In Polk’s day, Manifest Destiny was no idle slogan; it was an operating principle, especially when combined, as Polk combined it, with certain tenets of the Monroe Doctrine of 1823: that the United States would not countenance further occupation by European powers, and that it would regard as dangerous to its peace and safety any attempt at colonization in the Western Hemisphere. The one point of the doctrine expansionists studiously ignored was the part that said the United States would not interfere with existing colonies or dependencies of European powers in the New World. Annexations, such as that of Texas, had been used before as a means of halting “foreign influences” and their nefarious underminings of peace and security in the neighborhood of the United States. Diplomacy and purchase were the desirable means of expansion, but annexation, by war and by conquest, was a workable alternative.
Few questioned that the annexation of Texas would mean war with Mexico and indeed, by the end of 1845, with Texas admitted to the Union, an American army was poised above the Rio Grande to do battle with a Mexican force marching north. The war with Mexico preoccupied the president, but he regarded its rewards as vastly outweighing all sacrifices: Texas was won; now he turned his attention to the other Mexican provinces north of the Rio Grande, New Mexico, and Alta California, and to the Oregon Country.
In his editorial manifesto, John Louis O’Sullivan wrote that “the day is not far distant when the Empires of the Atlantic and the Pacific would again flow together into one,” and President Polk intended to fulfill this vision with his mighty one-term agenda, the most ambitious in American expansionist history: Before he left office he intended to add over 1 million square miles of territory to the United States.
3
President Polk’s “whole of Oregon” inaugural credo and his avowed intention to end the joint occupancy agreement troubled the Tory government in England, then mired in colonial wars against the Maoris in New Zealand and the Sikhs in the Punjab region of India. The Times of London called for “resolute determination” and suggested sending a naval squadron to Oregon waters to keep the sun from setting on the British enclave in the American Northwest. Gunboat diplomats in London succeeded in having the fifty-gun warship America broken away from the British Pacific Squadron and dispatched to Juan de Fuca Strait under the command of Sir John Gordon, brother of British foreign secretary Lord Aberdeen. Gordon and Lieutenant William Peel, third son of Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel, traveled to Fort Vancouver in September 1845 to reassure British subjects there of the “firm protection of their rights.”
In touring the Willamette valley, where the American farms and settlements were almost entirely confined, Lieutenant Peel met Jesse Applegate and observed that the immigrants, had they chosen the profession of arms, might have made “the best soldiers in the world.” Applegate acknowledged that his farmer-comrades “were probably brave enough, but would never submit to discipline as soldiers.” Recalling the rivalries and problems of his own overland journey, he said to Peel, “If the president himself had started across the plains to command a company, the first time he should choose a bad camp, or in any other way offend them, they would turn him out, and elect some one among themselves who should suit them better.”
Bancroft believed the visit of the America and Peel’s tour and talks with John McLoughlin, other Hudson’s Bay employees and officials, and Americans in the Willamette valley averted a war between the two nations contending the Oregon Country. A decisive matter, the historian said, was McLoughlin’s “joining the compact.” This referred to the provisional government set up by the settlers at Champoeg after Ewing Young’s death in 1841. Applegate had invited McLoughlin to participate, and since the oath of loyalty pledged to support the laws while remaining “a dutiful citizen of the United States or a subject of Great Britain,” he took the pledge.
When Gordon and Peel came to Fort Vancouver, Bancroft wrote, “they expected to maintain England’s hold on the north side of the Columbia River” but unexpectedly found the Hudson’s Bay Company working with rather than against the Americans and “learned the fearless and resolute character of the colonists, and their rapidly increasing numbers.” McLoughlin, Bancroft said, “constantly checked” any expressions of hostility toward the Americans, stating to his various visitors and “spies” (often one and the same), as he had openly averred in letters to England, that the country “was not worth a war.”
Not all listened to the factor’s admonitions, however, or approved of his fatalistic attitude or his generous assistance to the colonists. Chief among these disapprovers was Governor George Simpson, who regularly reported on the American invasion of Oregon to Whitehall.
