Bringing Indians to the Book

2. Columbia Rediviva

2 COLUMBIA REDIVIVA A:.ERICAN CLAIMS TO THE PRESENT PACIFIC NORTHWEST began with Captain Robert Gray of Boston, who named the Columbia River soon after piloting his ship across its bar in 1792. Many other explorers had searched the north Pacific shoreline for a Northwest Passage, but Gray found what others had missed. He trusted his instincts, made a closer approach, and found both the large bay that is still named Gray's Harbor and a broad river estuary farther south, where he remained for several days. To name a landmark was to claim it, as Gray knew. He also knew that British and Spanish rivals were nearby, charting and claiming other channels and harbors for their empires. Even more was at stake in finding this great river of the West, for to claimit couldbe to assert a claim as well to all the lands it drained. There was also the lingering chance that somewhere deep inland the Columbia might reach an easy point of connection to tributaries of the Mississippi or St. Lawrence river systems. The surviving logbook entries are so brief that it is impossible to know how deeply Gray pondered the name he assigned. The most 57 COLUMBIA REDIVIVA explicit record states only this: "Captain Gray gave this river the name of Columbia's River, and the north side of the entrance Cape Hancock, the south, Adams's Point" (Howay 438). It seems obvious that he named the river for his ship, the Columbia, but could he have held other thoughts in the moment? "Columbia" is a poetic term for America and an echo of a name for the whole New World that had been claimed by Christopher Columbus. Did Gray have America and Columbus in mind? The simultaneous naming of the entrance capes for John HancockandJohn Adams bespeaks a flash of patriotism. The Columbia was also a celebrated ship already, and an American symbol. On his first voyage in I787-90, Gray had taken furs from the Northwest coastto China and traded them at a profit before returning to Boston-making the Columbia the first United States ship to sail round the globe. From Columbus the explorer to "Columbia" as a continent to Columbia as a ship and an American symbol-the name had layers of history and significance. And there was more. In its log and other official papers the ship was simply the Columbia, but technically it was named Columbia Rediviva. That was the full name painted or gilded across its transom: Columbia renewed or reborn. To some, this name has suggested that the ship was an older vessel, rebuilt for Gray's backers (Scofield 43; Howay vi). When the ship was outfitted in I787, the name might just as wellhave referred to America reborn-that is, to the newly established United States, in thatyear of the Constitutional Convention. With Gray's discovery of the great western river, at any rate, Columbia was reborn across the continent, as a new region for American development. The idea of Columbia reborn would unfold again and again in the early nineteenth century as successive groups traveled to and staked claims in the area. In I805 Lewis and Clark came down the western slopes of the Rockies, made canoes for descending the Columbia River, and wintered near its mouth, flying a fifteen-star American flag over Fort Clatsop. In I 8Ir JohnJacob Astor's agents established Fort Astoria at a site nearby and tried to develop an American trading operation. It foundered in I8I3 when no supply ships came and the British North West Company made an offer the surviving agents could not refuse. 58 COLUMBIA REDIVIVA The War of r8r2 was settled by the Treaty of Ghent, which permitted both British and American settlements, but for decades the Hudson's Bay Company dominated the Columbia from a comfortable base or factory at Fort Vancouver. Then came the Methodist missionariesJason and Daniel Lee and two companions-in r834. Dr.John McLoughlin, the chief factor at Fort Vancouver, welcomed the missionaries generously. They could hardly have seemed a threat to his operations. He even directed them to a likely site, some miles up the Willamette River, where a few French Canadians had settled with their Indian wives after leaving the company. Perhaps McLoughlin shrewdly directed the Lees up the Willamette in order to keep intrusive Americans out of the richer fur country in the Columbia Plateau; perhaps...