The Village at Fort Vancouver: What Archeology Says About the Fur Trade’s Workers

Most of the people who kept the Hudson's Bay Company's Fort Vancouver running did not live inside its stockade. They lived in a cluster of houses to the west known as the Company Village, and archeologists have found ceramics there in surprising numbers. A National Park Service article uses digs at the site to show how an unrecorded community lived, and what it chose to buy.

Village House #1, built originally around the 1830s and reconstructed in 2006-2007 by the University of Oregon Field School to evoke a typical employee residence of the Hudson's Bay Company era (NPS).

A fur-trade town

European fur traders came to the Pacific Northwest to build alliances with Indigenous groups and secure furs for sale, and Indigenous people became increasingly important to the British colonial system. Fort Vancouver was the headquarters and supply depot of the company's Columbia Department. The Hudson's Bay Company merged with the North West Company in 1821, and its governor, George Simpson, recommended hiring fifteen Hawaiians as crew. By 1824 the company employed thirty-five. As the fort turned from furs toward agriculture, it hired more of them, called "Kanakas," a Hawaiian word for human being, until they outnumbered the French Canadians.

Gentlemen of the fort lived and worked inside the stockade. Hawaiians, French-Canadians, Métis and other Indigenous laborers worked outside it under English and Scottish managers, and many lived in the Village. Estimates of its population vary widely; there were several hundred men, women and children at the peak in the 1830s. The company encouraged employees to marry into tribes for strategic advantage, which produced mixed families, and it opened a school in 1832. An American visitor in the 1850s called the place "Kanaka Village." Residents just called it the Village.

The company also pressed missionizing on its workers, and the Hawaiian community largely resisted. In 1844 it hired a Native Hawaiian clergyman, William R. Kaulehelehe, known as "Kanaka William," to preach at Owyhee Church inside the fort gate and teach Hawaiian families.

The end of the Village

American settlers resented the fort as a symbol of British power. The boundary between the United States and Canada was settled in 1846, and the fort became U.S. territory. The company moved its headquarters to Canada and the U.S. Army set up a post in 1849. Residents began leaving, and army teamsters knocked down vacant houses for sport. Some Hawaiians settled in the lower Columbia region and others went home. By 1855 Kaulehelehe and his wife were the only Hawaiians reported at the fort. Owyhee Church was demolished in 1858 and the fort was decommissioned in 1860. On March 20, 1860, the couple watched soldiers burn their house.

A trace of the Village map drawn by Richard Covington in the 1840s (NPS).

What the ground shows

Most Village residents could not read, so archeology can test the story told by the records of colonial elites. Archeologists think the company did not help build the houses, so employees likely put them up themselves on days off. They were smaller and more rustic than the dwellings in the fort, usually for one family, though some held two or three families or related women. The Village sat apart from the fort, separated by fields and gardens, and its layout seems to have expressed the gap between elite officers and other employees.

Houses 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 were found from the spread of square nails and the "halos" of trash around them. The halos held many broken ceramic vessels, including teacups, saucers, slop bowls and teapots, in numbers like those in elite households inside the stockade.

House 7 gave the fullest picture. Its floor held architectural debris such as nails and window glass, and personal items such as buttons, buckles and mirror glass. There were also lead shot, a gun flint and a percussion cap, glass beads, clay tobacco-pipe fragments and a wide range of ceramics, including bandedware, cottageware, mochaware, transfer-printed earthenware and Chinese export porcelain. A hearth 70 cm across was probably an outdoor kitchen, since food remains and burnt bone lay near it. Feature 135 was a dog burial wrapped in what appears to be a green fabric blanket.

A hearth uncovered in the House 7 excavation, believed to be an outdoor cooking facility (NPS).

Why teacups

The Village's households had plenty of Staffordshire transfer-printed whiteware. Employees were paid in credits, never cash, and the Fort Vancouver sale shop was the only place to spend them, so they could not shop around. The article reports that the average number of broken vessels per household was worth more than the estimated yearly household income. The article reads this as value placed on goods the community could not easily afford: women of the Village probably used English wares to strengthen their families' standing, and perhaps to teach children the etiquette of an English tea, a fur-trade elite practice that was also part of Village life.

A transfer-printed vessel from the House 7 trash scatter; its reconstruction is in progress (NPS).

What it adds

The article concludes that the Village shows a separate community that supported the company's work while holding social power of its own. Its people adapted as the company changed, as people today do who build identity and community in new places. Archeology shifts the focus from the fort to the mix of peoples around it and gives voice to people whose histories were left unwritten.

Sources

• National Park Service, Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, Archeology and the Employees and Families of the Village; rewritten in hubnx's own words. The article's photographs of named individuals and of excavators are left out.