* * *
At the time of the Gordon-Peel visit, Simpson and McLoughlin had been associates for over twenty years, a relationship that began eroding almost from the moment the two met in the Canadian wilderness en route to old Fort Astoria in 1824. Simpson was the ideal Hudson’s Bay governor. He was brusque and ruthless, kept his eye on the ledgers, roamed about his domain in his canot du maître, dressed in a black suit, neck-stock, tartan-lined cloak, and tall beaver hat as he slashed staffs, closed unprofitable trading posts, and issued edicts and orders. McLoughlin, always wary of his ostentatious superior, could never keep a distance. Simpson visited Fort Vancouver frequently and when not at the fort was forever assailing the factor with correspondence and urgent memoranda.
In 1842 a rift opened between the two men that would never close. In June of that year McLoughlin received a letter from Simpson stating that John McLoughlin, Jr., had been murdered at Fort Stikine, the Hudson’s Bay trade center near Wrangell, Alaska. Oldest of McLoughlin and Marguerite’s four children, John Jr. had been left in charge of the remote post, which was surrounded by hostile natives and what a contemporary called “a gang of miscreant workers” and, according to Simpson’s chillingly matter-of-fact letter, had died in a “drunken fray, by the hand of one of his own men.” The governor said the young man’s conduct at the post had been “exceedingly bad” and that when he drank he showed violence “amounting to insanity” and had driven his men to such a degree that he had been killed “under the influence of terror, as a measure of self-preservation” by one of his employees. Simpson added that any “Tribunal by which the case could be tried, would find a verdict of ‘Justifiable homicide’” and advised McLoughlin not to press charges.
The White Eagle, at once devastated by the news and furious at Simpson’s brutally accusatory account of the murder, decided to conduct his own investigation into the matter. He found many of his son’s workers willing to testify that John Jr. rarely drank (indeed, fort records showed his liquor allowance had been scarcely touched) and that the problem with the men had erupted over Company rules discouraging liaisons with Indian women. John Jr. had quite correctly punished some men who had “scaled the Picquets” after stealing items from the post to give as gifts to their Indian paramours.
The factor also learned that the killer, a man named Heroux, after firing the shot and with his victim “writhing in the agonies of Death,” had walked up and smashed in John Jr.’s head with a rifle butt. For this, Simpson coolly informed McLoughlin, the murderer had been turned over to the Russians, from whom Fort Stikine had been leased. When the Muscovites announced that they had no jurisdiction in the matter, Heroux was released from custody.
McLoughlin wrote Simpson bluntly, “Instead of conducting the examination so as to endeavor to find out what had led to the murder, you conducted it as if it had been an investigation into the moral conduct of the Deceased, and as if you were desirous to justify the conduct of the murderers.”
After his findings, which he communicated to Hudson’s Bay authorities, the official version of the story began to change from that reported by Simpson, so much so that a Company official wrote, “I have come to the conclusion that McLoughlin was not a habitual drunkard, that the punishments he inflicted were not of excessive severity; and that he was very vigilant and strict in keeping the men
to their duty day and night.”
That was the only satisfaction McLoughlin was to have in the tragedy. He requested that authorities at York Factory send Heroux and his henchmen to England for trial but was notified that if it were done he would have to bear the cost, more than £10,000. He had to abandon the case.
Soon after this awful summer McLoughlin returned to the Catholic faith of his youth and had his marriage to Marguerite sanctified.
* * *
As a result of one of George Simpson’s memoranda to England in 1845, the government sent two officers out to Fort Vancouver as “observers” to scout military sites in the event of war and to gather information on the colonists. The men, Lieutenant Henry J. Warre of the Fifty-fourth Regiment and Lieutenant Mervin Vavasour of the Royal Engineers, traveled to the fort by the transcontinental route from the Red River to Fort Colville and reached Vancouver even before Captain Gordon and Lieutenant Peel of the Royal Navy departed for England that fall. The officer-emissaries posed, rather too ostentatiously, as tourists by wearing beaver hats, figured vests, and tweed trousers, and they lounged about the fort partaking of McLoughlin’s hospitality. He knew they were spies but had to endure them as they made notes for their report to London.
