This intimidating mission was made possible by the merger, after thirty-seven years of vicious rivalry, of the North West Company with the Hudson’s Bay Company. The Nor’westers had been organized in 1784 specifically to compete for a fur monopoly in Canada and fought—often literally—for trapping rights throughout “Rupert’s Land” (named for King Charles II’s cousin Prince Rupert, first governor of the Honourable Company), that is, all the lands that drained into Hudson’s Bay, 1.5 million square miles of North America. The competition turned brutal in the second decade of the nineteenth century in the Red River country of Manitoba and in what later became northern Minnesota and North Dakota. In these rich trapping grounds the rival companies built well-armed forts, broke up traplines, stole each other’s furs, and conducted guerrilla warfare in the rivers and forests around the frontier town of Winnipeg. In this region occurred a particularly destructive episode that sealed the fate of the warring competitors.
In 1811, Thomas Douglas, the Fifth Earl of Selkirk and a major stockholder in the Company, was granted 116,000 square miles of territory in the valley of the Red River. Lord Selkirk intended to set up an agricultural colony in his wind-scoured wilderness and succeeded in attracting his first settlers there in 1812. The titular governor of Selkirk’s colony soon alienated the local descendants of voyageur fathers and Indian mothers—who were called métis—and the Nor’westers joined in the conflict with these families. The factions engaged in outright battle in 1816, with twenty white settlers killed by the métis at Fort Douglas in the colony. After the failure of Selkirk’s struggling domain the Hudson’s Bay Company transferred his territory back to their control and in 1820, the year his lordship died, the British colonial secretary launched negotiations for the merger of the adversarial companies.
The result of these negotiations was the issuance in 1821 of a “deed of co-partnership” amalgamating the two companies under the Hudson’s Bay Company name and extending the Company’s fur-trade hegemony. The area covered was no longer limited to the territory prescribed in the 1670 charter—all the territory draining into Hudson’s Bay—but now embraced the entire Canadian west, including the Oregon Country, “Westward of the Stony Mountains.”
While the British were thus consolidating in the Pacific Northwest, American influence there seemed waning despite certain ominous stirrings between the fall of Fort Astoria and George Simpson’s arrival there in the winter of 1824. These portents, recognized by the politically astute and American-wary governor and his associates, began surfacing in February 1815 with the treaty that ended the Anglo-American war. The nettlesome status quo ante bellum stipulation of the Ghent diplomacy and the subsequent agreement between the nations for “free and open access” to and “joint occupancy of” the Oregon Country would eventually have to be confronted.
After Astoria, the Hudson’s Bay Company had an almost exclusive Columbia River fur-trade foothold, one that would endure fifteen years. The Americans, however, had not forgotten the Oregon Country and while the march back began slowly, it gained momentum every year of those fifteen.
2
A week or so before he set out from York Factory for the Pacific, Governor Simpson sent ahead his appointee as chief factor for the Columbia District, John McLoughlin, a man who needed no beaver hat to tower over his employees nor London cut of clothes to impress them. He was formidable in stature, physical strength, and endurance, protean in intellect and temperament, one of those singular men who seemed born to be a liege lord of some great remote domain. Through the sheer, blunt force of his presence he left an impression, not always positive but always indelible, on everyone who came in contact with him. “Once seen, he was never forgotten,” H. H. Bancroft said of him.
Simpson, who would quarrel often with his colleague and eventually scheme against him, stood in awe of McLoughlin, never quite knowing what to make of the man. On September 26, 1824, the governor and his voyageurs caught up with McLoughlin’s Columbia-bound vanguard party near the Athabaska River north of the future town of Edmonton, Alberta. At this rendezvous Simpson recorded in his diary an impression of the man whose character he would recognize, from the beginning of their relationship and over twenty years to come, as bearing no resemblance to his own. “He was such a figure as I should not like to meet in a dark Night in one of the bye lanes in the neighborhood of London,” he wrote with an amusing hyperbole that barely hid his condescension, “dressed in Clothes that had once been fashionable, but now covered with a thousand patches of different Colors; his beard would do honor to the chin of a Grizzly Bear, his face and hands evidently Shewing that he had not lost much time at his Toilette, loaded with arms and his own herculean dimensions forming a tout ensemble that would convey a good idea of the highway men of former days.”
