AMERICAN BATS — ^HANDLE Y 199 



his narrative, Townsend visited four Columbia River forts: Fort 

 Walla- Walla, near the present site of Wallula, Washington, half a mile 

 above the mouth of the Walla Walla River; Fort Vancouver, 6 miles 

 above the mouth of the Willamette River, Clark County, Wash.; 

 Fort William, on the southwest side of Sauvie Island, Multnomah 

 County, Oreg. ; and Fort George at Astoria, Clatsop County, Oreg. 

 Fort William can be eliminated immediately, for it was an American 

 establishment, built during Townsend's visit. There the bats could 

 not have been "protected by the gentlemen of the Hudson's Bay 

 Company." Townsend's citation of a Chinook Indian name for the 

 bat, "So-capual of the Chinook Indians," eliminates Fort Walla-Walla, 

 because the Chinooks normally did not occur above the cascades of 

 the Columbia (Townsend, 1839, p. 220), although Townsend's party 

 did encounter a band at The Dalles (1839, p. 159). Furthermore, 

 Cooper's description agrees with the dark, coastal race of the bat, 

 whereas a pallid form occurs in the vicinity of Fort Walla- Walla, 

 Finally, Townsend's description of Fort George (1839, p. 182) elimi- 

 nates it as a possibility: 



We anchored off Fort George, as it is called, although perhaps it scarcely deserves 

 the name of a fort, being composed of but one principal house of hewn boards, 

 and a number of small Indian huts surrounding it, presenting the appearance, 

 from a distance, of an ordinary small farm house with its appropriate outbuildings. 



Compare with this the statement, "Frequents the store houses at- 

 tached to the forts." Townsend described Fort Vancouver, where 

 he had residence during his months on the Columbia, as follows 

 (1839, pp. 170-172): 



The space comprised within the stoccade is an oblong square, of about one 

 hundred, by two hundred and fifty feet. The houses built of logs and frame-work, 

 to the number of ten or twelve, are ranged around in a quadrangular form . . . 

 in the vicinity of the fort, are thirty or forty log huts . . . placed in rows, with 

 broad lanes or streets between them, and the whole looks like a very neat and 

 beautiful village. 



Fort Vancouver appears to be the logical choice for the restricted 

 type locality of Plecotus townsendii Cooper. 



P. t. tovMsendii intergrades with the very differently colored 

 P. t. pallescens over a wide area in central and northern California 

 and northward between the Cascades and the Rockies. Allocation of 

 specimens, especially in inadequate series, from much of this area 

 to one race or the other is largely a matter of personal opinion. As a 

 result, various authors have disagreed on just where the artificial 

 boundary between the ranges of townsendii and pallescens should be 

 set. Other authors have chosen to solve the problem by applying a 

 subspecific name, intermedins, to populations of the intergrading area. 

 For a discussion of this problem, see the remarks under P. t. pallescens 

 (p. 192). 



