Fortune’s a River: The Collision of Empires in Northwest America (review)

Barry Gough has a long track record of publication on the maritime history of the northwest coast. Well known for his books on the royal navy on the coast and his work on Alexander Mackenzie and other explorers, Gough’s Fortune’s a River is a synthesis by a historian at the top of his game who knows the time and place that he is writing about really well. It is an account of how the interests of Britain and America, along with sidebar activity by Spain and Russia, contested for political and commercial control over the northwest. The prize was control over the Columbia River, the outlet to, and the access from, the Pacific.

The story was often one of British initiatives prompting American responses. It begins with John Ledyard, who was with Cook on the third voyage when it put in at Nootka, and who, on his return, tried to quicken American interest in the potential of the northwest coast. After the trip of Alexander Mackenzie, the first to cross the continent by land, Thomas Jefferson expressed the American interest by, among other things, sending Lewis and Clark to find a way to the Pacific. They were the first to reach the mouth of the Columbia, while David Thompson dallied upriver in the interior, as he was more concerned with accurate mapping and relations with the Native people than with driving hard to the coast. Throughout all this probing by land, the Russians and the Spanish were hovering to the north and south on the coast ready, but not always able, to assert their competing interests.

Gough’s argument is that these early explorers were the forerunners of empire and that they established initial claims, sometimes literally with a stake in the ground, through their courage and endurance. But, as he also notes, it took strong commercial interests backed by political and military power to make these initial claims stick. The Americans established a tenuous toehold at Fort Astoria, only to be ousted by the much more aggressive and better organized Northwest Company. The Northwest Company later morphed into the Hudson Bay Company and it continued to manage commercial development around the mouth of the Columbia until the arrival of American settlers marked the beginning of the end of British control. The forces that had been set in motion by Alexander Mackenzie, countered by Jefferson and represented by Lewis and Clark, were realized by the establishment of the forty-ninth parallel as the international boundary from the Rockies to the Pacific by the Treaty of Oregon in 1846. In the end, the Americans were more convinced and determined, and so control of the river of fortune fell to them.

As Gough tells it, the story does bounce around a fair bit and, since it follows interests rather than chronology, there is a certain amount of repetition and referencing back and forth in the text. It might be confusing to a reader coming to this history for the first time. The book is also somewhat overwritten, tending to use more words where fewer would do. Contrary to the jacket notes, it is not written like the ‘wild west adventures’ that I read, being at the opposite end of the writing spectrum to, say, Cormac McCarthy. The contribution of the book is that it gathers the various strands of interest and exploration together and, in that, it is a significant addition to literature on the history of the European exploration of the northwest.