Bancroft wrote that McLoughlin “was of an altogether different order of humanity from any who had hitherto appeared on these shores. Before or after him, his like was unknown; for he was far above the mercenary fur-trader, or the coarse, illiterate immigrant.”
He was born Jean Baptiste McLoughlin in 1784 in the parish of Rivière du Loup, 120 miles down the south shore of the Saint Lawrence from Québec, his father an Irish farmer, his mother a Fraser of the great Scotch clan. In 1803, when he was nineteen and after a period of study with a Québec surgeon, McLoughlin received his certification as a physician and joined the North West Company, rising from post surgeon to chief trader in the Sault Sainte Marie area of Ontario. At some point in his service there he married a Cree Indian woman who bore him a son but died in childbirth.
In Ontario, McLoughlin became acquainted with Alexander McKay, the Nor’wester trader who had accompanied Alexander Mackenzie on his explorations to the Pacific Coast in 1793 and, as one of the original Astor partners, sailed for the Columbia on the Tonquin in September 1810. McKay was murdered by Indians at Clayoquot Sound on Vancouver Island the following June and soon after this McLoughlin married McKay’s widow, Marguérite Wadin McKay, the half-Cree daughter of a Swiss trader. She was nine years the young physician-trader’s senior, had four children fathered by McKay, and would bear another four by her utterly devoted second husband.
At the time he reached Fort George with Governor Simpson in November 1824, McLoughlin was forty years old and, says Bancroft, “as he appeared among his pygmy associates, white or red, there was an almost unearthly grandeur in his presence. Body, mind, and heart were all carved in gigantic proportions.” Everything about him did seem majestic. Six and a half feet tall, a full foot taller than Simpson, McLoughlin was lean and tough as a lath, wide-chested, long-limbed, and thick-necked, with a massive head crowned by an unruly mass of shoulder-length white hair, mid-parted and swept back behind his ears. When he shaved the grizzly bear’s beard Simpson had noted, he uncovered a squarish, handsome face with a hawk’s nose, a wide mouth, and deep-set, palely luminous blue eyes.
From his mane of white hair, Columbia River natives gave him the name White Eagle and in the years ahead he became their personal King George. To others, including the Americans he befriended, the names for him were always regal—“Emperor of the West,” and “King of Old Oregon”—befitting the benevolent autocrat of a 670,000-square-mile wilderness realm.
Bancroft, given to few panegyrics in his massive histories, was captivated by the man: “His life should be written by the recording angel and pillared at the crossing of the two chief highways of the universe. Search these shores from Darien to Alaska, and you will find none such.… His life though quiet and untrumpeted was full of glory.”
* * *
Governor Simpson’s plans for construction of a new factory on the Columbia River and installing McLoughlin there to run it were elements of a scheme aimed at warding off any American interference in the Hudson’s Bay Company’s fur monopoly in the Northwest. The new fort would serve as the hub of the Company’s commerce in the Oregon Country and from it and other, smaller, posts in the region Simpson intended having his brigades fanning out west to the Ro
cky Mountains and south to Mexican territory to trap beaver to extinction. The idea was to create a “fur desert” between American lands and the southern approaches to the Columbia that would discourage American traders and, as a consequence, discourage American emigrants.
To implement this brutal strategy, Simpson selected as his chief brigade leader for the Columbia district Peter Skene Ogden, age thirty when he came down from the Spokane post and joined Simpson and McLoughlin at Fort George in the winter of 1824.
