The real story behind the Northwest’s first non-Native settlement
Jun 28, 2019, 9:26 AM
There may have been as many as three places called Oak Point on the Columbia River; one near Clatskanie, Oregon was site of the first non-Native settlement in the Pacific Northwest in 1810. (NOAA Historic Chart Collection)
(NOAA Historic Chart Collection)
The John Jacob Astor-funded fur trading venture called Fort Astoria – where the city of Astoria, Oregon now stands at the mouth of the Columbia River – is generally remembered as the first non-Native settlement in the Pacific Northwest.
However, one year earlier, the little-known settlement of Oak Point was established and failed in the month of June 1810.
There’s still a community known as Oak Point on the Washington side of the Columbia, along Highway 4 about 10 miles west of Longview.
Proto-Northwest historian Edmond Meany believed that Captain George Vancouver’s Lieutenant William R. Broughton named Oak Point on the Washington side of the river in the autumn of 1792, not surprisingly, because there were oak trees there.
A little more than 10 years later, American explorers Lewis and Clark came through the area in 1805, and it was a few years after that, in 1811, John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company famously established Fort Astoria near the mouth of the river.
The Astor-funded effort failed within two years, and the men sold the fort to the British group known as the Northwest Company before the British Navy could seize it all as part of the hostilities of the War of 1812. The British formally seized it anyway – which would cause no end of troubles for them after the war was over – and renamed it Fort George.
Eventually, the Hudson’s Bay Company dominated the fur trade in the Old Oregon Country, and helped Great Britain lay claim for decades to what would eventually become part of the United States.
It’s much less well known, but on June 1, 1810, a year before Fort Astoria, a man from Boston named Nathan Winship – one of four sons of Jonathan Winship, a big wheel in a community on the edge of Boston called Brighton – sailed the ship “Albatross” up the Columbia, and established a settlement on what’s now the Oregon side, just across from Oak Point on the Washington side.
Winship, whose family had been trading up and down the Pacific Coast for decades, and his group had plans to build a trading post and to pursue agriculture at the spot that they called Oak Point, which was about four miles northeast of what’s now Clatskanie, Oregon.
The land was flat, and there were oaks, which is, not surprisingly, where the name came from. Winship’s men started building a structure, offloaded hogs and goats, and planted a garden. But less than a week later on June 8, 1810, a big rain fell, and two feet of river water flooded the settlement. Anyone who’s ever camped out in the Northwest in June can surely sympathize.
Not to be deterred, Winship and company moved everything about a half-mile downriver. It was not long after that this move that Natives – Chinook and Chehalis – arrived and made it clear that the group was not welcome.
So, before a month had gone by, the “Bostons” left and never came back. The “Albatross” sailed downriver, and Winship and crew resumed trading up and down the Pacific Coast.
As for the third possible Oak Point, Lewis McArthur, the well-known second-generation Oregon place name expert and author, wrote that he believed that Broughton’s Oak Point was actually farther upriver, not far from what’s now Woodland, Washington.
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