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A STOCKADE OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL RICHES
A Stockade of A Stockade of
A view of the reconstructed Fort Vancouver and its period garden. The garden was a horticultural showpiece for John McLoughlin, the chief factor of the fort.
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Fort Vancouver, the regional headquarters of England’s Hudson’s Bay Company, was a major 19th-century trading post. More than 50 years of research have made it a major archaeological site.
Archaeological Riches Archaeological Riches
National Park Service National Park Service archaeologists Doug archaeologists Doug Wilson (left) and DanielWilson (left) and Daniel Martin excavate a test Martin excavate a test unit in the western unit in the western portion of the U.S. Army’sportion of the U.S. Army’s Vancouver Barracks. Vancouver Barracks. The Army established The Army established its headquarters and its headquarters and quartermaster’s depot quartermaster’s depot at the site in 1849. at the site in 1849.
Fort Vancouver as it may have looked in 1845. The fort included hundreds of acres of agricultural fields, thousands of cattle, horses, sheep, and pigs, an orchard, and a garden. It also boasted the first lumber mill in the Pacific Northwest, a salmon-packing operation, a school, a church, and the largest multicultural settlement between Sitka, Alaska, and San Francisco, California.
Gentle slopes sweep down across the 366-acre Vancouver National Historic Reserve and stretch onto the flood plain of the Columbia River in Vancouver, Washington. This idyllic vista belies what has long been a graceful but busy landscape, once home to the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Fort Vancouver as well as a diverse Euro-American frontier village, and, later, a strategic U.S. Army post. Today, nestled within a growing city of 150,000, the reserve functions as one of the nation’s premier archaeology parks, where more than 50 years of exploration have exposed the past.
On a late September day, National Park Service (NPS) archaeologist Robert Cromwell and his team dug tests units on the West Barracks area of the army post. This was part of a cultural resources survey in advance of the restoration of turn-of-the-century structures there. Nearby, Kendal McDonald, who specializes in archaeogeophysical prospection, employed a tubular contraption called a gradiometer, a remote-sensing device that detects underground variations. She recorded anomalies—possibly gravesites—in the earth’s magnetic field where a Hudson’s Bay Company cemetery may have been located.
Archaeology has helped bring the early history of Fort Vancouver to life, with the result of drawing thousands of tourists each year. The stockade and several buildings within the fort have been reconstructed exactly above the footings of the originals. The dimensions and features of the reconstructed buildings are suggested by archaeological findings on site. These findings also inform a variety of historical reenactments performed at the site: volunteer blacksmiths hammer away beside the forge, wheelwrights and woodworkers ply their craft in the Carpenter’s Shop, and pelts are sorted and pressed into bales for shipment to England at the Fur Store.
“So much archaeology has gone on here that it really is an archaeology park, more than anything else,” said geographer Keith Garnett, as he squints into a surveyor’s scope to locate the cemetery’s boundaries.
In order to guarantee its preservation, Fort Vancouver National Historic Site became part of the national park system in 1948. In 1996, Fort Vancouver became part of the 366-acre Vancouver National Historic Reserve, which was established to protect adjacent, historically significant areas.
The result is a complex endeavor balancing the interests of tourism and public use with those of scientific inquiry and historic preservation. The fort and surrounding lands serve as a vast open-air classroom where professionals gather for seminars in new archaeological techniques, college students participate in field schools, children wield trowels in summertime Kids’ Digs, and the public can witness the fruits of their work.
Fort Vancouver served as the 19th-century economic, cultural, and political hub of Oregon Country (extending from present-day Northern California to Alaska and as far east as Idaho and western Montana). For three decades beginning in 1829, the Hudson’s Bay Company directed its vast Western fur trading operations from this site on the rich Columbia River bottom land. A small corps of managers and clerks—usually fewer than 35—lived within the 734-by-318foot stockade, but the business of the fort made it a crossroads for a much larger population.
