Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  On July 23, Reverend Francis Fletcher, a member of the expedition, said the Miwoks “tooke a sorrowfull farewell of us” and the Hind sailed west to Mindanao, the Indian Ocean, and home to Plymouth, arriving there, after nearly three years’ absence, in September 1580, completing the first English circumnavigation of the world.

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  In 1596, a letter was published in Europe purportedly written by a Greek explorer in the service of Spain. Apostolos Valerianos, who adopted the name Juan de Fuca, claimed to have sailed a small caravel into the Pacific for the viceroy of Mexico in 1592 and to have found the western opening of the Northwest Passage, a broad inlet on the northern coast between 47 and 48 degrees north latitude. He told of “sailing inland” for more than twenty days and of finding a people who wore the skins of beasts and a land rich in silver, gold, and pearls.

  His story was probably a fiction, common enough in the day, but mapmakers put his “opening” in the latitude he described. Two hundred years later, the Juan de Fuca Strait, separating Vancouver Island from the Washington mainland and leading into Puget Sound, was discovered not many sea miles distant from de Fuca’s 48 degrees north.

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  Visions of the Northwest Passage continued to draw mariners along the Oregon coast of America. In 1602, the Spaniard Sebastián Vizcaíno led the San Diego and the Tres Reyes out of Monterey on the California coast as far north as the 43rd parallel, searching for Quivira and the Strait of Anián.

  Nor were all the explorers Spaniards and Englishmen. Peter the Great of Russia had conquered Siberia by 1639 and reached the Pacific, and in 1741 Vitus Bering, a Dane, sailed in the St. Peter from Kamchatka to the coast of North America near Sitka. In the 1765–68 era, the Russians were on the move south along the coast, slaughtering sea otters and coastal Indians with equal rapacity.

  In 1774, at the time when the First Continental Congress was meeting in Philadelphia, Spain sent an expedition to the Oregon coast. Among other accomplishments, it discovered Nootka Sound, on the west coast of what became Vancouver Island.

  By 1812, with the consent of Spain, Russian hunters out of Sitka founded Fort Ross on Bodega Bay in California and later another fort in the Sandwich Islands. American politicians considered these outposts dangerous in their implications, especially due to their proximity to San Francisco Bay, and in 1816 James Monroe proposed a treaty of amity in North America with the 49th parallel as the boundary between the interests of the two countries. Monroe did not mention England in his proposal, but in any event the idea was not pushed to fruition.

  The Spaniards interpreted the Russian incursions as threats to her claims in the Pacific and sent new expeditions out to expand explorations of the coast of Alta California and establish missions and presidios from San Diego to Sonoma, north of the Golden Gate.

  But Spain did not pursue its discoveries and, after it seemed clear that the Russians were more interested in the fur trade than in permanent settlement, it was the British who rose to challenge Spain’s claims.

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  In 1778, in his third and final voyage to the Antipodes, Captain James Cook, England’s greatest navigator, came to the Oregon coast with his flagship Resolution and the sloop Discovery. His mission was to conduct a thorough search for the Northwest Passage (for which Parliament was offering a £20,000 prize) by sailing above the northernmost latitude of Ferrelo and Vizcaíno, and above the latitude of Drake’s New Albion exploration 200 years before. His cautionary instructions from the Admiralty were to avoid any encounters with foreigners and to respect Spanish dominions on the American coast. His orders stated, “You are also, with the consent of the natives, to take possession in the name of the king of Great Britain, of convenient situations in such countries as you may discover, that have not already been discovered or visited by any other European power, and to distribute among the inhabitants such things as will remain as traces and testimonies of your having been there.”

  The world had no more experienced explorer than James Cook. He had helped chart the Saint Lawrence River, surveyed the Newfoundland coast, made two previous epic voyages, that of 1772–1775 his greatest legacy: In three years he had sailed over 20,000 leagues on the southern seas—three times the circumference of the globe—with a loss of only four men (defeating scurvy with sauerkraut and meat broths), and charted the coasts of Antarctica and Australia.