The two gathered little information to support a military defense of Oregon lands, particularly those south of the Columbia, but they did make damaging accusations against Hudson’s Bay’s handling of the American influx, charging McLoughlin with welcoming the colonists to the country in such numbers that they now outnumbered British residents. Warre and Vavasour reported that they had personally observed immigrants arriving at Vancouver who were sold goods from the Company’s stores at cheaper rates than those offered British subjects, and said that McLoughlin was also “overly friendly” to American missionaries. Without his aid, they said, “not thirty American families would now have been in the settlement.”
The factor’s good deeds were not to go unpunished. The two army lieutenants, and in his more moderate report, Peel of the Royal Navy, were critical of the Company’s overly generous relationship with American colonists, directing them to the farmlands south of the river and assisting them with men, equipment, and transportation instead of discouraging their settlement and perhaps advising that they move on south to Mexican California. Hudson’s Bay directors had repeatedly warned McLoughlin not to give more than minimal humane assistance to the Americans, their missionaries in particular. They knew, probably from Governor George Simpson’s reports, that the factor not only sold the clerics all the supplies they needed to start their mission stations, but even extended the Company’s protection over their little enclaves situated among unpredictable natives.
“What would you have?” McLoughlin responded. “Would you have me turn the cold shoulder to the man of God who came to do that for the Indians which the company had neglected to do?”
Yes, he had assisted the colonists and the missionaries, had assisted Americans long before their numerous arrivals in 1843, ’44, and ’45, he said. Yes, he had provided food for them, and boats and boatmen to transport them to the Willamette before the Columbia iced over. Yes, he had taken care of their sick and injured at the fort hospital and gave them seeds if they could not afford to buy them so they could plant a crop and stave off starvation. (These matters Bancroft called “Christ-like Deeds.”) Had he and his officers refused such humanitarian succor, he said, the Company would have been “covered with obloquy.”
While touching lightly on the ingratitude of those who neglected to pay their debts and the rudeness of those who made him despair for American honor, McLoughlin nonetheless defended the Americans from what he considered to be the ignorant slurs of government spies.
“They have the same right to come that I have to be here,” he insisted, and repelled the notion that the Company was duty-bound to defend British territorial rights. His responsibility, he said, was to Hudson’s Bay directors, not to colonial or military affairs. Those were in Whitehall’s province, not his. And as to being in league with the colonists’ rudimentary government, he produced copies of letters he had written to England in 1843 describing the potential American threat to Fort Vancouver and asking for protection he never received.
The “White Eagle of the Old Northwest” admitted that British lands had been invaded, but said pointedly, “I have found British subjects just as keen at catching at an opportunity to benefit themselves, in some instances to my cost, as these American backwoodsmen.”
McLoughlin had been keen to catch such opportunities himself, having a large property interest in Oregon City, terminus of the Oregon Trail south of the Columbia, and he had been wise to invest in it. He had grown weary of his responsibilities and thankless burdens, and had become desolate over the Company’s plan to quit Fort Vancouver. He had first heard of the idea during one of Governor Simpson’s visits. Sir George said Hudson’s Bay headquarters would likely be moved to Vancouver Island, that the old post had outlived its usefulness, that the bar of the Columbia was too dangerous and the new headquarters would be more central to the northern operations. Now, in 1845, with the fur trade in a steep decline along the Columbia, the region was no longer prized. Moreover, the Company’s directors were alarmed at the numbers and aggressive nature of the American settlers in the Willamette valley and feared for the safety of its stores and property at Vancouver.
McLoughlin, seeing that his life work was to be thrown away, tendered his resignation from the Hudson’s Bay Company in the fall of 1845—the year the American population of Oregon reached 5,000—and took up residence in Oregon City the following spring. He had intended to seek American citizenship, but with the news in the spring of 1845 of the election of President Polk and the threat of war with England, he could not change his allegiance without being branded a traitor and forfeiting his retirement stipend.
He would have to await settlement of the boundary issue.
