Page:Portland, Oregon, its History and Builders volume 1.djvu/911



CHAPTER XXXII.

1825 — 1910.

Vancouver — First JVhite Settlement in Old Oregon — The Governor of the Vast Wilderness — The Character of Old Vancouver — The Disputed Hudson's Bay Company Title — Modern Vancouver — Great Prospects in the Future — The Home of Great Enterprises.

(By A Citizen of Vancouver.)

The settlement at old Fort Vancouver was the first permanent settlement by- white men made in old Oregon. The establishment set up at Astoria by John Jacob Astor was never anything more than a fur trader's post. Even after aban- donment by Astor's men and taken by the British gun boat, and then still later oc- cupied by the Hudson's Bay Company, it was throughout only a temporary settlement to serve a passing exigency. If Astor had not been betrayed by his own men and the establishment captured by the British, there can be no doubt that Astor would have founded a city at Astoria that would have forestalled the building of a city at Portland.

It is true that the Hudson's Bay Company settlement was also temporary and intended only to accommodate the fur trade of that company. But the circum- stances of the settlement, meeting the oncoming tide of American immigration, forced a result that the British traders never expected or intended, and one that the directors in London greatly deplored. It attracted people to the old fort to trade for goods, to sell peltries and to support immigrants, and gather around it a nucleus of humanity that in the end located the city of Vancouver.

The site of Vancouver was located by Lieutenant Robert Broughton, of the British exploring ship, Chatham, commanded by Captain George Vancouver of the British navy, on October 26, 1792, fourteen days less than 300 years after Columbus discovered America. Vancouver had sailed into the mouth of the Columbia on the 19th of October, but did not think it was much of a river. But to satisfy his curiosity he put Broughton in a small boat with a half dozen sailors and sent them up the river. They were seven days in getting up to the site of this city, and so pleased with the location that they named it after their captain — and the name stuck.

According to Vancouver's report, Broughton, before leaving here, took pos- session of the river and surrounding country in his Britannic Majesty's name. This place remained a vast wilderness, inhabited only by Indians, until after the consolidation of the northwest and Hudson's Bay Fur Trading Companies.

Dr. John McLoughlin, who had been given the position of chief factor of forts in the west, while passing down the Columbia to take charge of Fort George, now Astoria at the mouth of the river, noticed an attractive little plain near Point Vancouver. Seeing the many advantages of this position, he determined to make it his headquarters, and therefore, in the latter part of 1825 he moved his headquarters from Fort George to Fort Vancouver. Because of