  In 1776, when Cook sailed from England for the last time on his square-rigged flagship Resolution (his sailing master was a twenty-one-year-old navigator from Plymouth named William Bligh), his orders were almost too specific. He was to proceed around the Cape of Good Hope into the Pacific, cross from Tahiti in the Windward Group of the Society Islands to the coast of North America, and proceed northward to determine the value, if any, of the theory that in arctic waters would be found the western entrance to the Northwest Passage. Failing to find it there, he was to continue through the Bering Strait and search for an open-water polar passage. Such confidence was placed in his success that the Admiralty dispatched naval vessels to meet him in Baffin Bay on the Atlantic side of the continent.

  He reached and rediscovered Hawaii (which he named the Sandwich Islands after the First Lord of the Admiralty, the Earl of Sandwich), and on March 7, 1778, sighted the coast of Drake’s New Albion at the 43rd parallel and charted and named such features as Capes Arago, Foulweather, and Perpetua as he sailed upcoast. He missed seeing the tumultuous mouth of the Columbia River, but on March 22 the Resolution and the Discovery stood at a cape on the edge of a strait Cook denied existed. He named the promontory Cape Flattery and wrote in his journal, “There appeared to be a small opening, which flattered us with the hopes of finding a harbor.… It is in this very latitude where we now were, that geographers have placed the pretended strait of Juan de Fuca.… But we saw nothing like it; nor is there the least probability that ever any such thing existed.”

  Cook’s ships made their first landing at Nootka Sound, and the explorer wrote about the desolate, windblown place in his journals, which were eagerly published in England and the United States and widely read. He wrote about the furs secured from Indians at Nootka, which fetched handsome prices in the China trade (sea otter pelts, purchased for a handful of beads, sold in Canton for as much as $200 each); of savages paddling canoes, some of them forty feet long and seven wide, made from a single cedar trunk, and throwing feathers and red dust in their wake. He saw men dressed in fur-edged blankets of dog hair mixed with cedar bark and decorated with scenes of whale hunts, over which were draped capes of sea otter skins; people whose bodies were smeared with red clay mixed with whale oil, their hair long and soaked in fish oil sprinkled with bird down, their earlobes and noses decorated with bone and bits of metal, wearing wooden masks painted into grotesque visages. These amazing people had articles of iron and copper, leftovers from Spanish landings, and one native wore two silver spoons as ear ornaments. Their houses, “filthy as hogsties, everything in and about them stinking of fish,” Cook said, were surrounded by racks of drying fish, piles of excrement, and strange totems.

  In spring of 1779, soon after he returned to the Sandwich Islands from the northwest coast, Captain Cook, age fifty, was killed by natives at Kealakekua Bay. One of six marines from the Discovery and the Resolution fighting hand-to-hand the natives who stabbed Cook to death was an American named John Ledyard.

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  The lure of the Pacific Northwest in the last decade of the eighteenth century and the first of the nineteenth had nothing to do with its potential for settlement, or with its vast timber and fishery potential—which were obvious from the starboard rail of any ship headed north—or even with that ancient, chimerical idea of a Northwest Passage. The great enticement in those two decades was Lutra enhydris marina, which the Russians knew as Bobri morski, “sea beaver,” and which American and English sailors called the sea otter.

  These gregarious, aquatic animals lived and bore their pups in their favorite habitats, the reefs and rocks and float
ing kelp beds of coastal California, British Columbia, and Alaska. The animal was prized for its thick, fine underfur, perfect for sewing into royal robes, and for the tails, which were used for decorating hats and gown borders. Like the beaver, next on the list for extermination, sea otters were “harvested” recklessly. Between 1790 and 1812 an average of 12,000 a year were clubbed to death. In fact, the animal was all but extinct on the northern coast by 1800.

  English mariners to the Northwest knew the value of the sea otter from Drake’s time, and the Russians were slaughtering them on Alaskan shores even before they began their poaching sorties out of Sitka down to Fort Ross. Coastal Indians had known the animals’ worth from time immemorial: Two sea otter pelts would buy a slave, and when the first white explorers came, the furs could be traded for any number of iron tools, beads, and gewgaws.

  In 1785 the French sent an expedition to the Oregon coast and, not surprisingly, one of its objectives was to obtain reliable information on the fur trade there. Since 1600 France had worked to establish a fur monopoly in the New World, and by 1750 its coureurs de bois (runners of the woods) and brigades of trappers had penetrated the continent as far west as the Mandan villages of the Missouri River and south to Santa Fé in Spanish New Mexico.