The fort employed upwards of 200 men, who with their wives and children were dispersed in trapping brigades across a broad territory between the Pacific and the Rocky Mountains. Each spring the brigades would descend on the fort, loaded down with pelts of mink, marten, river otter, bobcat, rabbit, bear, deer, elk, and the most sought after, beaver. They also brought news and supply lists from the network of more than 20 posts in the region under the fort’s command.
Trappers stacked the baled pelts in the Fur Store, a large warehouse and processing area, and made stops in the Company Store or the Indian Trade Shop for dry goods, the Bakehouse for provisions, or the Doctor’s Office and Dispensary. Beyond the fort’s palisade, carts would rumble past orchards and extensive gardens and pull up at a cluster of weathered huts known as Kanaka Village.
Kanaka’s population swelled to more than 600 in summer between 1830 and 1845, making it the largest Euro-American settlement in the Pacific Northwest. The residents consisted of frontiersmen of French Canadian or Scottish heritage, immigrants from the British Isles, and Native Americans from various Columbia basin tribes such as the Clallam and Klickitat, Walla Walla and Chinook, Spokane and Nisqually. Native American women, who were often critical in building economic alliances between the Europeans and the tribes, married into the fur trade, in a practice called marriage á la façon du pays or “in the fashion of the country.” The Kanakas, for which the village was named, were Sandwich Islanders (from what are now the Hawaiian Islands) who boarded English supply ships midway on trans-Pacific voyages and came to make up about 40 percent of the village population.
American settlers streamed into the area, especially after an 1846 treaty with Great Britain set the present-day boundary with Canada and left Fort Vancouver on U.S. soil. The U.S. Army arrived in 1849, establishing a military reservation on what are now the upper reaches of the Vancouver National Historic Reserve. For a decade, the army and the Hudson’s Bay Company coexisted. Finally, the company abandoned Fort Vancouver in 1860, moving the last operations north to Fort Victoria in Canada.
After the departure of the Hudson’s Bay Company, Fort Vancouver soon succumbed to fires and decay. Traces of the stockade and its community eventually disappeared. Then in 1947, NPS archaeologist Louis Caywood located the fort’s powder magazine. Over the next five years, Caywood discovered the remnants of the fort’s stockade and he also unearthed the footings of several of its buildings.
This glass button was recovered from Kanaka
Village. Four strands of glass were wound to create this ornate button that measures less than one half inch in diameter.
Portland State University students excavate within the stockade at the location of the Sale Shop. The Sale Shop was the outlet for Euro-American manufactured goods, which were sold to Hudson’s Bay Company employees, missionaries, and Oregon Trail immigrants.
Living history programs at the site rely on archaeological data to increase authenticity. (Above left) Historically, pelts were sorted and pressed into bales for shipment to England. The reconstructed fur press in the Fur Store is located on the exact location of the archaeological remains of the original store. (Above right) Volunteer blacksmiths use artifacts from the museum collections as prototypes to replicate historical trade axes, beaver traps, and other iron items. (Below) Woodworkers in the Carpenter’s Shop use tools that are identical to those found at the site.
In the late 1960s, archaeologists Susan Kardas and Edward Larrabee located several houses at Kanaka Village. Doug Wilson, an archaeologist with the Vancouver National Historic Reserve, noted that they also dissected the relationship between humans and material objects. “Here’s this incredibly diverse community out in the village,” he said. Kardas and Larrabee took the then-unusual approach of searching for archaeological traces that reflected that diversity.
Large-scale excavations in the 1970s set the groundwork for many of the reconstructed buildings, including the Chief Factor’s House and Kitchen, the Indian Trade Shop, the Northwest Bastion, and the Fur Store. Archaeologists Jake Hoffman and Lester Ross focused on what archaeological remains said about the fort’s architecture. For example, their inferences about refuse disposal outside the fort’s main kitchen were used to position the back door in the reconstructed building. Concentrations of brick and mortar indicated the locations and composition of chimneys. Footings and sill timbers suggested the dimensions of buildings.
