The Fort and the Village

Fort Vancouver, located in southwestern Washington (USA), was the administrative headquarters and supply depot for the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) in the Pacific Northwest, essentially its colonial capital between ca. 1825 and 1845. The documentary record for Fort Vancouver suggests a spatial segregation between the fort and the village along class lines which separated the elite managers of the company from its employees (engagés). Archaeological and ethnohistoric data, however, tend to blur these sharp lines between the fort and the village as artifacts, pollen, and other data reveal a more complex colonial milieu tied to the unique multicultural nature of the settlement and ties to indigenous and other non-Western communities. The historical archaeology of colonialism at Fort Vancouver helps the modern descendants of these people, as well as others tied to the fort, reconnect to their history and heritage and develop a dialogue regarding past and current identities.

Valley of the Willamette

This chapter begins with an explanation of the geology, climate, ecosystems, and first peoples of Oregon’s Willamette Valley after the last ice age. It then explains how those factors contributed to success of commercial agriculture upon resettlement by Europeans in the nineteenth century. While hops had been grown Fort Vancouver as early as the 1830s, there is no record of them growing anywhere else in the Pacific Northwest. Instead, the Fort Vancouver and subsequently the Willamette Valley emerged as centers of livestock and wheat production by midcentury. The end of the chapter explains how the new residents transformed the Willamette Valley into a major center of agriculture in the Far West, and this ultimately helped set the stage for hop production.