A contemporary described Ogden as “humorous, honest, eccentric, law-defying, short, dark and exceedingly tough,” and it was said that he had “a taste for violence.” He was born in Québec City, the son of a Canadian admiralty court judge, and ran away from legal studies to join the North West Company as a clerk. He was a prodigious, ambitious worker and by age twenty-four, after commanding a fur post at Lake Athabasca, he earned a transfer to the Columbia, which in 1818 was the remotest of the Nor’wester’s many remote fur interests. There, in two years’ time, he had led trapping parties from Fort George to Puget Sound and all the waterways of the Columbia and was promoted to brigade leader. He had a single black mark on his record, a time when his meteoric career plummeted to earth. In 1821 Ogden was among the most outspoken opponents of the merger of the North West Company with Hudson’s Bay and proved such an irritant that his name was excluded from the list of Nor’westers to be retained in service. During this period of unemployment he traveled to London to appeal to Hudson’s Bay officials and apparently made a good impression on the Company sirs and lords. They saw the value of his experience in the raw Columbia River country, as did the new governor of the district, George Simpson, who reinstated Ogden as clerk of the first class and brigade leader at the Columbia factory.
Ogden’s return to the Oregon Country did not begin auspiciously. From his headquarters at the Spokane fort he followed Simpson’s orders to begin the campaign to “trap out” the competition by sending a brigade east into the Snake River beaver streams. The leader of this expedition was Alexander Ross, one of the former Nor’westers who had come to the Columbia on the Tonquin. He was a capable administrator but proved overcautious in Blackfeet territory and returned with an unsatisfactory cache of furs. Simpson was not happy at the outcome of this first foray and wrote Ogden: “The Snake River Expedition has hitherto been considered a forlorn hope [a British army term for a suicidal mission], the management of it the most hazardous and disagreeable office in the Indian country.… This important duty should not be left to a self-sufficient and empty-headed man like Ross who feels no further interest therein than that it secures to him a Saly [salary] of £120 p. Annum and whose reports are so full of bombast and marvellous nonsense that it is impossible to get any information that can be depended on from him.”
A month after he arrived at Fort George, Simpson fixed the problem: He saw in Ogden a man who could best serve the Company on the trail, Ross best in a clerkly capacity, and so appointed Ogden to command the Snake River brigades and Ross to take over Ogden’s duties at the Spokane post.
In his first expedition east, Ogden set out in December 1824 with a heavy brigade of over 70 trappers, each with five heavy, iron-jawed and chained traps, plus 372 horses, 80 guns, and an unwieldy party of camp followers—wives and children of the trappers, clerks, and interpreters. He also had seven Americans in his company who had returned with Ross to Spokane after being separated on the Green River from a band of traders organized by William Henry Ashley. Among the seven was a twenty-five-year-old New Yorker, Jedediah Smith, a name soon to be familiar to Hudson’s Bay authorities in Oregon.
This cumbersome company miraculously crossed the Continental Divide to the headwaters of the Missouri, doing so in the dead of winter without serious incident. Near the Three Forks of the Missouri they found a region rich in beaver and buffalo but one also haunted by Blackfeet and the clear realization that they were trespassers in American territory. Ogden led them west again and they spent much of the winter trapping, hunting, and camping on Salmon River streams and byways in Idaho and, in April 1825, on the Salmon’s juncture with the Snake. The fur hunt that month was “tolerable,” Ogden scrawled in his journal, but of “short duration”; the principal hindrance, as it had been with Ross and countless other expeditions, was again the Blackfeet. (The enmity of these natives began, some said, after two Piegans—a Blackfeet band—were killed by Meriwether Lewis and his men on their return journey from the Columbia in 1806.) A small band of these nomadic buffalo hunters killed and scalped one of Ogden’s trappers and caused “unrest” among the others; this event was followed by an encounter with Americans that came close to a territorial battle and the near ruination of his first expedition.
In May Ogden led his party southward along the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains of Utah to the Bear River and a point where, Ogden noted, it “discharged into a large Lake of 100 miles in length.” (The Great Salt Lake had first been seen by white men only the year before, by the twenty-year-old Virginian James Bridger and his trapping party.) The Bear River and its streams and feeders swarmed with beaver, so many that Ogden’s men dressed 600 skins in under two weeks—then lost them.
