North America - Northwest Coast. European Exploration and Contact

European Exploration and Contact. The earliest documented contact on tire Northwest Coast between European explorers and Native American villages came in 1741 with the second North Pacific voyage of Vitus Bering, the Danish captain of a Russian expedition. Although Bering died on one of the islands along the northern coast, his crew returned with charts of the coastline of southeast Alaska and several hundred sea otter pelts. Spanish ships arrived in 1774 and 1775 to assert their claim to the region and also traded with coastal villages.

In 1778 the Bri tish explorer James Cook's last voyage of exploration stopped in Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island, where he traded with the local Nuu-chah-nulth village for sea otter pelts. Although he, too, did not survive to return home, having been killed in the Sandwich (Hawaiian) Islands by natives, his crew sold the otter pelts for a high profit in the Portuguese territory of Macao in Asia. News spread to other European and U.S. sailors, instigating the first major resource boom on the Northwest Coast.

These international traders valued sea otter pelts as "soft gold," and the earliest significant understanding of the Northwest Coast among Europeans was of a region rich in lucrative natural resources. This would be a hard label to shake and one that more than any other influenced the region's future.

From 1778 into the early nineteenth century, the sea otter trade dominated European-Native American relations on the Northwest Coast, and native hunters and traders played a central role in trade and the eventual demise of the otter population. Native Americans traveled through the coastal kelp beds hunting sea otter. The economic exchange brought increased material wealth to the coastal tribes as they used their role as suppliers of pelts to demand increasingly high prices from the European and U.S. traders, who competed against one another for access to the pelts.

By 1820 the sea otter along the coast was nearly extinct, its population having dropped from 500,000 to less than 2,000 in the entire North Pacific. Destruction of the sea otter led to devastation of the kelp beds along the coast and the diverse ecosystem that thrived in their shelter. Sea otters were the main predator of sea urchins, which fed on kelp and algae along the ocean floor. The sea urchin population exploded, thus replacing the productive kelp beds with "urchin barrens."

In 1968 the provincial government of British Columbia began a project to reintroduce sea otter from Amchitka Island in the Aleutian Islands to the northwest coast of Vancouver Island. The otter thrived among the abundance of urchins, and kelp bed ecosystems quickly returned. The otter population has since spread along the west coast of Vancouver Island as far south as the Olympic Peninsula of Washington.

The sea otter trade brought material benefits to coastal tribes, but European ships also brought with them waves of infectious diseases that decimated the densely populated coast. Because of tire relatively recent arrival of Europeans to the Northwest Coast compared to other regions of the Western Hemisphere and the frequent contacts by fur traders, the impact of epidemics is well documented. From an estimated population of over 180,000 in 1774, the indigenous population of the region dropped to less than 40,000 within one hundred years.

Smallpox and malaria were the biggest killers, and epidemics recurred about once every generation. Smallpox first hit the coast from Oregon to southeast Alaska in the 1770s. Explanations of how it arrived and from whom, including theories that some epidemics arrived overland from the Great Plains, remain under debate.

By 1830 malaria arrived in the lower Columbia River region as a land-based trade in beaver pelts developed there, killing 88 percent of native inhabitants within a decade. These epidemics cleared the way for American settlement of the Oregon country and were the most powerful force in shifting the population from Native American to Anglo-American bv the time of the founding of Oregon Territory in 1848.

As the sea otter disappeared, economic development of the region's resources shifted to trade in beaver pelts, particularly in the lower Columbia River region. The American-based Pacific Fur Company founded Fort Astoria in 1811 at the mouth of the river. British traders of the Northwest Company bought out Astoria, and it eventually moved upriver to Fort Vancouver, near present-day Portland, Oregon, in 1824 as the seat of the Hudson's Bay Company's Columbia District.

Hunting of beaver had more impact in the inland regions of the Northwest, but many of the furs were transported to international markets via the Columbia River. In 1845 the Hudson's Bay Company decided to move its regional headquarters to Victoria on Vancouver Island, thus shifting British presence and the social and environmental impacts of the fur trade farther north, into the Fraser River country.

As the fur trade declined in the 1840s, the Hudson's Bay Company began to develop additional commercial ventures in the region. It promoted agricultural settlement at its Puget Sound Agricultural Company and at farms around Victoria. These two sites joined the Willamette Valley in Oregon as the first major pockets of agriculture on the Northwest Coast in the 1840s. Farmers transformed the botanical life of their surroundings by introducing crops such as wheat, hops, and fruit orchards as well as normative flowers.

The Hudson's Bay Company developed commercial ventures in coal mining on Vancouver Island near Fort Rupert in 1849 and Nanaimo in 1852. The company also built lumber mills at Fort Vancouver in 1827 and at Victoria in 1848. It also began to export barrels of salted salmon. These changes represented the diversification of the company and were the first commercial efforts to exploit the mineral, timber, and fish resources of the region.