In the spring of 1811, sixteen men made their way through the damp, lush undergrowth of thick evergreen forest overlooking the Columbia River in present-day Oregon and built a fur post they called Astoria.
Named after John Jacob Astor, an important New York entrepreneur and founder of both the American Fur and the Pacific Fur Companies, the completed fort consisted of the factor's residence, a powder magazine, a storehouse, and cabins for the employees, all surrounded and protected by a log stockade.
The strong structure would provide the home base for Astor’s far-ranging trappers and traders as they competed with the powerful North West Company which was owned and operated by Canadians.
Astor's plans to dominate the western fur trade proved to be unsuccessful. By mid-1812, the United States and Great Britain were once again at war and, in October of the following year, operatives of the North West Company, by now Astor's arch-rival along the Columbia, marched on Astoria and occupied the post.
They commandeered all the furs, furnishings, and supplies in exchange for a cash settlement worth only about one-third of the fort's actual value.
In December the British formally occupied Astoria and changed its name to Fort George. Now, after only two and a half years in the business, Astor had to place on hold his western fur trade interests and focus upon his earlier operations around the Great Lakes.
Nevertheless, the New Yorker's employees experienced many adventures and opportunities in the wilderness of the great Northwest before Astor had to pull out of the Pacific fur trade altogether.
Two of them, Ross Cox and Alexander Ross, left written accounts of their adventures.
Lost in the Pacific Northwest
Nineteen-year-old Ross Cox, an Irish-born clerk for Astor’s Pacific Fur Company, was lost, no doubt about it.
When he awoke from an afternoon nap on a warm day in August 1812 and returned to the previous night’s campsite, he discovered that his companions had left without him.
There he was in the wilds of present-day eastern Washington with no supplies, no equipment, no horse, and no weapons. Cox, in no way an experienced man of the wilderness, was terrified.
The likable Irish lad had left the Astoria post in June along with ninety-seven other men. Their mission was to forge up the mighty Columbia River, collect furs from the Indians along the way, and establish a new post on the Spokane River, a westward-flowing tributary of the Columbia.
The party had run into difficulty almost immediately after leaving Astoria.
Cox later detailed one of his experiences in Adventures on the Columbia River, an account of his years as a fur trader, declaring that “We had half expected Indian trouble, but were totally unprepared for that overwhelming army of fleas that attacked on front, flank and rear. Our only defense was to strip off our clothes and dip them in the water, thus drowning the swarms of invaders.”
After recovering from the flea attack and avoiding an encounter with Indians along the river, the party finally made its way to the mouth of the Walla Walla River.
There its leaders met with a delegation of Walla Walla Indians, who, according to Cox, “were decidedly the most friendly we had met.”
The Astorians bought many horses from the tribe. The group then traveled through Nez Perce country, and Cox left modern generations with a detailed account of the tribe’s lifestyle. He wrote:
“These Nez Perces (Pierced Noses) live in huts made of poles covered with mats of bark or rushes. Some houses were oblong, some cone-shaped, and some square. An opening at the top served the double purpose of window and chimney. They were clean, ambitious, smart-looking people who were fond of their children and kind to the aged. Apparently, they were all in good health, although many were afflicted with sore eyes.
“Both men and women wore a sort of leather shirt reaching to the knees. In addition, the men wore leggings made of some kind of skin. The Nez Perces were good hunters and excellent horsemen. Their saddles were made of dressed deerskin stuffed with hair. The wooden stirrups were covered with raw skin which, when dry, became hard and lasted a long time. Bridles were merely ropes made of the hair from horses’ tails.”
It was shortly after leaving the Nez Perce village that Cox was left behind. Dressed in only “a gingham shirt and summer trousers, badly worn moccasins, and no hat,” the young trader was ill prepared for what faced him over the next fourteen days.
When he returned to the campsite – just a few hundred yards from the forested dell to which he had wandered to pick cherries and take a nap – it was deserted.
By then it was about five o’clock in the evening and the coals from the fires indicated that his companions had probably left about three hours previously.
Cox camped nearby for the night, and early the next day he attempted to catch up with his fellow traders. He saw two riders at a distance but was unable to attract their attention.
The following night he was confronted by a giant rattlesnake but escaped unharmed. Trying to settle into a small cave the next night, Cox was surprised and terrified when a large gray wolf emerged from the cavern.
Days of wandering in the wilderness turned into a week. By then his clothes were torn to shreds, his “moccasins were completely gone, and . . . feet were torn and bruised by thorns and sharp rocks.”
The young clerk lived off the land, eating wild cherries and berries when he could find them. Unarmed, he found it impossible to kill game to supplement his meager diet. In an encounter with a grizzly bear, Cox saved himself by climbing a tree.
After waiting several hours for the bear to leave, he descended from his perch and escaped. Finally, after two weeks of aimless wandering, Cox chanced upon an Indian camp.
