Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 15.djvu/43



OLD FORT OKANOGAN AND OKANOGAN TRAIL 35

this valley some eighty miles, where it again forks, one, and the nearest turns to the right and leads through a gap in the mountains striking the Hudson's Bay Brigade trail from Fort Hope to Ft. Thompson and New Caledonia, probably eighty or ninety miles south of Ft. Thompson and following this trail to Alexander. The other fork, which is the Colville and Fort Hope trail, keeps up the Similkameen a short dist- ance and then leads over the mountains uniting with the brig- ade trail about 30 miles to the southward of the other fork." The question is often asked how it happened that the build- ings of old Ft. Okanogan have so completely disappeared. There are much plainer signs and remaining traces of the former buildings at the site of the old Astor post, than on the site of the later post that was still in existence, and com- prised a considerable number of buildings as late as the early sixties. Of course the great length of time since the original Ft. Okanogan of the Pacific Fur Company was abandoned (about 97 years) easily accounts for the complete disappear- ance of everything there except the cellars and the chimney stones, but the substantial buildings of log and adobe that were in the old Ft. Okanogan of the Hudson Bay Company in 1860, ought, under ordinary circumstances, to be to some extent still in existence. On the contrary the signs of former habitation are much dimmer there than on the site of the older post. This condition may be accounted for through the action of various agencies. The Indians say that placer diggers (both white and Chinese), working on the bars of the Columbia, used up much of the timber in their opera- tions, and very likely the structures were raided by both whites and reds for any and all passing needs. At any rate it seems that all the buildings had disappeared before 1880. The final stroke of obliteration was given the place by the big flood of 1894, which was probably the highest water in the Okanogan and Columbia for at least a century, and per- haps several centuries. At that time the waters of the Colum- bia swept entirely over the place and carried away much of the bank of earth and gravel that the old-timers say existed along the shore of the river there, leaving the wide stony