An Ethnohistorical Overview of Groups with Ties to Fort Vancouver National Historic Site Douglas Deur 2012 Douglas Deur, Ph.D., College of Forest Resources, University of Washington and Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit National Park Service, Pacific West Region Seattle, Washington Research and report production done under Cooperative Agreement between the Pacific West Region, National Park Service and the College of Forest Resources, University of Washington: Cooperative Agreement No. CA 9088A008; and, Task Agreement No. J9W88050025. Pacific West Region: Social Science Series Publication Number 2011-12 Frederick F. York, Ph.D. Regional Anthropologist and Social Science Series Editor Northwest Cultural Resources Institute Report No. 15 The cover image was cropped at the bottom to delete the caption “Interior of Blackfoot Lodge,” which is incorrect. The entire image is represented above. Table of Contents Introduction 1 Methods 5 Before the Hudson’s Bay Company 9 Questions of Tribal Affiliation in the Chinookan Realm 17 The Cascades 26 Clackamas 29 Multnomah 31 Skillute 32 Cowlitz, Klickitat, and other Area Tribes 33 “A Sort of Communal Range”: A Case for Overlapping Claims 35 The Configuration of the Fort Vancouver Community 39 Navigating Trade Networks and Mutual Interests 43 Defense and Punishment on the Northwestern Frontier 51 Society and Structure in the Fort Vancouver Community 56 Strategic Marriages between HBC Employees and Native Women 61 The Unique Roles of Iroquois and Cree Employees 73 “The Greater Part of their Riches”: Slaves at Fort Vancouver 77 Changing Fortunes: The 1830s and 1840s 87 Demographic Contractions on the Lower Columbia 87 Chinookan Collapses and Relocations 92 Native Hawaiians at Fort Vancouver 95 The Expansion of Inland Tribes: The Klickitat and Cowlitz 103 Champoeg as a Daughter Community 112 Fort Vancouver as a Base for Missionary Efforts 115 The American Transition, Treaties, and Indian Wars: 1849-1879 125 Native Communities on the Eve of American Invasion 126 Growing American Interests and Hostilities toward the HBC 130 The Emergence of Vancouver Barracks 139 The Coast Reservation and the Extinguishment of Indian Title 143 Treaty-Making in Southwestern Washington & the Columbia Gorge 149 Vancouver Barracks in the Indian Wars of the 1850s 159 The Fate of the “Vancouver Indians” 166 The Fate of Remaining Klickitats and Cowlitz 174 The Fate of “Half Breeds” and Kanaka Village in the New Northwest 177 The Later Campaigns and Prisoners of Vancouver Barracks 185 Conclusions 195 Potentials for Further Research 197 Bibliography 201 Appendix 1: Account of Burials on the Lower Columbia River 237 Notes 245 i ii Introduction Among all of the places that feature prominently within the history of the Pacific Northwest, few rank as important as Fort Vancouver. And, among those places that feature prominently within the region’s history, perhaps Fort Vancouver stands alone in the sheer ethnic and racial diversity of its historical occupants. A contact point between different tribal groups prior to European contact, the site occupied by Fort Vancouver was uniquely well situated within the densely populated and resource-rich “Portland Basin” – the lowland area surrounding the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia Rivers. The site was positioned between two core areas of tribal settlement, one on the Columbia Cascades upstream and the other at Sauvie Island and the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia Rivers a short distance below. Moreover, the fort site sat along traditional routes of travel, between the coast and the interior along the Columbia River, and north and south through the Willamette and other River basins of what would become western Oregon and Washington. It was located in an area where diverse groups – resident Clackamas, Multnomah, and Cascades Chinooks, as well as interior Klickitats, Cowlitz, Kalapuyas, and many others – converged for shared resource harvests and trade long before the Hudson’s Bay Company was ever a presence in the region. Fort Vancouver was the administrative headquarters and main supply depot for the Hudson’s Bay Company’s fur trading operations in the company’s immense Columbia Department. The Fort was at the core of almost all political, cultural, and commercial activities involving Euro-Americans in the Pacific Northwest during the 1820-1840s. A diverse population congregated around the post for trade, employment, and security. Constructing their fort at this site in 1824-25, the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) brought together a characteristically diverse group of fur traders – a cast assembled largely before their arrival on the lower Columbia, during the Company’s more than 150-year history of trading