Fort Vancouver

Fort Vancouver was the largest settlement on the Pacific Coast north of Mexico when the first Oregon Trail wagon trains began arriving in the early 1840s -- a sprawling trading post on the Columbia River that the Hudson's Bay Company had built in 1825 as headquarters of its Columbia District. Chief Factor John McLoughlin ran the post like a small kingdom, overseeing farms, a sawmill, and warehouses stocked with goods shipped from London. For exhausted American emigrants who had just crossed 2,000 miles of plains and mountains, Fort Vancouver was the first real settlement they had seen in months, and often the difference between starting over with nothing and starting over with seed, tools, and credit.

The fort's location was no accident. Britain and the United States had jointly occupied the Oregon Country since 1818, each side hoping settlement would eventually decide the boundary question, and the Hudson's Bay Company used Fort Vancouver to anchor British claims north of the Columbia. McLoughlin extended credit and supplies to American settlers anyway, a decision his own company later criticized as helping populate land Britain still hoped to keep. The strategy backfired for the British: American emigration tipped the demographic balance so decisively that the 1846 Oregon Treaty set the boundary at the 49th parallel, and Fort Vancouver itself ended up on American soil.

The Hudson's Bay Company abandoned the post in 1860 once the treaty made its position there untenable, and the U.S. Army had already built its own garrison, Vancouver Barracks, alongside it. The original fort burned and decayed for decades until the National Park Service reconstructed several of its buildings on the original foundations, including McLoughlin's house and the fur warehouse, now open to visitors as Fort Vancouver National Historic Site.