Historic Fort Vancouver marks bicentennial in 2025
Nov 27, 2024, 12:19 PM | Updated: 2:40 pm
It was right about this time exactly 200 years ago when work began on what would become Fort Vancouver. It became a busy regional headquarters for fur trade conducted the Hudson’s Bay Company and an enduring British presence in what would, ultimately, become American territory. Bicentennial observances will begin at the historic fort in early 2025 and continue through much of the coming year.
If there’s one takeaway from all the stories about the past that we try to tell on KIRO Newsradio and MyNorthwest, it’s that history is complicated, and is often full of subtleties and nuance.
With Thanksgiving here, it’s worth thinking about the over-simplified way that Americans once observed the holiday and celebrated its history with well-meaning pageants featuring brave pilgrims and stoic Indians feasting in gratitude in New England. Looking back even just a few decades to what many remember from their childhood, subtlety and nuance aren’t exactly the words that come to mind.
Much closer to home, Fort Vancouver was an incredible crossroads of commerce, religion, morality, and politics, as well as a clash between Indigenous cultures and European and American colonial aims. It’s a place where so many threads of Pacific Northwest history cross and tangle and get all twisted up; it’s about regional history, to be sure, but with international ramifications as far as where the international boundary would be set, and how far Great Britain and the United States would go to achieve their territorial goals.
More Feliks Banel: History of big windstorms in the Northwest
When the centennial for Fort Vancouver was celebrated in 1925, it was truly “celebrated” – not “observed” or “commemorated” the way we might say today. A hundred years ago, it was a festive occasion about what was considered an American triumph, with a commemorative coin and even a pageant called “The Coming of the White Man.”
It’s not 1925 anymore when it comes to Fort Vancouver, and it’s not the old days of pilgrim and Indian pageants when it comes to Thanksgiving. The way that many museums, college professors, and even cable TV channels depict history is much more sophisticated. The “black and white,” or “good guys versus bad guys” approach is mostly gone, including for the upcoming Fort Vancouver bicentennial.
Meagan Huff is curator for the National Park Service at Fort Vancouver. She agrees that standards for history are just higher nowadays.
“People are less tolerant of only getting that side or any one side of a story,” Huff told KIRO Newsradio. “And I think that’s kind of fabulous. I think we shouldn’t be satisfied with just a simplified version of the story. We should always want to dig a little deeper and learn a little more.”
All Over The Map: Early 20th century artifact plucked from Lake Washington
Huff says Fort Vancouver National Historic Site has been operated by the National Park Service since 1947. It’s east of I-5 just north of the Columbia River. The centerpiece is a re-construction of the 1820s wooden fort, which was built about 50 years ago.
March 19, 2025 will mark the actual bicentennial of the official dedication of Fort Vancouver 200 years ago.
In 1825, what’s now Washington, Oregon, Idaho and British Columbia was jointly occupied by the British and the Americans under a treaty signed in 1818. The big wooden fort was a foothold not just for the British-chartered fur company, but also for staking claim to possession of the territory. This was during a time when the British thought they would ultimately get sole control of the land north of the Columbia River – which is why the Hudson’s Bay Company moved operations from what’s now Astoria (on the south side of the river) to what they named Fort Vancouver (in honor of the British explorer) on the north side.
Meagan Huff says that many of the events in 2025 will be centered around the re-constructed fort structure – including lecture programs and new exhibits – but she clarified that the original fort in 1825 was actually built in a slightly different location.
“The original Fort Vancouver, the first Fort Vancouver, was actually built starting around this time of year in 1824 ,up on a bluff to the northeast of where you see the reconstruction today,” Huff explained. “They originally built it up on that bluff because they thought the view was very majestic and this would be a good position or area for a fort.”
That turned out to be a mistake, Huff says, because “it was very difficult for them to bring in goods and supplies from the river.” Thus, a new fort was built in 1829 on a camas prairie nearer to the Columbia where the reconstructed fort now stands.
When the boundary was settled by treaty at the 49th parallel in 1846, Hudson’s Bay moved most of their operations to Victoria on Vancouver Island. However, Meagan Huff says the British stayed on at Fort Vancouver for more than a decade after 1846. Eventually, the U.S. Army moved in, and then the old fort burned down under mysterious circumstances in the 1860s.
Huff says that much of what’s known about Fort Vancouver comes from archaeological research done there on-site going back to 1947. The initial focus of excavations was on the big wooden fort because it was the easy-to-understand, giant artifact. That research helped do the reconstruction in the 1960s.
But, says National Park Service curator Meagan Huff, the archaeology evolved to look beyond the structure to take in the bigger picture of the entire community.
“The focus was on the Fort Vancouver village, which was an employee village located to the west of the fort, where most everyone lived in the 1830s and 40s,” Huff said. “This is where the working class lived, where women and families lived, so being able to locate where village houses were, being able to see the kinds of things that people threw away, the kinds of things that people used, was extremely helpful.”
Information gleaned from those archaeological studies has been informing exhibits and programming at Fort Vancouver for decades, and will do the same for the 2025 bicentennial.
However, even though the way the history is told has evolved to encompass the larger and broader story of everyone in and around Fort Vancouver, it’s still important to understand the role of at least one of the larger-than-life characters there.
John McLoughlin is the individual most associated with site selection for Fort Vancouver, and for overseeing Hudson’s Bay operations there for decades.
McLoughlin was French-Canadian. He was tall with long white hair, and some Indigenous people called him the “Great White Eagle.” McLoughlin was in charge of Fort Vancouver for the Hudson’s Bay Company, and in that role he met all the important Americans who shaped or who tried to shape Oregon Country history from the 1820s to the 1840s. Part of his likely unspoken job description was to be a physical presence to help the British assert claim to land north of the Columbia River. But he was also generous to Americans, too – for which he was sometimes criticized by other Hudson’s Bay officials.
It’s not that simple, of course, says Meagan Huff. For example, John McLoughlin’s treatment of Indigenous people was complex. He married a Native woman, and encouraged the Hudson’s Bay employees who worked for him to do the same.
However, says Huff, “there were times in his time at Fort Vancouver where he was ordering attacks on Clatsop villages because he believed that they had done harm to a company ship.”
“So there were times where, you know, looking back, we’re like, ‘my goodness, that seems unjust and bad,’” Huff continued. “But there were also ways in which he really saw indigenous leaders in the area as people to be esteemed and respected.”
McLoughlin ultimately left Hudson’s Bay Company and settled in Oregon City, in what had become Oregon Territory, officially part of the United States. He’s been known for more than a century as the “Father of Oregon.”
Meagan Huff says observances will kick off officially in March 2025, and that more details will be coming in January. But she says there’s no need to wait for the bicentennial to officially begin to pay a visit.
“We certainly welcome the public to come to Fort Vancouver in the bicentennial year,” Huff said, “but at any time beyond this as well, because the story will continue, and our understanding of it will continue to change and be shaped. And we’re always looking for new perspectives.”
“That’s kind of how I see my job,” Huff continued. “Doing my research and then asking, ‘But what about that? But what about that?’ And trying to find more and more stories and bring those forward.”
You can hear Feliks Banel every Wednesday and Friday morning on Seattle’s Morning News with Dave Ross and Colleen O’Brien. Read more from Feliks here and subscribe to The Resident Historian Podcast here. If you have a story idea or a question about Northwest history, please email Feliks. You can also follow Feliks on X.