furs across the North American frontier. Seeking men skilled in the fur trade with few local loyalties, the HBC enlisted the services of Iroquois, Cree, and Native Hawaiian men, in addition to a cadre of French Canadians, Scots, Métis (mixed-race people of American Indian and European ancestry), and others recruited from other HBC posts throughout northern North America to operate and support the fort’s operations. In turn, these men married American Indian women from within the region, frequently with the encouragement of HBC officers who recognized the strategic advantages of such alliances to the Company’s interests. Over time, American Indian traders and trappers converged at the fort - both in the “Village” (or “Kanaka Village”) of mixed-race families that accreted on the fort’s margin, and in preexisting Native villages a short distance away. Slaves from as far away as the northern California Pit River and Shasta tribes, as well as from tribes up and down the 1 Pacific coast, lived within the mixed-race community of the fort and provided services to households and HBC operations alike. And yet, the story of Fort Vancouver is even more complex than this description might suggest. The roughly 25 years of sole HBC occupation of the Fort Vancouver site represented a period of dramatic demographic change, perhaps the most dramatic changes ever known, on the lower Columbia River. Through the 1830s, the Chinookan peoples and other tribes of the lower Columbia River region were decimated by diseases. Some estimates suggest up to 90% of the population perished during the time of HBC operations at Fort Vancouver. By the end of that decade, many spectators describe the remaining Chinookans as scarce, while new peoples – Klickitats and other tribes of the interior Northwest - were occupying their village sites and their commercial roles in the Portland Basin. Through the 1840s, the HBC increasingly looked inland, to interior tribes less affected by the epidemics or the initial overexploitation of furs, for both trade alliances and intermarriages. By the early 1850s, the arrival of the American military at Fort Vancouver dramatically transformed the role of the fort for Pacific Northwest tribes. The Village community slowly dispersed along numerous pathways, while tribes residing nearby were assigned to various reservations, strategically positioned away from the growing non-Native settlements of the Portland Basin. Between 1855 and 1879 – a period of almost precisely equal length to the era of exclusive HBC occupation of Fort Vancouver – the Vancouver Barracks became a place where Indians were gathered together in preparation for relocation to reservations and where prisoners of war were detained from numerous Indian wars of the West. Members of the Nez Perce, Paiute, Bannock, Shoshone, Yakama and other tribes all were represented in the prisoner population of the Barracks. In the aggregate, then, during the period of HBC management at Fort Vancouver, almost every tribe in the Pacific Northwest had been represented in some way within the Fort Vancouver population, as were various Native Hawaiian communities and eastern Canadian First Nations. All of these historical developments create distinctive challenges for the National Park Service (NPS) staff seeking to manage the Fort Vancouver site and interpret its history to the public. Unlike most other National Park Service Units, the multi-ethnic and multi-tribal character of Fort Vancouver is central to the history and mandates of the park. As a partner in the Vancouver National Historic Reserve (VNHR), Fort Vancouver National Historic Site (FOVA) – a unit of the NPS - has taken the lead in protecting and interpreting cultural resources within the Reserve. When taking on such tasks as telling the Fort Vancouver history to the public, or making determinations as to which American Indian tribes should be consulted when human remains are encountered, NPS staff have been called upon to make decisions about historical tribal affiliation based on the complex and sometimes elusive history of Native peoples at the fort. The current document has been developed, in part, to provide a little more context and clarity to these efforts. 2 This document summarizes the outcomes of an effort to identify the diverse human populations associated with Fort Vancouver. Through a review of ethnographic, historical, and ethnohistorical information found in various research libraries and archives, this research has sought to illuminate the many reasons that Native Americans converged at the fort and to reconstruct the paths taken by these people after their departure. In the process, we are able to identify those modern communities that are significantly linked to the history of Fort Vancouver – in turn, this will allow the