4
The Oregon boundary question had first surfaced as a diplomatic issue during the War of 1812, when Fort Astoria was sold to the North West Company. It cropped up again in 1818, when the United States negotiated with the British and fixed the Canadian-American border at the 49th parallel between Lake of the Woods and the crest of the Rocky Mountains. No boundary was established for the region west of the Rockies, and since both nations claimed the Oregon Country, in compromise negotiators decided to leave the territory “free and open” to both nations in what was termed “joint occupation.”
Meantime, President James Monroe’s secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, sought to pressure Spain to relinquish her claims to all territories north of the 42nd parallel, the northern border of California. Weakened by colonial revolutions, Spain dragged out the negotiations but capitulated in 1819 with the Adams-Onís Treaty, which established the 42nd parallel as the northern boundary of California and turned over to the United States all claims to the Oregon Territory.
Adams said, “the remainder of the continent should ultimately be ours,” and warned that his government “considered this hemisphere closed to any new European colonial establishments.” In truth, the government considered the hemisphere closed to old colonial establishments as well, and with Spanish claims settled, diplomatic attention turned to Russia. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Russian traders had moved south of their holdings in Alaska and established outposts as far south as San Francisco Bay, but this expansionism ended in 1825. In that year, Adams negotiated a treaty with the czar’s ministers providing that Russia would lay no claim to territory south of 54 degrees 40 minutes, a line eastward from the southern tip of Prince of Wales Island. The United States agreed in turn to make no claim to lands north of that line.
With only Great Britain and the United States remaining to contest the territory between the 42nd parallel and 54 degrees 40 minutes, in 1827 the joint occupation agreement between the two nations was extended indefinitely. The document carried the proviso that either power could terminate it
after giving the other a year’s notice.
The issue lay more or less dormant for a decade, but by the early 1840s, with the first emigrant trains entering Oregon, the boundary question again rose to prominence. Commercial interests became sensitive to the importance of establishing trade ports on the Pacific for business with the Far East, American migration to the Oregon Country was leaping forward (in 1841 there were about 500 Americans scattered throughout the region; by 1845, 5,000), and militant expansionism, the idea expressed in John O’Sullivan’s “Manifest Destiny,” was taking wing. The idea that Oregon should be annexed by the United States had been gaining momentum since Robert Gray discovered the mouth of the Columbia River in 1792, and after a half century, the time had arrived to settle the matter.
Britain’s case for superiority over the Oregon Country rested on the Nootka Sound Convention of 1790, under which Spain relinquished its claims, the discovery voyage of Captain James Cook in 1778, various explorations such as those of Vancouver in 1792 and Alexander Mackenzie in 1793, and the establishment, beginning in 1821, of fur-trading posts controlled by the Hudson’s Bay Company.
The United States pointed to its own explorations: Gray; Lewis and Clark in 1804–06; the acquisition of Spanish rights north of the 42nd parallel via the Adams-Onís Treaty, and to the coast south of 54 degrees 40 minutes by treaty with the Russians; the fur-trading post at Astoria, established in 1811, and the first permanent settlement in Oregon; the actual occupation by American settlers, most of them in the Willamette valley; and the fact that Oregon was contiguous to American soil.
In his inaugural address President Polk had referred to America’s claim to Oregon as “clear and unquestionable,” but he at least nodded politely toward John Bull by saying that “every obligation imposed by treaty or conventional stipulation should be sacredly respected.” He had no intention of risking war with England—he already had an impending war on his hands, with Mexico over the Texas annexation—and he wanted to resolve the matter expediently and peacefully by extending the 49th parallel west to the Pacific. Despite all the talk of “54-40 or Fight!” and the use of it as an unauthorized campaign slogan, the 54th parallel was never seriously in contention. Nor for that matter did England aspire to the whole region as far south as the California line, but early in the dispute did want to make the Columbia River, which meandered through Oregon to the sea several hundred miles south of 49 degrees, the southern border of Canada. The British, specifically its Hudson’s Bay directors, believed control of the river essential to maintain hegemony over the interior fur trade. Without some adjustment to the 49th parallel, the British insisted, they would be cut off from the southern end of Vancouver Island and denied access to the Juan de Fuca Strait.
Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising Page 37
