The Activity of the Hudson’s Bay Company beyond the Rocky Mountains in the First Half of the 19th Century.

Abstract

The Hudson’s Bay Company was founded in England in 1670. It received a charter from Charles II and was granted a commercial monopoly in the territory of the drainage basin of the Hudson Bay. It established an extended system of fur trading posts that gradually spread as far as the Rocky Mountains and then to the Pacific Ocean. The most important aim of the paper is to examine the activity of the Hudson’s Bay Company beyond the Rocky Mountains focusing on the role of John McLoughlin, its Chief Factor in the Columbia District. The area encompassed more than 1.5 million square kilometers from the northern border of Mexican California to Alaska, and to Americans was known as Oregon Country. The Hudson’s Bay Company flourished in the Pacific Northwest in the 1820s and 1830s, but from the 1840s, hundreds of American settlers started to move to the region on the Oregon Trail and settled down in the fertile valley of the Willamette River. According to the Convention of 1818, Oregon Country was under the joint occupation of Great Britain and the United States, but at first the influence of the Hudson’s Bay Company was much bigger. The American immigrants, however, who received help from McLoughlin, gradually outgrew the trading stations of the Company and started to demand the extension of full American sovereignty over the territory. After heated debates tensions were resolved in the Oregon Treaty of 1846. It ended the joint occupation and set the boundary between Great Britain and the U. S. at the 49th parallel. John McLoughlin resigned from the Hudson’s Bay Company, founded a new town, Oregon City, and became an American citizen in 1849.