This disaster began on May 25, 1825, while Ogden’s party camped on the Weber River, east of the Salt Lake. He was working on papers in his command tent when he was paid an unfriendly visit by an American named Johnson Gardner who coolly informed the brigade leader that Hudson’s Bay men had no business on United States soil and said they must “return from whence they came without delay.” Ogden left no record of his reaction to this abrupt command, but it can be assumed that he greeted it with less diplomacy than he reported.1 He informed Gardner that he and his brigade were on lands “jointly owned” by Britain and the United States and that therefore he was no trespasser. The American was adamant, ordering Ogden to collect his men and depart, Ogden countering that only upon receiving orders from his government would he do so.
During this edgy colloquy Ogden’s trappers were mixing with Gardner’s and were being educated on the difference between “free” trapping and working for the Company: The Americans were being paid significantly more for their furs than the British paid. This lesson learned, twenty-three of Ogden’s men decamped to Gardner’s side and took with them 600 beaver skins—most of the catch to date.
With his brigade depleted by a third, Ogden took his remaining men north and west before he lost more of them. By the time he brought the remnant into Fort Nez Percé in November he had only 400 furs on his packhorses, a trifling number for an expedition so well manned and mounted.
No one was more furious over the outcome of his first Snake River expedition than Ogden, nor more unwilling to admit to failure. He rested twelve days before starting out again, this time with a compact company of thirty-seven seasoned engagés and “freemen” (trappers contracted for a single season). The demi-brigade struck out across the Blue Mountains to the Snake in November and by the end of March 1826 had 1,000 furs, and 3,800 by the time it returned to Fort Vancouver in July.
“M’sieu Pete,” as his men called him, led four other trapping-exploring parties through 1830 searching out new fur territories for the Company. In 1826 he marched south from Fort Nez Percé to Klamath Lake, just above the border of Mexican California; in 1828 he returned to Utah, explored the northern shores of the Great Salt Lake, and upon his return became the first white man to trace the Humboldt River (then variously called the Mary’s, the Unknown, the Swampy, and Ogden’s River) to its sink in northern Nevada and to put to rest the long-standing notion of the “Bonaventura River,” a mythical waterway believed to flow from the Salt Lake to the Pacific.
On his sixth and final expedition in 1829, Ogden led a brigade south out of Fort Vancouver through the Great Basin to the Colorado River and down through Mexican territory to the Gulf of California, fighting one pitched battle with Mojave Indians en route. He returned up the length of the San Joaquin and Sacramento valleys of Alta California, having hea
rd stories of the trapping opportunities in the region spun by Jedediah Smith, who came through them in 1828. Another informant was a Tennesseean named Ewing Young, whom Ogden met near Yerba Buena, the town subsequently named San Francisco, who was on his way to the Oregon Country.
Ogden went on to serve the Company in British Columbia and in the fastnesses of the Canadian Northwest Territories, but as a factor rather than an explorer-trapper. That life, he said, “makes a man sixty in a few years,” and he managed to live only four years beyond that age. It is said that he “mellowed with age,” developing a certain tact and charm that were not noticeable in his early years with Hudson’s Bay brigades.
3
As Ogden’s first brigade worked its way toward the beaver streams of the Snake, Governor George Simpson and Chief Factor John McLoughlin were supervising the construction of Fort Vancouver on Belle Vue Point, ninety miles southeast of Fort George on the north bank of the Columbia near the mouth of the Willamette River. The new “grand mart and rendezvous for the Company’s trade and servants on the Pacific” lay in territory claimed by both the United States and Britain. It was trapezoidal-shaped, 750 by 450 feet in size, surrounded by hewn-log palisades twenty feet high with a bastion at its northeast corner armed with twelve-pounder cannons. There were several eighteen-pounders inside the compound as well, and the massive log gates of the main stockade were manned by armed sentries.
Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising Page 17