Apostles of Commerce: The Fur Trade in the Colonial Northwest and the Formation of a

382 Pages·2015·1.83 MB·English

by  Jonathan William Olson

Florida State University Libraries
Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School
2014
Apostles of Commerce: The Fur Trade in
the Colonial Northwest and the Formation
of a Hemispheric Religious Economy,
1807-1859
Jonathan W. Olson
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FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

APOSTLES OF COMMERCE:
THE FUR TRADE IN THE COLONIAL NORTHWEST AND THE
FORMATION OF A HEMISPHERIC RELIGIOUS ECONOMY, 1807-1859

By

JONATHAN W. OLSON

A Dissertation submitted to the
Department of Religion
in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Awarded:
Summer Semester, 2014
Jonathan Olson defended this dissertation on May 28, 2014.
The members of the supervisory committee were:

John Corrigan
Professor Directing Dissertation

Andrew Frank
University Representative

Amanda Porterfield
Committee Member

Michael McVicar
Committee Member

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and
certifies that the dissertation has been approved in accordance with university requirements.

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Always for Courtney

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank the members of my committee, Amanda Porterfield, Andrew Frank,
Michael McVicar, and especially John Corrigan, for taking time out of their busy schedules to
read over drafts and provide helpful feedback. I am also in the debt of numerous archivists,
namely those at the Bancroft Library, University of Washington Library, the Hudson's Bay
Company Archives, and the Hawaiian Mission Children's Society Library. Lastly, I would like to
thank my family and friends for their endless encouragement and, most of all, my wife Courtney,
who graciously endured many long and lonely evenings.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... vi
1. INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................1
2. FUR TRADE IMPORTS, INDIGENOUS SPIRITUALITY, AND THE CONFLATION OF
ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE: THE CASE OF KAUXUMA-NUPIKA ..................................25
3. KAPU AND COMMERCE: HAWAIIANS IN THE NORTHWEST FUR TRADE AND THE
MATERIALIZATION OF A PACIFIC WORLD RELIGIOUS EXCHANGE ............................84
4. REVENUE, REGULATION, AND RELIGION: THE HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY ON
THE PACIFIC SLOPE ................................................................................................................166
5. HARVESTS AND HANDOUTS: AMERICAN PROTESTANT MISSIONARIES AND THE
SCOPE OF THE NORTHWEST FUR TRADE .........................................................................237
6. BAPTISMS, BENEFACTORS, AND BRIGADES: THE CATHOLIC MISSION ECONOMY
AND THE FUR TRADE IN COLONIAL OREGON .................................................................300
7. EPILOGUE ..............................................................................................................................355
REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................360
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................................375

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ABSTRACT

The ethnic and national mélange that characterized the Pacific Northwest in the first half of the
nineteenth century (Native Americans, Metis, Hawaiians, British, Americans, and French-
Canadians all called it home) facilitated a wide range of local and trans-regional religious
exchanges largely visible within the networks, resources, and methods of the area's foremost
economy: the fur trade. I argue that this trans-continental commercialism, sustained in part by
the trafficking of furs in the colonial Northwest, integrated into its system of operations a
hemispheric religious economy, whereby fur trade and religious transactions manifested as
conflated economic performances within the larger scope of imperial expansion. I explore a
variety of religious encounters from the early stages of the trade to its collapse in the mid-
century. After establishing a historiographical and interpretative framework in chapter one, I
highlight, in chapter two, the interplay between indigenous prophecy and fur trade imports from
eastern North America and Europe, which included not only durable goods, but also theologies
and moralities. In chapter three, I underscore the role played by Hawaiian employees of fur
trading companies in shaping a religious economy which linked the Northwest to a wider Pacific
World exchange. In chapter four, I dissect the region's leading trade organization, the London-
based Hudson's Bay Company (HBC), and their exploitation of religion as a means of preserving
a monopolizing control over all commercial activity in the area. Lastly, in chapters five and six,
I scrutinize the Protestant and Catholic mission economies, and their comparable yet contrasting
forms of dependence on the capital of fur trading giants such as the HBC. In the end, I suggest
that the diffusion of religion into the "secular" - into the "commercial" and "ecological" - during
the early nineteenth century set a precedent for the contemporary Northwest as the "None Zone."
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CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
They called him Tsalakum. As the headman of a village on Whidbey Island - a twelve
mile stretch of land that forms the northern barrier of what is now Puget Sound - he served as the
primary liaison between his community and the Euro-American traders who began arriving in
the early part of the nineteenth century. He was responsible for the welfare of his kin and
conducted his negotiations with a shrewdness that became legendary within the ranks of trading
organizations such as Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC). In the early 1840s, he encountered a new
type of trader on the Island. Although their skin was light, they wore long black garments
instead of leather pantaloons and seemed to care very little about animal furs. They also
distributed a different set of commodities. Instead of offering blankets, guns, and ammunition,
these Black Robes (as they were called) offered greater spirit power in the form of water
purification, which was said to ward off disease and improve one’s fortunes in the arenas of
gambling and warfare. These newcomers also gave gifts of significant value. Tsalakum himself
"received a wooden strip [also known as the Sahale Stick] on which were marks to designate,"
according to one writer, "the centuries after the creation of the world and some of the principal
events of sacred [biblical] history."1 This stick was nothing the headman or any of his people
had ever seen before and he accepted it with great pleasure.
The following year, one of these Black Robes (a priest named Francis Norbert Blanchet)
was busy conducting a mission at the HBC trading post on the southern end of the Sound (Fort
Nisqually) when a visitor arrived with an urgent message. It was the wife of Tsalakum, who

