Ruining the Rivers in the Snake Country: The Hudson's Bay Company's Fur Desert Policy

Ott, Jennifer

While historians have heralded and vilified the fur trade for opening the region to non-Indians, they have paid little attention to the effects of trappers on the land. Although the fur trade’s role in environmental change has faded from view as farming, ranching, and population growth have affected soil and water quality and biodiversity, extracted elements help define a region as much as what remains. Beaver trapping, for example, produced fundamental changes in how humans, animals, land, and water have affected each other in the Northwest, particularly in the Snake River Basin. Between 1823 and 1841, the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) carried out what is known as the fur desert policy — a strategy of clearing the basin of beaver to keep encroaching Americans from coming west of the Continental Divide. Through their use of efficient Snake Country trapping brigades, the HBC nearly extirpated beaver in the region and, in the process, redefined the physical space in which people would live. The fur desert policy began in response to a territorial dispute over the Oregon Country. The HBC accepted the inevitable loss of most of the region to the Americans and focused on retaining the area bounded by the Columbia River on the south and east, the Pacific Ocean on the west, and the forty-ninth parallel on the north, an area encompassing potential Puget Sound ports and the transportation route provided by the Columbia River. The Americans sought control of the entire region. During the negotiations for the Convention of 1818, the United States and Britain agreed to postpone a final decision about what was called the Oregon Question. Renewed in 1827, the convention remained the region’s governing document until the two nations resolved the dispute in 1846. Native people’s land rights did not enter into the debate, but the realities of the local situation in the Snake Country complicated the process and balanced the power between the British and the Americans. The HBC did not explicitly gain access to the Snake Country for pelts. For the places where the Company established posts, however, the local Indians required recognition of their control of the land and demanded compensation for the use of it. Without these posts along the Columbia River and its tributaries, the British would have been unable to carry on the fur trade. When another fur outfit, the North West Company, began to build Fort Walla Walla (later called Fort Nez Perces), the local Indians congregated at the site. They wanted payment for the trees that the North West Company had cut for construction of the fort and to make it clear that the British would not be allowed to hunt or fish in the area. Company official Donald McKenzie reached an agreement with the chiefs that allowed the bands around Fort Nez Perces to retain the land and the driftwood from the river and gave the Europeans use rights. Likewise, at Fort Colvile, the HBC made a verbal treaty with a local chief that allowed use of the land but prohibited Company employees from fishing at Kettle Falls. The Governor and Committee, the governing body of the HBC, recognized the importance of assuring the people in the Columbia District of their intentions to respect local land tenure. In 1825, they instructed George Simpson, governor of the Northern Department, to make it clear to Native people “that we have no desire to posses or cultivate their lands beyond the little garden at the Trading houses.” This comment is deceptive in that it neglected to mention the Company’s intent to scour the land for pelts and the inevitable non-Native settlement that would follow.

Ruining the Rivers in the Snake Country: The Hudson's Bay Company's Fur Desert Policy

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