David Chance and Caroline Carley of the University of Idaho identified a handful of Kanaka Village houses, the U.S. Army quartermaster’s depot, and a hospital to treat patients during a period of epidemics. Carley identified areas known as smudge pits, in which smoke was made in order to treat diseases such as “fever and ague.” This malady—later identified as malaria—was thought to be associated with filthy air, which the smoke, ironically, was thought to cleanse.
Several houses were excavated in the 1980s under the direction of Bryn Thomas of Eastern Washington University. Workers were elated to unearth a small cellar that held parts for a liquor still and several bottles. No such cottage industry had been documented in the village before.
Digs followed in the Officers’ Row and West Barracks areas of the U.S. Army post, and along a proposed utility corridor south and east of the fort. The Oregon Archaeological Society sponsored volunteer excavations within the stockade that showcased professional and avocational archaeologists working side by side.
Archaeologist Dan Martin rocked back on his haunches beside the two-foot-deep shaft he’d dug. He beckoned to Robert Cromwell and Danielle Gembala, who were directing shovel tests across the 12-acre Vancouver West Barracks area, where the U.S. Army first established an encampment in 1849 that it maintained through 2000. Martin traced his finger along one side of the hole. Beneath the upper layers of loam and rock is a distinct stratum of gravel abruptly interposed between decades of sediment. Finely crushed rock, or cinders perhaps, the group surmises, but definitely of human origin. Perhaps a longforgotten road, a fire pit, or part of a foundation.
Approximately 100 shovel tests were dug at the West Barracks last September and October, with analysis and cataloguing of artifacts continuing into December.
Concurrent with the West Barracks dig was a remotesensing project in the adjacent East Barracks area, where Army Reserve structures, a granite war memorial, and pavement cover what once was a Hudson’s Bay Company cemetery. Historical records dating back to 1836 indicate that at least 200 individuals from a wide range of ethnic groups, including several Native American tribes and
Dan Martin screens sediments through 1/8-inch mesh screens. In some cases, samples are wet-screened through an even finer mesh to recover very small artifacts, such as beads, seeds, and fish bone.
A researcher consults a Munsell Color Chart to match the color of a sediment sample. The chart is used by many scientists to precisely identify colors. Sediments are characterized by color, texture, structure, and other attributes to determine if they resulted from human or natural processes.
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Robert Cromwell noted that the choice and quantity of goods for Europeans “exploded exponentially” during the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, this exquisite English china has shown up in virtually every dig at Fort Vancouver—from the excavations of the chief factor’s house to the lowliest hut in the workers’ village.
Cromwell, a Fort Vancouver National Historic Site archaeologist and Syracuse University doctoral student, intends to find out why Spode is so prevalent. He is conducting an analysis of 45,000 Spode pottery shards retrieved from Fort Vancouver to examine consumer choices and their potential to reveal values and behavior.
The 19th-century explosion of material goods reached all the way to this outpost in the wilderness. “We know from the historical record that the people who worked at Fort Vancouver had an amazing choice for their time period and their location,” explained Cromwell. As the administrative depot for the Columbia Department of the Hudson’s Bay Company, Fort Vancouver was importing over 200 tons of material goods from England every year in the 1830s and 1840s. Clerks kept studious records, not only of inventories and orders but also of how much everything cost, “from 20 different types of tobacco to 50 different types of cloth to, of course, lots of Spode,” Cromwell said.
The historical record also reveals a rudimentary class structure and the disparity of wages in the Hudson’s Bay ranks: from £50 to £5,000 annually for the 30 to 35 “gentlemen” who lived within the stockade, to £17 to £21 for most contracted workers, known as engagés. Yet all shopped at the company store, and the combined data on household income, goods available for purchase, and price inventories provide the context for analyzing material goods excavated from living quarters.
Cromwell is analyzing assemblages of Spode ceramic shards from 13 house sites, 10 in the village and three in the fort. Calculating the number and cost of Spode vessels owned in each household leads to a general assumption about purchasing power in the home—the more Spode, the greater the affluence of the household. Then there are reasons for relative economic position—a larger family, more male wage-earners in the household, ethnicity, special skills—all “hypotheses and questions to be teased out of the archaeological record.”
