Fort Colvile: Washington’s once-prolific 200-year-old fur trading post you may have never even heard of

KETTLE FALLS – Beneath the glassy waters of Lake Roosevelt lie the remnants of the second-most important fur trading post in the Pacific Northwest.

About 20 years after the Lewis and Clark Expedition traversed the Columbia River, the Hudson’s Bay Company made its way to the Inland Northwest and established Fort Colvile , a third of a mile from Kettle Falls. Back then, the falls were a mecca for Indigenous tribes in the area and so full of fish that early written records said one couldn’t throw a stick in the water without hitting a salmon.

Built 200 years ago as of this year, Fort Colvile was in a lucrative location, where trappers traded thousands of beaver and muskrat pelts each year until the post closed in 1871.

Much of the fort’s history was washed away when the Lake Roosevelt reservoir filled up after the completion of the Grand Coulee Dam in 1941. While today Fort Colvile is about 80 feet underwater, a smattering of historians, authors and other curious folk gathered at the Mistequa Hotel in Chewelah on Oct. 18 to dredge up bits and pieces of the area’s historic heart of fur trapping.

Without writers, researchers and stories passed down generation after generation, the truth about one of Washington’s earliest European settlements may very well have completely disappeared beneath the waves of the Columbia River.

The Beaver Bonanza

Mark Weadick, president of the Northwest Fur Trade Historians, said that beaver pelt was far and away “the coin of the realm.” One beaver fur cost as much as 10 muskrat pelts. And it took around three beavers to barter for just the blade of an axe, not the handle, in the American West.

Weadick has a log of items traded at Fort Colvile and said that in 1833, there were 3,537 beaver furs that went through the fort. Just six years later, in 1839, that number dropped to 1,943. Muskrats were also another desired kind of fur, as in 1833, Fort Colvile saw 13,726 muskrat pelts pass through the fur-trading post.

“You would have been very, very hard-pressed to find a single beaver anywhere in the state of Washington around 1900 (because of the fur trade),” said Ben Goldfarb, an environmental journalist and author of “Eager: The Surprising Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter.”

Before Europeans came to the United States, the National Park Service estimates that up to 200 million beavers roamed freshwater habitats across the country. By 1900, the number dropped to as few as 100,000.

Beavers, the largest rodents in North America, were hunted nearly to extinction because their underhairs have microscopic hooks that latch to one another like Velcro. This underhair was used to create gentlemen’s top hats sold across several major cities in Europe and on the East Coast.

Goldfarb said beavers have about as many individual hairs on a postage stamp size patch of skin as people have on our heads.

He continued, “So just remarkably dense fur. And they also have two layers of hair. They’ve got these longer outer guard hairs, and they’ve got this secondary layer of under fur, which trappers called beaver wool.”

“It was the most desirable pelt, besides sea otters, which have the thickest fur of any mammal.”

The HBC implemented the “fur desert policy,” which decimated beaver populations . The company believed that if they effectively wiped out the beaver populations, Americans would view the Northwest as unappealing, and the region known as the “Oregon Territory” could remain under the crown’s control. The Oregon Territory stretched from the Pacific Coast to the Rocky Mountains and remained an item of contention between a burgeoning United States and Britain until a treaty in 1846.

Old names with modern ties

Weadick said he tracked 15 surnames belonging to modern families in the region and, using historic records, traced them back to workers at Fort Colvile or people with Indigenous roots .

“We come from such a polygon bunch of people that it gets hard to trace your lineage,” said Joe Barreca, president of the Heritage Network and lead organizer of the summit. “And certainly you’re not going to find it in a public school. But I think that’s the way we should be doing history altogether. We should be starting with our own history and then understanding what our ancestors went through to be here and to become us. It makes it so much more interesting.”

He saw last Saturday’s summit as a way to take a close look at local history, without forgetting all the ugliness, beauty and intricacies that came with the intersection of the fur trade and Indigenous communities. In total, he got around a dozen speakers together to talk about their own families, challenges of the fur trade, Indigenous culture in the area and the kind of boats used on the Columbia.

