[howay] the raison D'ETRE OF FORTS YALE AND HOPE 55 



smooth nor level it is practicable and, when the timber is cleared away, 

 will make a much better road than we expected to find in so rugged a 

 section of country. It has, moreover, the important advantage of 

 being safe, and is infinitely preferable to the most perilous piece of 

 water communication in the Indian country." 20 



In the year and a half which had elapsed since the Treaty of 

 Washington, the Hudson's Bay Company had keenly felt the animus 

 existing against it in the minds of the Americans, and had found to 

 its cost, that the right to navigate the Columbia "on the same footing 

 as citizens of the United States " was quite illusory in practice, however 

 valuable it might appear in the abstract. The goods for New Cale- 

 donia were imported with the other goods and delivered at Fort 

 Vancouver. They were, therefore, subject to duty. In urging 

 celerity in the effort to find and open a road to the coast by way of 

 the Fraser, Douglas wrote on 6th November, 1847: "We will thereby 

 escape the exactions of the United States Government and have it in 

 our power to supply the interior with British goods free of import or 

 transit duties." His intention then was to have the road built in 

 time to enable the brigade of 1849 to utilize it. 



But within three weeks thereafter occurred the destruction of 

 the mission station at Wai-i-lat-pu, near Walla Walla. The Indians 

 on that occasion, which is commonly called the Whitman massacre, 

 murdered Dr. Whitman and thirteen others. Out of this massacre 

 arose the Cayuse War of 1848 in Oregon. The effect of this strife 

 was, of course, to close the Columbia River to the peaceful trader. 

 The usual road being thus blocked, the company was, of necessity, 

 compelled to alter its plans and to adopt immediately the Fraser 

 River route. How far this compulsion reacted disastrously upon the 

 new venture it is now impossible to estimate. Anderson records that 

 in the early part of 1848 an express arrived from the headquarters at 

 Fort Vancouver detailing these events and ordering that the brigade 

 of 1848 break its way at all hazards through to Langley, whither the 

 supplies for New Caledonia, Thompson River, and Colvile would be 

 forwarded.-^ The Cayuse War, however, only hastened the advent 

 of the inevitable ; for with the removal of the company's headquarters 

 from Fort Vancouver to Fort Victoria (which took place in 1849) the 

 abandonment of the Columbia River route for a more northerly one 

 must of necessity occur. 



^"Letter in the Archives of British Columbia. 



^^Anderson's manuscript History of the North West Coast, copy in the Archives 

 of British Columbia. 