A differing regard for ceramics between the fort’s inhabitants and the villagers is beginning to emerge. Gentlemen of the fort sat at a table with the chief factor in a very formal setting. Artifacts retrieved from fort trash deposits consistently bear the blue-on-white imprinted patterns valued for formal dinner settings; however, all fragments from one period of time will repeat the same pattern, then another pattern will appear and predominate for another few years. Cromwell says this seems to indicate that complete formal settings, with all pieces uniformly matched, were ordered for the chief factor’s table and used for some time. Once the collection was well worn and chipped, it would be disposed of and replaced by a different pattern.
The villagers’ incomes precluded a buying spree of Spode, which cost approximately £15 for a complete 72-piece setting. Yet household collections of the ceramics, some of them sizable, have been documented for every excavated house site in Kanaka Village. Recovered artifacts bear a diverse array of patterns and colors, indicating households purchased vessels piecemeal and used them in more casual settings. In short, the gentlemen’s purchases seemed to be dictated by decorum, the villagers’ by fancy.
How were they obtained, Cromwell wonders. Did the Hudson’s Bay resell end-of-stock Spode at a discount, or were certain less-popular items marked down in price? Did the gentlemen of the fort pass along chipped or unwanted pieces? Was a black market in operation?
Another question is: Why did the people put so much stock in having Spode china? Cromwell suspects an urge for acculturation to European ways. Most village women were Native Americans who married into the fur trade. Historic pictures show them in at least partial European attire, mostly skirts and dresses. Could they have also set a high priority on serving meals and using utensils in the fashion of the Europeans? Cromwell hopes to answer these questions. —Dennis Johnson
Kendal McDonald uses a gradiometer to collect data on the magnetic field of underground sediments. She’s searching for evidence of grave sites and other archaeological features.
native Hawaiians, were interred there. The purpose of the remote sensing was to identify the locations of burials so that they won’t be disturbed should any type of construction take place on the property.
Remote-sensing technologies can yield valuable clues as to the number and position of interments in the cemetery. One method, magnetometry, measures the earth’s electromagnetic field and records anomalies that indicate sediments have been disturbed. In geologic processes, as layers of sediment settle, iron elements align themselves to the magnetic poles like the pointer on a compass, creating a
“somewhat homogenous” field, explained McDonald. Digging a pit, as for an interment, scrambles that alignment or alters the proportion of iron.
Two other types of remote sensing—ground-penetrating radar and electrical resistivity—were employed in archaeological investigations at this site. The reserve’s shifting uses over the years make it an excellent testing ground for combining various types of remote sensing, added Wilson. “Each method will come up with something a little bit different. Magnetometry would be great for finding hearths or concentrations of metal indicating a dump. Radar is really good at getting specific group features. Resistivity is good at getting the different, broader patterns, maybe the outline of the house. So if you put them all together, you can find the house, the hearth, and the dump, and many different features all together.”
During the past two summers, field schools working at the stockade and the village have made significant discoveries, including a dwelling designated House Five. Among more than 1,400 artifacts retrieved from its hearth alone are English ceramics and Chinese porcelain, a pierced 19th-century coin likely used for adornment, dozens of clay pipestems, and a hook attached to a chain, possibly used to suspend a kettle over the fire. Studies in micromorphology and palinology (the study of strains and concentrations of pollen) are being applied to seeds, shells, and bone fragments from the hearth area in hopes they will reveal more about the villagers’ diets.
“Because of the amount of archaeology and the history of archaeology that has gone on here, [the historic reserve] provides a means for examining past methods and also testing new methods,” concluded Wilson. “We are also committed to higher education and the training of future archaeologists, not only in the most modern, upto-date techniques of archaeology, but also to train them in how to interpret to the public what they’re doing.”
For over a half century, archaeology has played a critical role in telling the tale of Fort Vancouver. There is every reason to believe the story will continue.
DENNIS JOHNSON is a writer based in Tacoma, Washington. His article “Dogs Throughout Time” appeared in the Fall 2002 issue of American Archaeology.