Fort Colvile, not to be confused with the army base Fort Colville , was named for the London-based governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, Andrew Colvile. Even though two forts, a group of confederated tribes comprised of 12 total bands and a city of about 5,000 people are all named after this 18th-century English lord, he never visited the Pacific Northwest.

While there are several families with ties to historical figures who lived in and around Fort Colvile, Weadick mentioned two mostly forgotten men as still having living relatives: Angus McDonald and Jacques “Jaco” Finlay.

McDonald, a Scotsman, was the last and longest-serving chief trader at Fort Colvile, serving from 1858 until the trading hub closed in 1871. His great-great-great niece teleconferenced in for the summit from Germany to talk about his life, his love for poetry and devotion to his Nez Perce wife and their 12 children.

Matty Ross is the great-great-great-great-great grandson of Finlay, the Canadian fur trader who constructed the Spokane House. From 1810 until 1826, the Spokane House was the first fur-trading post to grace what would one day become Washington state. The idea of a trading hub existing in the Inland Northwest first blossomed with fur trader and explorer David Thompson in 1811. He was the first Euro-American to journey through the Upper Columbia River. While Thompson had the dream, Finlay was the one to bring the vision of a fur-trading post to fruition.

Changing mindsets for a different time

Warren Seyler, a historian with the Spokane Tribe of Indians, gave the closing remarks before lunchtime at the summit. Next to him was Ross, wearing a bright red newsboy cap and sporting a long white beard.

Seyler told a story about two Indigenous girls walking in the woods long ago when they heard a rustling in the bushes. The girls assumed it was a wild animal, Seyler said, because Native Americans didn’t usually romp around the woods that loudly. But when a white man emerged from the bushes, the girls screamed, “Suyape!” which is Salish for “people with an upside-down face.”

At the pinnacle of the story, Seyler gestured with his palm out toward Ross. With one swift movement, Ross took his red newsboy cap off to reveal a shiny, bald head, further emphasizing his Santa Claus-like beard. Seyler then explained (although the joke mostly wrote itself) that many Europeans, who often had long beards and bald heads, looked quite opposite from their Indigenous counterparts, hence why they were referred to as “upside-down faces.”

“When (fur traders) came here for the beaver, our mindset was, if we wanted gloves for a child or for ourselves, we might go kill one or two beavers,” Seyler said. “But what we were taught was exploitation. Don’t just kill for your immediate needs. Go kill everything you can find. Don’t kill one or two. Go kill 100 or 200. So that was a change in a mindset that I don’t think people ever think about.”

Prior to the influx of white settlers and a slew of smallpox that ravaged Indigenous communities, Kettle Falls was a place to exchange goods, ideas and news for several tribes in the area. Thousands of salmon, some weighing as much as 100 pounds, dried on quartzite slabs along the Kettle Falls every single day.

The sound of rushing water cascaded down nearly 50 feet and resounded for miles. Salish speakers referred to Kettle Falls as Shonitkwu, which meant “roaring or noisy waters.”

Seyler stressed it’s important to acknowledge there are always two sides to the same story. So while Fort Colvile prompted economic growth in the area, Seyler said it was the beginning of change for Indigenous tribes, as they transferred from having everything they could ever need to having very little or nothing at all.

Standing next to his mother, Ryan Booth pondered how remarkable it was to discuss and learn with others, many of whom look completely different from himself, their shared history. Booth, a professor of history at Washington State University and member of the Upper Skagit Tribe, said moments like what happened at Mistequa are few and far between. The beauty is in finding what’s similar among us, not what divides us.

“In an era where we’re sort of atomized and living in our little silos, this is a moment of everyone coming together and sharing this common history,” Booth said. “This is the human experience. We really do crave being with other human beings and learning from each other, and this seems to be a really good example of that. Despite our differences, despite things that could divide us, and I’m sure if we really wanted to, we could jam some wedges in here. But that’s not what this is about.”