  Louis XVI personally had a hand in planning the 1785 Pacific expedition. Like other European monarchs, he was interested in the China trade and therefore captivated by the idea of “some river or narrow gulf” that might communicate between the two great oceans—a Northwest Passage. He also wrote of “the possibility of a colony or at least a factory [trading post] in a region not yet occupied” on the Pacific coast of America.

  A nobleman and celebrated navigator named Jean de Galaup, Comte de La Pérouse, led the expedition, commanding two vessels, the Boussole and the Astrolabe. At age forty-four he had already spent thirty years at sea, starting his career as a midshipman during the Seven Years’ War. In addition to a full complement of officers and seamen, La Pérouse had aboard his ships a remarkable assortment of scientists, interpreters, and “observers” who were to gather data on the country, its people and “products,” the extent of Spanish establishments ashore, and the latitude at which furs might be obtained without giving offense to Spain.

  La Pérouse’s ships found the northwest coast on June 23, 1786, and spent six weeks in Alaskan waters as far north as latitude 59 degrees 37 minutes, then sailed down past Nootka and the Oregon coast to California. The Boussole and Astrolabe made frequent anchorages and lowered boats, the shore parties conducting a brisk trade with Indians. The fur-shrewd Frenchmen had bartered for over a thousand sea otter “pieces” before crossing the Pacific to Macao, the Portuguese port on the China coast. There the scraps, tails, and hides were sold and the profits divided among the crews of the two ships.

  “I believe there is no country in the world where the sea-otter is more common than in this part of America,” La Pérouse wrote in his log, “and I should be little surprised if a factory extending its operations only forty or fifty leagues along the sea-shore might collect each year ten thousand skins of this animal.” He cautioned, however, that a French factory on the northwest coast of America might cause problems with the courts at Madrid and Saint Petersburg.

  In September 1787 the navigator put his Russian interpreter ashore at Kamchatka to make his way to Paris with reports and maps, then sailed south. In January 1788, now two and one half years out of Brest, the French ships battered their way into Botany Bay, the harbor on the eastern shore of Australia discovered eight years earlier by Captain Cook. There was a historical coincidence in La Pérouse’s appearance there. Watching him maneuver his vessels into the bay were the crews of two British warships and nine merchant transports, which had just landed over 700 British convicts ashore after a voyage of 15,000 miles from Plymouth. This was the “first fleet” of the criminal population of Australia.

  The French explorers spent six weeks at Botany Bay among the Englishmen and their prisoner-colonists before setting sail and disappearing into the maw of the Pacific. Thirty years would pass before it was determined that La Pérouse and all hands had perished when the Boussole and the Astrolabe went down among the Coral Sea reefs of the New Hebrides, 1,200 miles east of the Australian coast.

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  In the same year as the La Pérouse expedition, Captain Charles Barkley (or Barclay or Berkeley), an Englishman, sailing from Ostende in the merchant vessel Imperial Eagle under the flag of a fictitious “Austrian East India Company,” entered Nootka Sound, and began a trade with the Indians of Vancouver Island. His notable contribution to the history of the American Northwest occurred in July 1787, when he found the “lost” Strait of Juan de Fuca. Barkley did not venture far into it; instead, he continued south to trade with the natives.

  The sailors of the Imperial Eagle were among the first to learn that native naïveté and docility could not always be depended upon. Four of Barkley’s crew were killed after going ashore with “too much confidence and unarm’d,” and the captain’s report established that the attack took place at 47 degrees 46 minutes north, at a place he appropriately named Destruction Island. He ordered the burning of a village in retribution and established a pattern of violence that would last a half century.

  Despite the conflict with the natives, the origin of which was not reported, Barkley’s expedition made a trade bonanza among the coastal tribes, departing the coast with 4,000 sea otter pelts, which were taken to Macao in the winter of 1787 and sold at an immense profit.

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  The River of the West

  “… THE MOST LOVELY COUNTRY THAT CAN BE IMAGINED.”

