COLUMBIA RIVER EXPLORATION AND SETTLEMENT

COLUMBIA RIVER EXPLORATION AND SETTLEMENT. For nearly two centuries before Europeans first saw the Columbia River, geographers eagerly theorized that a Great River of the West penetrated deep into the center of the North American continent. A number of speculative maps variously located this river between forty-two and fifty degrees north latitude and connected it to the mythical Northwest Passage, thus making it part of a navigable water route between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. No easy water route across the continent existed, but the belief that whoever claimed this river would control the commerce of North America eventually proved correct.

The Columbia was first described and mapped during a period of intense imperial interest in the North Pacific, when Europeans and Americans sought to establish commercial and territorial claims in the region. Spanish captain Bruno Hezeta first observed a large estuary in 1775 near forty-six degrees latitude, where the Columbia meets the Pacific, and his report soon attracted the attention of English, Russian, French, and American interests. Hezeta's claim that he had seen the mouth of a great river, and not a large bay, was eventually confirmed on 11 May 1792, when an American trader, Captain Robert Gray, sailed across the river's treacherous bar and into the fresh waters of the Columbia, which he named in honor of his ship, the Columbia Rediviva. Under the direction of British captain George Vancouver, Lieutenant William Broughton sailed more than one hundred miles up the Columbia in October 1792 and produced the first detailed map of the lower river. The American explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark described the Columbia from its confluence with the Snake River to the Pacific in 1805 and 1806, and six years later the North West Company fur trader David Thompson mapped the entire twelve-hundred-mile river from its source in the Canadian Rockies.

Jointly claimed by Great Britain and the United States, the Columbia River basin became an important arena for the international fur trade. Strongly influenced by established Native markets and distribution networks along the Columbia, the trade all but collapsed in the 1830s due to overexploitation by the Hudson's Bay Company. Weakened by disease and increasingly unable to control the terms of their encounters with outsiders, Native communities were quickly displaced by the thousands of overland migrants who poured across the Oregon Trail in the 1840s. While this new settlement depended on the advice of ex-trappers turned guides, who provided detailed information on interior waterways, it also benefited from the work of Lieutenant Charles Wilkes and the U.S. Exploring Expedition, which mapped the Columbia Basin in 1841.

The presence of so many new arrivals from the United States not only replaced the fur trade economy with one based on agriculture, fishing, lumber, and mining, but also transformed the jointly administered territory into an exclusively American province. Basing its claims on the explorations of Gray and Lewis and Clark, the United States negotiated a treaty with Great Britain in 1846 that divided the Columbia River at the forty-ninth parallel. All lands to the south became part of United States, eventually forming the states of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and part of Montana.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Allen, John L. "The Canadian Fur Trade and the Exploration of Western North America, 1797–1851." In North American Exploration. Edited by John Logan Allen. Vol. 3: A Continent Comprehended. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997.

Gibson, James R. "The Exploration of the Pacific Coast." In North American Exploration. Edited by John Logan Allen. Vol. 2: A Continent Defined. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997.

Meinig, D. W. The Great Columbia Plain: A Historical Geography, 1805–1910. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968. Reissued in 1995 with a forward by William Cronon and new preface from the author.