1 F. N. Blanchet to the Bishop of Quebec, St. Paul of Walamette, 23 February 1841, in Notices and Voyages
of the famed Quebec Mission to the Pacific Northwest, trans. Carl Landerholm (Portland, OR: Champoeg Press,
1956), 62.

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beseeched the priest to return home with her, as the chief and others were ill and in need of
intervention. To prove their identity and sincerity, she presented Blanchet with the same Sahale
Stick her husband received months prior, except in this instance it had been "carefully enclosed
in the skin of a sea-lion."2
The packaging of Tsalakum’s Stick offers an apt metaphor for the broader relationship
between religion and commerce in the colonial Northwest. The ethnic and national mélange that
characterized the region during this era (Native Americans, Metis, Hawaiians, British,
Americans, and French-Canadians all called it home) enabled a wide range of local and trans-
regional religious exchanges largely visible within the networks, resources, and practices of the
area's foremost economy: the fur trade. This trans-continental commercialism, sustained in large
part by the hunting and trafficking of animal pelts, integrated into its system of operations a
hemispheric religious economy, in which fur trade and religious transactions manifested as
conflated economic performances within the larger scope of imperial expansion. Much like
Tsalakum’s Stick, religious actors found themselves enveloped in what is best described as an
"ecology of exchange," cultivated from decades of fur trade encounters, and one that would
prove vital to the transference of their own sets commodities across ethnic and regional lines. In
the words of one local trader, "commerce [was], in truth,…hand maid to religion."3

2 Philip M. Hanley, History of the Catholic Ladder, ed. Edward J. Kowrach (Fairfield, WA: Ye Galleon
Press, 1993), 22.

3 Archibald McDonald and Malcolm McLeod, Peace River: A Canoe Voyage from Hudson's Bay to the
Pacific, by the Late Sir George Simpson in 1828 (Ottawa: J. Durie & Son, 1872), 64.

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Religion and Trans-Regionalism in the Pacific Northwest
This study centers on an area known commonly as the Pacific Northwest. As with any
regional identification, it can be as restrictive or expansive as one imagines it to be. It could
simply include the modern states of Oregon and Washington or it could stretch as far north as the
Arctic Circle. I am most interested in the commercial and religious activity taking place along
the Northwest's primary waterway, the Columbia River and its many tributaries, but only in such
way that demonstrates the region's larger role as a nexus between Pacific and Atlantic World
cultures. In short, this narrative expands as it contracts, all the while advancing a particular
argument that amasses several prominent themes in historical scholarship.
The categorical pillars of my argument - religion, commerce, and region - encompass a
sizable historiographic trajectory. To begin, in the 1970s and 80s two important changes
occurred in the larger field of Western history. First, the more focused studies that dominated
the literature on the American West in the mid-twentieth century (on topics such as fur traders,
miners, and Native American communities) revealed to scholars a very different West from the
one nineteenth-century historian Frederick Jackson Turner originally described in his famed
"Frontier Thesis."4 Second (and in many ways a corollary to the first) condemnation of the

4 In 1893, at the young age of thirty-two, Turner stepped up to the podium at the annual meeting for the
American Historical Association and delivered his now famous speech entitled, "The Significance of the Frontier in
American History." Prefacing his discussion with the "closing" of the frontier as reported by the 1890 census,
Turner went on to convince his fellow historians that the frontier mattered and was a "fertile field of investigation."
To do so, he argued that the "frontier spirit" formed the backbone of a cohesive and distinctive American identity.
After all, the frontier was, for Turner, an ever-expanding line that compelled Americans to constantly adapt to new
circumstances. This "perennial rebirth," as he phrased it, "furnish[ed] the forces dominating [the] American
character." Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt
and Company, 1921), 3. These "forces," according to Turner, encompassed two key elements: progress and
individualism. In terms of progress, he interpreted the frontier as a salient example of social evolution. As the
frontier expanded westward, so too did modern civilization in incremental stages. First there were "primitive"
hunters. Then came ranchers followed by farmers who cleared the forests and cultivated the land. Then came
merchants and finally manufacturers who ushered in a new era of modernization. This evolutionary model
demonstrated to Turner that the crucible of the frontier provoked a sense of innovation and development that became
the source of America's progressive sensibilities. In terms of individualism, Turner argued that the frontier
engendered a strong sense of individual autonomy among families who had nothing but antipathy for direct control.
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