Introduction

This blog will focus on historical information related to Fort Vancouver, the Hudson's Bay Company headquarters in the Columbia District (as HBC called the Oregon country), the territory from the ridge of the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, and from Russian-held Alaska (southern border at 54 degrees 40 minutes north latitude) to Mexican California (northern border along the 42nd parallel of north latitude). The time focus is from 1824, when HBC moved its Columbia District headquarters to the Vancouver site, to 1846, when the boundary between US territory and British-held territory was fixed at the 49th parallel, and HBC moved its District headquarters to Ft. Victoria, on Vancouver island. But the time span is flexible on both ends, starting with European exploration of the northwest coast of North America in the 1770s and ranging down to about 1860, when the last HBC employees left the site of Fort Vancouver. (Note that Fort Vancouver, now surrounded by the city of Vancouver, Washington, on the Columbia river, is related to the much larger city of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada only by their shared name. The first settlement at what is now Vancouver, B.C. dates from 1862.)