the British offered the United States just what such American spokes- men had called for: Port Discovery with a five-mile radius of territory. When that was summarily rejected, they offered the whole of the Olympic Peninsula, giving the Americans the southern shore of Juan de Fuca and the western harbors of Puget Sound. But the United States refused to consider any such enclave and became increasingly insistent on the entire contiguous block of territory. In 1837 Slacum declared Puget Sound to be "of the highest importance to the United States" from "a military point of view," and Wilkes obviously concurred, declaring that "the entrance to the Columbia is impracticable for two-thirds of the year."

Great Britain never pressed for any territory south of the lower Columbia. In 1823-24 it explicitly offered a boundary along 49°N from the Rocky Mountains to the Columbia and down that river to the sea. In the next year George Simpson was in London, following his first assessment of the Columbia Department as part of the company's strategic system, and British diplomats were urged to reopen negotia- tions in order to obtain a boundary drawn from the Continental Divide at the point of Lewis and Clark's crossing (thought to be 46°20'N) west to the Snake River (at the junction with the Clearwater River) and downriver to the sea. Such a line would preserve the Flathead and Spokane countries (where the British had out- posts before the Astorians) and, more important, would preserve (with slight adjustment) the overland trail between Fort Nez Perces (which could be shifted to the north bank) and Fort Colvile on the upper Columbia. Inbound brigades used that trail, and the procurement of hundreds of horses annually from the Cayuse and Nez Perces Indians in the Walla Walla and lower Snake areas was fundamental to the operation of the whole interior system. In the very last stages of boundary negotiations, when the company was asked for a list of alternatives, Simpson again nominated this line as the first choice. But having already offered the 49°N- Columbia line, British negotiators were in no position to insist on a boundary less favorable to the Americans, and so an argument based on routine British occupa- tion and use of this large block of territory was foreclosed.

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116 EXTENSION: A CONTINENTAL EMPIRE

During these recurrent deadlocked negotiations the United States offered two modest concessions: freedom of navigation on the Columbia, and the termination of the Forty-ninth parallel line at the Strait of Georgia and extension of the boundary through the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The original American insistence on 49°N to "the sea" could be interpreted to mean extending that line across Van- couver Island to the open ocean. This modification would leave that island entirely to the British and Juan de Fuca open to both parties. Other alternatives were discussed privately. In 1842 Daniel Webster, then the principal American negotia- tor, was of the opinion that a boundary drawn east through Juan de Fuca, south through Puget Sound, and on to the lower Columbia would adequately serve American interests (close to the British proposal of 1826), but he made no such official offer (turning instead toward trying to gain British help in securing San Francisco Bay from Mexico) and it is unlikely he could have gained approval to do so (he was in disfavor with expansionists for having "given away" part of Maine).

By 1844 the British government, for a variety of reasons having little to do with Oregon directly, was ready to settle this festering dispute. The great domestic issue was free trade (repeal of the Com Laws); new economic theories were being intensely debated, and an important faction of leaders was persuaded that Britain would be better served by a widening of trade and a contraction of empire; over the ensuing months there were fears of rebellion in famished Ireland and memories of rebellions in the troublesome Canadas; the Americans would go to war with Mexico and become alarmingly bellicose over Oregon (loud cries of "Fifty-four forty or fight!"); war with France was a chronic concern. The British public had slight interest in this distant affair, and the particular British diplomats then in charge of the matter had no great sympathy for the monopolistic privileges of the Hudson's Bay Company; at the same time, the company's directors, while clearly preferring a Columbia boundary, no longer argued that the Forty-ninth parallel would be disastrous to its operations or its profits. Thus, a partition along 49°N to the Strait of Georgia and the mid-channel of the Strait of Juan de Fuca (a dispute over the connecting line through the maze of islands separating these points would flare up later), together with specification of navigation privileges on the Columbia for the Hudson's Bay Company (but not British subjects in general) and protection of its "possessory rights" within the territory awarded to the United States, was offered by the British, quickly accepted by the American administration, and ratified by a generous margin in the Senate in June 1846.

