Explorers, Exploiters & the Fur Trade
Encounter, Colonization, and Devastation: Tribal Homelands
To the explorers in 1772, the northern Pacific Rim was the then unknown, an area of the World barely explored because of the vagaries of the ocean currents. Spain and Portugal (Brazil) were authorized by Pope Alexander VI to colonize the Americas and its Native Peoples as subjects, also to convert and enslave. The Spanish had a reason, the Russian fur trappers had already arrived in Alaska and were soon to have forts in Hawaii and the San Francisco Bay in a blind effort to exterminate the sea otter. Sailing was not the only to reach Cascadia, it was the Scot Alexander Mackenzie (1793) who first walked the walk, financed by the English Hudson’s Bay Company, later followed by Lewis & Clark and then the Montreal based French Canadian North West Company. All this was the early exploration of the West (coast). The final frontier, the Old West frontier, was to be found on the slopes of the Rocky Mountains with those stories to be told a generation (30 years) later. With few exceptions, the initial meetings with the Indigenous Peoples: the Arapaho, Cheyenne, Crow, Shoshone and Ute were friendly. These Native Americans’ main food sources were Wapato, Camas, and Salmon.
The trapping of beavers was greatly diminished, the search for gold (and other metals) was beginning in earnest, and relations had worsened with many Native Americans by approximately what year?
State of Washington History
Explorers, Exploiters & the Fur Trade
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