Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 3.djvu/136

126 who superintended the erection of Fort Vancouver was Capt. Rufus Ingalls, long and well known in Oregon.

The construction of barracks for the accommodation of the riflemen and also for troops expected in the autumn, was a task more difficult than might have been anticipated. Mechanical skill of any sort had never been a feature of pioneer life; but whatever assistance the Oregonians might have given the army at other times, was reduced to nought by the absence of the working element in the mines of California. For the same reason (the great demand made by mining), lumber was scarce and high priced. Captain Ingalls had, therefore, to make the best use he could of the abandoned buildings of the Hudson's Bay Company, and to pay the soldiers wages in addition to their regular pay to induce them to perform the labor of cutting down timber and rafting it to Vancouver. With the help of the Hudson's Bay Company, however, a sufficient number of buildings were erected or leased to shelter the troops in Oregon and on the road.

It was impossible at this time to secure a title to the site (the United States land law not having been passed), except by purchase or lease of the possessory rights of the British fur company. A lease was accordingly taken by the chief of the quartermaster's department, Maj. H. D. Vinton, of the site of Vancouver, which became and remains the military headquarters for the Columbia region. The same course was pursued at Steilacoom with regard to the site of a fort.

A post was established at The Dalles, where two companies of the rifle regiment were stationed in the spring of 1850, under command of Maj. S. S. Tucker. A post was in contemplation in Southern Oregon, but the temptation to desertion on the road to the gold mines was too great, and the design was abandoned for the time. Cantonment Loring, being found to be too far from a base of