The friendly people fed and clothed him. The next day they escorted him to the Spokane River, where the other Astorians were building a fort near Spokane House, a post that belonged to the Pacific Fur Company’s competitor, the North West Company. Cox described his reunion:
“My deerskin robe and tanned complexion deceived them for a minute, but when they recognized me a great shout went up. All the men thronged around me, asking me questions, and congratulating me upon being found. I had been given up for lost. Just the day before, my clothing had been sold at auction, but now the purchasers hurried to bring it back to me. A holiday was declared to celebrate my return, and the Indians who had taken care of me were liberally rewarded.”
Cox left Fort Spokane the following May. When he arrived at Astoria, he learned that the United States and Great Britain were at war.
In late October Astor’s Pacific Fur Company sold Fort Astoria and all of its supplies and equipment to the North West Company and Cox became an employee of the new masters at Fort George, the new name given to Astoria.
Over the next several years, Cox traveled extensively between Fort George and the interior fur posts of the North West Company.
In April 1816, he was placed in charge of the post at Fort Okanogan, which had been built in the summer of 1811 and was the first U.S. settlement in what is today the state of Washington.
In late 1816, although still a young man, Cox retired from his life as a fur trader and returned to Fort George. Then, on April 16,1817, he began an overland journey that eventually carried him to Montreal. From there he returned to Ireland, married, and became a newspaper correspondent and a clerk for the Dublin Police Department.
Cox’s later life remains a mystery. Neither his date of death nor place of burial is known. Fortunately for future generations, however, his valuable book remains.
Ross Cox Builds a Fur Post, or Two
About the same time that Ross Cox began his wanderings in eastern Washington, Pacific Fur Company clerk Alexander Ross was hard at work at the confluence of the Okanogan and Columbia Rivers, near the present-day towns of Brewster and Bridgeport, Washington. Ross’s superiors at Fort Astoria had sent him to build a fort and fur-trading post at the critical junction of the rivers.
Arriving there in early September 1811, Ross and his party erected a sixteen-by-twenty-foot-long log house, one of the first U.S. structures in today’s state of Washington. The men called the place Okanogan Post and Ross was left in charge.
As clerk-in-charge of construction, he spent most of the winter of 1811–12 alone at Okanogan Post. His success at the facility – trading for more than fifteen hundred beaver pelts during a six-month period – guaranteed him several more years as manager there.
When Astor’s fur interests were sold to the North West Company in 1813, Ross stayed on board with the new management. He was transferred back to Fort George (formerly Astoria) in 1816.
In 1817 Ross left Fort George and traveled to a post on the Thompson River in Canada. From there he moved to the Walla Walla region, where he assisted in the construction of a new fur station to be named Fort Nez Perce.
The new post, located on the Columbia River, was to become the central supply depot for all of the North West Company’s interior posts, replacing Spokane House, which the company had built a few years earlier at the junction of the Spokane and Little Spokane Rivers.
The company management had decided that the new site was more centrally located for both North West Company trading parties and the various Indian tribes with whom they traded.
The construction crew arrived at the Walla Walla site in July 1818 and began work immediately. In his book The Fur Hunters of the Far West, Ross gave a vivid description of the problems in building the post:
“We were in an unfriendly land with a gigantic task on our hands. In the whole country, this spot was the hardest! Nevertheless the region had to be made safe for the fur trade, the friendship of the natives secured, buildings made, furs collected, and new territories added. This was a big program, and we did not dare see obstacles ahead. Our orders were to occupy the position, so on the dreaded spot we took our stand to run every risk and brave every danger.”
Indeed, the construction of Fort Nez Perce was a large undertaking. According to Ross the site was a “commanding one.” The Columbia River guarded it on the west.
To the north and east “stretched a wide expanse of never-ending plains.” And to the south the foothills of the Blue Mountains protected the location.
Built along the same lines of other fur posts in the region, the “Gibraltar of the Columbia,” as Ross called it, “rose proudly above the mighty river, a symbol of the white man’s power in the land of the red man.”
The weapons that protected Fort Nez Perce were formidable for the time. The armament consisted of four cannons, ten swivel guns, sixty muskets, twenty pikes, and a box of hand grenades.
And just to be safe and to protect the fort from illegal entry, as Ross recalled, “all trading was done through a hole in the wall of the trading shop, we standing on the inside, and the natives on the outside.”
Ross stayed on as the manager of Fort Nez Perce until 1822, when he elected to leave the employment of what was now the Hudson’s Bay Company (the previous year Hudson’s Bay had merged with the North West Company). However, the company persuaded him to stay on for another year to take command of a fur brigade bound for the Snake River country.
After conscientiously serving three different fur companies, Ross finally retired to the present-day city of Winnipeg, Manitoba, where the Hudson’s Bay Company gave him a one-hundred-acre land grant. There he became superintendent of schools, pursued his writing interests, and died in 1856.
James A. Crutchfield can be reached at TNcrutch@aol.com
