Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 15.djvu/37



OLD FORT OKANOGAN AND OKANOGAN TRAIL 29

Coast, and destined to win undying fame. Another year Dease has charge of the brigades gathering at Okanogan. Again and again it is Ogden who comes down with the big brigade from the north and goes back with the goods in the fall. Once or twice it was Francis Ermatinger, and so on. Throughout the year Okanogan was the scene of constant comings and goings.

The last New Caledonia brigade came over the old trail from Kamloops to Okanogan in 1847. On account of the treaty of 1846, fixing the boundary on the 49th parallel, and further, on account of the breaking out of the war between the Americans and the Cayuse Indians, rendering the Colum- bia route unsafe for brigades carrying furs and property aggre- gating great value, orders were sent out early in 1848 by express from Vancouver to the officers in charge of the in- terior posts to break their way through with the brigades of that year, over the Cascades to the mouth of the Fraser. After many a reconnoisance and much expense, a trail was opened by which pack trains could manage to travel, and the course of the same was pretty much the same as that along which the Victoria, Vancouver & Eastern Railway is now building, that is, up the Similkameen and over the divide to the head of the Coquihalla and down that stream to Fort Hope on the Fraser, thence to the mouth of that river. This continued to be the route used by the Hudson Bay Company between the coast and the inland posts of Colville, Okanogan, Thompson river, etc., for the next ensuing ten years or more. This is what was known in fur trading parlance as the "Fort Hope Trail." The year 1848 saw no brigade come to Fort Okanogan, bound either up or down. The old Okanogan trail was to see them no more they were gone forever. Fort Okanogan from that time forward was of small importance, but the company continued it as we have seen for something like twelve years more before finally discontinuing it. Gen. McClellan passed through by it in 1853, and in his report calls it a "ruinous establishment." The place came into some pass- ing prominence in 1858, when the Fraser river gold rush was