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  From the interior of what became the Oregon Country to its thundering coast lived a diverse people who had occupied the land for centuries before Ferrelo and Drake saw it. Some of the native clans were given French or English names such as Nez Percé, Flathead, Coeur d’Alêne; and there were also such tribes and subtribes as the Cayuse, Colville, Kalispell, Spokane, Yakima, Walla Walla, and Wishram; and the coastal Chinook, Chehalem, Salish, Clatsop, Puyallap, Tillamook, Coos, and Umpqua. Their cultures have been called by anthropologists the most elaborate in the world among nonagricultural native people.

  All the tribes, land-bound and coastal, had a common riches: the land’s lush abundance. Fish, salmon in particular, and timber for boats and homes distinguished them. Many of the coastal folk, those first encountered by Europeans, were fish-rich, status-conscious slaveholders. Their social structure was sharply divided among autocrats and commoners with a hereditary chief at the center who owned huge tracts of village lands, hunting and fishing grounds, and was served by slaves captured in raids on other tribes. This chief’s status among his people and his renown among peers in neighboring clans was to a degree dependent on the elaborateness of his periodic potlatch (a Chinook word essentially meaning “giving away”). In this religious ceremony, after much speechmaking and feasting, to demonstrate his riches the chief would distribute gifts—from caches of dried fish to parcels of land—according to the social status of the recipients.

  Among the coastal clans were accomplished artisans much admired (and soon feared) by the explorers and navigators who visited their sea-wracked shores from Nootka Sound to Alta California. In ships’ logs and explorers’ journals are descriptions of their longhouses and carved and painted totems, of delicately carved bowls made of alderwood, blankets of animal hair, weirs—basket-traps—of woven willow, fish lines and nets made of twisted wood fibers and grasses, hooks and harpoons made of wood, bone, and shell. They wrote of dances and rituals with much noisemaking with rattles and bells, the participants wearing wooden masks and long cloaks made of shredded cedar bark dyed with berry juices.

  White chroniclers admired the native watercraft, especially the great flat-bottomed, cedarwood dugouts, some of them thirty or forty feet long, capable of carrying a crew of five and a ton of weight. Chinooks and Nootkas, among others, made such boats—rough-shaping them with s
tone adzes, firing them for hardness, sanding and polishing them with sharkskin—and paddled them from Vancouver Island to California waters and up the Columbia to the Indian commerce center at The Dalles rapids. They harpooned whales in them, caught sharks and seals and sea otters, netted fish, and pulled the boats ashore to collect mollusks along the beaches.

  Another artistic and functional craft of the coastal tribes was the canoe. This vessel—unlike those familiar to the voyageur, made from birch bark and hide lashings—the Pacific Northwest Indian made his from a split log, chipped with adzes until the walls were thin and pliable, the bottom burn-hardened with heapings of hot coals, the skin painted, and the wooden prow carved into animal figureheads.

  William Clark described these canoes as “butiful … neeter made than any I have ever Seen and calculated to ride the waves, and carry emence burthens.”

  The culture of the sea and river people, and even important features of their religion, were founded on fish. The Nootkas honored Salmon Beings, and the first fish caught each year was eaten ritually at an altar and its bones thrown back into the water to reincarnate. Even the inland Colvilles had a Fish Guardian Spirit. They used fish oil, which they preserved in fish- or animal-gut bags, in cooking, for flavoring, for mixing with berries, and for rubbing in their hair and on their skin.

  Many, perhaps most, of the Northwest tribes were, to use the white man’s word, “peaceable,” avoiding wars with their neighbors and even mediating family and intertribal quarrels. Some had communal food-gathering practices and tribal assemblies in which all adults, male and female, had their say.

  But there were some tribes who had waged war before the white man came and remained warlike thereafter.

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  The river rises in southeastern British Columbia and flows northwest, then south, in the Rocky Mountain trench for 465 miles before crossing the 49th line of latitude. Just below the mouth of the Spokane River lava beds force it to make a bend westward, then it veers south again, running swiftly through a narrow valley where it is joined by its chief tributary, the Snake. Now on a westward course, the river flows through the magnificent gorges it created over the millennia, through the Cascades and the Coast Ranges, reaching the Pacific, 1,210 miles from its source.