ever since. Although it was June the “chaplain” to his roistering buccaneers claimed that they traveled in intense cold and snow. Residents of the Pacific Northwest, who boast of roses in January—although the land lies in the latitude of Newfoundland— quite frankly don’t believe Parson Fletcher’s story.
After Drake, Sebastian Vizcaino came in 1602 from Spain to Monterey in California and from there pushed on north the following year as far as the forty-third parallel, leaving a record of his passing in the names of such Oregon coast promontories as Cape Blanco and San Sebastian.
In the years that followed, until 1774, so far as records go—though Oregon Indian myths say otherwise—no alien eye was laid upon that roaring coastline, no outsider caught a glimpse of naked red men with deformed heads, faces painted with mica and ochre; holding their annual food gathering expeditions for fish, roots, berries; fasting and communicating with spirits; performing their mystic rites. While European nations contended for the eastern part of the New World, the western part slept in wild beauty, its snowcapped peaks unassailed, its records of geologic convulsions— exploding mountains, seas of lava, prehistoric oceans—unread by knowing eye. The hundreds of miles of waterways were disturbed only by Indians paddling their dugout canoes, chanting their minor songs on the waters of Whulge, their name for the inland sea; looking respectfully at the Mountain that was God—which no red man dared approach—or at Kulshan, the White Watcher—the Mt. Ararat of their flood legend, now known prosaically as Baker.
In 1774 Spain roused herself for another effort on the Pacific to consolidate her claims there. She sensed a threat in Russian activity far up the Northwest coast and in the gradual pushing overland of the fur companies from Hudson’s Bay. Up the west coast then sailed Juan Perez, bringing back little of value except word that the northern Indians would seem to have had white communication since they had iron trinkets in their possession. Perez was followed in 1775 by Bruno Heceta who formally claimed the Northwest lands for Spain and who brought back a report of turbulent discolored water off the shore to the north which was probably the Columbia resisting the Pacific with a fierceness so pronounced that it took years for mariners to fight their way into her waters. Neither of these two Spanish mariners got as far north as Alaska, where the Danish captain Vitus Bering, in service to the fabulous Tsar Peter, had already discovered the sea otters, destined to play such a significant part in Northwestern development.
It was left to Englishmen to publicize the big trade discovery on the west coast. As a result of the travels of Captain James Cook, who came out in 1776 from London, word got back of fortunes in furs to be had in this part of the world. On the return journey Cook’s ship stopped at Canton and the sailors discovered that the Chinese would pay fabulous sums for the shabby sea otter furs they had bought from the Nootka Sound natives for sundry metal oddments like old coat buttons and drawer handles.
In spite of Cook’s discovery it took some years for trade to get brisk on this distant coast. No names need concern us in this period except that of John Meares, since it is through him, as Philip Parrish has said in Before The Covered Wagon, “that the current of history runs.” Meares is famed for a number of things, including the launching on this bleak northern shore of the first boat to be built on the Pacific coast; built moreover by fifty Cantonese—the first Chinese laborers to be brought to this country. Word of Meares’s activities up north got about among the Mexican and California Spaniards, and they sent a company north to seize ships, build forts, and in general make it plain to the British that these waters belonged to Spain. Meares heard of it in China and took home a full and angry report to London. It almost caused a European war. Meares insisted that he had purchased Nootka Sound—so named by Captain Cook who spelled it as he thought the Indians pronounced it—and there was no one to prove that he hadn’t, so in the end after some hot words and musket brandishing Spain relinquished her claims. The Nootka Sound Controversy brought Captain George Vancouver up the coast, as representative for England, and Vancouver can never be forgotten here because he managed to give geographic names that have stuck all these years: the mountains Rainier and Baker, Hood Canal, the islands of Whidby and Vashon, Port Townsend and Port Orchard, Admiralty Inlet, Bellingham Bay, and Howe Sound. Vancouver’s lieutenant, William Broughton, named a point on the Columbia River for his master and gave the snowcap he saw in the distance the name of Mt. Hood.
While Spain and England were arguing over their rights, these western waters had begun to give anchorage to Yankee ships whose crews also bartered for furs in summer and wintered in Hawaii. The stage was slowly being set for that markedly bloodless quarrel by which mighty expanding England and the still insignificant but ambitious United States were to determine whose country this Pacific Northwest really was.
THE RIVER OF FABLE THAT REALLY EXISTED
For many years it seemed likely that the tale of a mighty westward-flowing river, rising in a mountain of shining stones and emptying into the great sunset ocean, was but another compound of Indian myth and white man’s dreamings. Perhaps no river in history has enjoyed so much enshrouding of mystery as the Columbia, long called the Oregan or Oregon—a name whose genesis is lost.
There was a Yazoo chief named Moncacht-apé who—sometime during the middle of the eighteenth century—got bored with his restricted life in the valley of the Mississippi and set out to verify tales he’d heard of great oceans to the east and west. He went first to see the Atlantic and reported to a French explorer, who has told his tale for posterity, that his “eyes were too small for his soul’s ease.” He then set off promptly to find the great western body of salt water. He said he got to the Pacific by way of a great westward-flowing river, and if one believes the tale at all it seems likely that this was the Columbia.
Even while the British were still looking for that long-sought Northwest Passage by way of Hudson’s Bay, a Connecticut captain named Jonathan Carver had returned from extensive travels in the interior of America with tales of a great river which he called the Oregan—a name he claimed to have got from Indians. Carver had maps, too, somewhat fanciful ones, and he took his maps and his tales and his mysterious river name with him to London, where perhaps he imagined he would have a better audience. Carver averred that the British planned to send an expedition down this river and establish forts at its mouth. But Captain Cook’s unwitting discovery of fortunes in furs had already begun to turn a tide of mariners toward the Northwest coast. Unhappily for England’s plans the American colonies decided to break their bonds with the mother country and it remained for a Boston fur trader, Robert Gray, to immortalize himself in 1792 by discovering the fabled river—and naming it for his hardy little craft, the Columbia.
Gray, undaunted by the names Cape Disappointment and Deception Bay, with which the explorer Meares left record of his failure to find the River of the West, succeeded in putting his little ship over the bar that hid with such wild fury of foam and wave the spot where the Columbia met the Pacific. Gray sailed twenty-five miles upriver, hoisted the American flag, and planted some Pine Tree shillings in the soil. Vancouver sent an expedition under Broughton up the stream much farther than Gray had gone, to lend weight to England’s possible claims. But the fact that Gray—though only a fur trader without government authority—had been there first was to prove helpful later in establishing America’s colonization rights by virtue of “discovery” rights.
EXPLORERS ON FOOT
No expedition by foot across uncharted terrain can compare in human interest with an American expedition of 1804 and 1805 made by two Virginia gentlemen (one with chronic melancholia), a party of twenty-nine ill-assorted men, and Sacajawea, an Indian woman won for small change in a gambling game. This was the Lewis and Clark expedition which the farsighted president, Jefferson, organized to explore the western part of the American continent, to which he thought the United States had as good a right as any other country. Shrewd Mr. Jefferson concealed his real intentions under a display of interest—quite sincere but secondary—in mastodon bones, botanical specimens, and commercial treaties with the Indians, but he apparently had it in his mind to get Americans into the valley of the Columbia in order to add some “rights