As a large body of historical studies makes clear, settlement of the Oregon dispute was more the result of particular persons and parties working within the context of other national and international issues than of the actual historical geography of exploration, exploitation, and occupation of that vast territory by the contending nations. It is true that the basic geographic character of Oregon was

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ASSERTION AND DIVISION: OREGON 117

much better known in the 1840s than when the agitations began in the 1820s, and such knowledge was drawn upon in every debate, discussion, and oration. The particular natural features most pertinent to the boundary question were the Co- lumbia River, the bar at its mouth, the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and Puget Sound, together with various harbors therein. As for the human geography, Fort Van- couver and Astoria were central, but other British posts and the overall system were rarely brought into focus, and references to them were usually incomplete and inaccurate. The Willamette Valley and its settlements were usually mentioned, often at length, but since these did not He within the primary disputed territory, they were directly pertinent only in terms of a perceived threat to Fort Vancouver and British use of the Columbia. As for more general regional qualities, extensive accounts were often given, but opinions differed sharply, and most of the descrip- tions and assessments in the American literature were polemical. One must con- clude that momentous geopolitical decisions on Oregon, as with so many other parts of North America, were made with limited understanding of, and even limited concern about, its geography.

It is common—and surely appropriate—to commend the peaceful resolution of this dispute during a very bellicose time; it is also common for American historians to suggest, sometimes explicitly, that in the end it was an almost matter-of-fact, obvious, and equitable compromise in which each side got approximately half of the whole. Frederick Merk, one of the most distinguished American specialists on the matter, concluded that the Forty-ninth parallel was the most reasonable basis of settlement; indeed, that line, he said forthrightly, "was the boundary that the finger of nature and the finger of history pointed out for the partition of the Oregon area." As for the first, it is difficult for a geographer to discern "the finger of nature" (Merk took the term from John Quincy Adams) in a geometric line drawn straight across great mountains and rivers and across the human systems adapted to those gross lineaments of nature. As for "the finger of history," it is true that the United States kept its "finger" pointed firmly along the Forty-ninth parallel, but it must also be concluded that it thereby achieved a geopolitical victory that its historical geographical position could hardly justify; this "compromise" resulted in Great Britain losing the entire area in serious dispute. Perhaps we should interpret "the finger of history" as pointing to the basic difference in character of the British and American positions in the human geography of Oregon: the one created and maintained by a commercial company, the other by a spontaneous folk movement; the one a network of widely dispersed stations staffed by assigned agents, the other an organic colony of settlers. That is a telling difference in kind but has little to do with the line of partition, for there were not two dozen Americans north of the Columbia River in 1845-46. We should recognize that the Hudson's Bay Company regarded colonization within its own territories as being a costly complication and

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118 EXTENSION: A CONTINENTAL EMPIRE

infringement upon the fur business, and only reluctantly undertook it as an implied obligation to win renewal of its charter from politicians with larger British interests in Oregon. In retrospect, the 1841 counterimmigration appears to have been fatally handicapped from its inception. But lest we slip into the easy assumption that there could have been no hope that British colonization could have competed with American colonization in Oregon, it might be interesting to reflect on the fact that at the very time Hall Jackson Kelley was whipping up attention with his Geographical Sketch and schemes for the colonization of Oregon, Edward Gibbon Wakefield (a man at least as obsessed, capricious, vain, and difficult as Kelley) was avidly promoting his National Colonization Society in London. Suppose that in his search for a distant place to try out his theories Wakefield had fixed his eye on the northwest coast of North America instead of the southern coasts of Australasia—and suppose the Evangelicals in England had done the same. The idea is not wildly implausible. While Kelley was trying to organize his Oregon expedition, Wakefield and associates had formed the South Australian Associa- tion; and just as Nathaniel Wyeth was reluctantly allowing Jason Lee and his fellow Methodists to tag along, George Fife Angas was paving the way for Wesleyans and other dissenters to stamp their imprint on the only nonpenal colony in Australia. The pertinent point is that overseas emigration, the results of recent colonizations, and how to improve on them were lively topics in England all through the 1830s. Wakefield's theories were controversial and, insofar as they were tested, not wholly practical; nevertheless he had a major influence on several successful undertakings. If we are going to refer to "the finger of history" we might think about the one that pointed him first to Australia and New Zealand rather than to North America (to which he in fact did come, to the Canadas as an associate of Lord Durham, for whom he composed the appendix on Crown Lands and Emigration for the famous report).

The purpose of this digression from what did happen is to help us guard against simple assumptions that colonization had become a peculiarly American talent and American expansion inevitable and irresistible. Ultimately it seems most reasonable, perhaps, simply to conclude that the United States gained a major geopolitical victory because Oregon became a more important issue in its national politics and it gave the impression that it was willing to risk more in support of its demands than was the case with Great Britain.

The boundary settlement produced no immediate American expansion or Brit- ish withdrawal. The Hudson's Bay Company's properties and operations were ostensibly protected by the treaty, and American emigrants continued to choose the Willamette Valley. Two dramatic events, however, one within the region and one nearby, impelled important changes. The first was the massacre at the Whit- man mission in the Walla Walla Valley in late 1847. An explosion from long-

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