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

One would be hard pressed to find an author better qualified to discuss this fascinating story of imperial competition for Northwest America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Barry Gough made his career discussing, in particular, the complicated interaction between Britain’s Royal Navy and Indigenous peoples in the northeast Pacific and the territory that became the province of British Columbia. His many fine books and articles, far too numerous to mention here, shared many praiseworthy qualities: extensive use of primary sources, a mastery of the secondary literature, sound historical judgment, and lively prose. Dr Gough’s well-earned retirement in Victoria has not dulled his historical and storytelling skills. Fortune’s a River characteristically makes good use of primary and secondary sources, weaves together many national imperial narratives, and tells the story well. It richly deserves to attract both an academic and popular historical audience.

None of the stories contained herein – Alexander Mackenzie’s trail-blazing exploration from eastern Canada to the Pacific Ocean, David Thompson’s careful cartography, the storied saga of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, and ill-fated Russian and Spanish attempts to maintain their imperial presences on North America’s wild west coast – are unknown. Indeed, many of these separate stories have been much discussed. Gough’s great accomplishment is to demonstrate the clear but hitherto ignored linkages between all of these activities as the ambitions of Europe’s imperial powers – whether rising (Britain) or falling (Spain in particular) – collided with the continental destiny of the newly born United States. The race for control over the potentially rich northwest region of North America combined all of the major facets one would expect – diplomacy, naval and military power – but also some one might not expect, notably clashing commercial needs and science. As Gough shows, the efforts of the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Northwest Company to tie northwest North America to the economy of British North America via their fur trading did not go unnoticed in a distant Washington dc. Interested in science, commerce, and his nation’s territorial expansion, the ever-curious President Thomas Jefferson employed first the Lewis and Clark Expedition and then John Astor’s private fur enterprise to establish an American claim to the distant shores of the Northeast Pacific.

As Gough makes clear in the book’s final chapters, this fight for control produced but two late-coming winners, the United States and Britain, who then fought to control a vast Oregon territory, a fight settled only in the 1840s after James Polk’s war scare to American advantage. The two established European powers in western North America, Spain and Russia, were the losers. Spain’s attempts to control lands north of what is now San Francisco proved fruitless. Mexico, which inherited Spanish sovereignty in North America after claiming its independence in the early nineteenth century, fared even less well, losing California and much more to a belligerently expansive United States in the 1840s. Russia did not wait for such a one-sided settlement, selling its American possessions to the United States in 1867. But the biggest losers in all of this, as Gough indicates, were the Indigenous peoples of western North America. Initially able to fend off or exploit the Europeans and Americans who came to their lands by sea or land, the Natives soon found that, weakened by European diseases and overwhelmed by British and American power, they had lost the ability to fend off the interlopers and to control their own destinies.

Only one minor problem affects the book, the author’s tendency to mix the present and past tenses when speaking about the past. But this is a very small quibble. This fine book, written by a scholar in full possession of his considerable skills, deserves a broad academic and public audience.