Landscapes of Colonialism in the North American West

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sigrid Arnott. David Maki.

For hundreds of years, the Dakota landscaped natural liminal zones (high promontories above water) with burial earthworks. These sacred landscapes signaled boundaries between spiritual realms, the living and the dead, and local village domains. During the 19th century, the U.S. Government took ownership of the Dakota homelands in Minnesota and the Dakota Territory leading to violent conflict and decades of war. At the boundary of this conflict forts were built to "sweep the region now occupied...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin E Eichelberger.

In 1856 Fort Yamhill and Fort Hoskins were established to guard the newly established Oregon Coast Reservation.  Charged with controlling traffic in and out of the northern part of the reservation these posts served as "post-graduate schools" for several officers who would later become high ranking generals during the American Civil War.  During their service these men, often affluent and well educated, held the highest social, economic and military ranks at these frontier military posts.  This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Montserrat A. Osterlye.

In 1776, Spain sent thirty families from what is now Mexico to establish El Presidio de San Francisco as the northernmost outpost of their empire. Presidial soldiers defended adjacent Catholic missions and policed California Indians in the San Francisco Bay Area. The historical record is largely silent on the lives of colonial families and their relationships with indigenous people. This paper summarizes research at the archaeological site of El Presidio de San Francisco since its discovery in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Glenn J. Farris.

At the Russian American Company settlement of Fort Ross on the California Coast was a village housing a vibrant community of Russians, Native Californians, Native Alaskans, and Creoles. Using a drawing of the village made in 1841, along with various visitors’ accounts and inventories of the settlement, we are able to reconstruct a partial image of this community. However, in order to locate the old village on the ground, a composite research group of students and professors from UC Berkeley,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lotte E Govaerts.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Louisiana Purchase significantly expanded the United States. For decades thereafter, the Missouri River was the main transportation route for US interests in the new northwestern regions of its territory. Consequently, many sites related to US colonialist expansion in the form of fur trade posts, military forts, Indian Agencies, and early US settlement, were located along the Missouri River. Several of these sites were investigated during the River...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meris J Mullaley.

In the mid-19th century, the Fort Vancouver employee Village was one of the most diverse settlements on the Pacific Coast. Trappers, tradesmen, and laborers from Europe, North America, and Hawaii worked and lived within a highly stratified colonial social structure. Inspired by an 1845 description of the Village, with houses that were "as various in form" as their occupants, this investigation examined community-level social relationships in the Village through vernacular architecture and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Douglas C. Wilson. Robert J. Cromwell. Katie A. Wynia. Stephanie Simmons.

Fort Vancouver contains the archaeological vestiges of houses, activity areas, and other landscape features of the British and American Colonial Period, AD 1827 to 1860. Data from this site are used to explore the lives of its inhabitants who worked in the fur trade and other economic activities of the Hudson’s Bay Company.  Most of the material culture recovered from Fort Vancouver is imported European articles, tied closely to the marketing and sales of trade goods to its employees and family...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark A. Tveskov.

United States colonialism in the  Oregon Territory was a maelstrom of hostility, ambiguity, and conflicting agendas among Native Americans, Gold miners, pioneer families, citizen militias, Indian agents, and Army personnel.  The U.S. Army's role in this drama was particularly ambiguous; many of the pro-states rights pioneers in this pre-Civil War era of the 1850s resented the soldiers—to the point of armed conflict--for defending the treaty rights of Native American people, while the Army was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth A. Horton.

The U.S. Army’s Fort Vancouver in southwest Washington was headquarters for Pacific Northwest military exploration and campaigns in the mid-19th century. Between 1849 and the mid-1880s, members of the military community operated within a rigid social climate with firm cultural expectations and rules of behavior that were explicitly codified and articulated within the larger Victorian societal culture of gentility. Drawing upon datasets derived from the archaeological record and documentary...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melissa Cascella.

This paper will provide insights into the daily lives of the families that lived on Fort Walla Walla, one of the Pacific Northwest’s earliest communities, from its early use as a military base and into its transition to a veteran’s facility. Established in 1858, Fort Walla Walla was built along the Oregon Trail by the U.S. Army to defend settlers moving into the territory and played a major military role into the early 1900s. After the Fort closed in 1910, it was converted into a veteran’s...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victoria Castillo.

Fort Selkirk served as a small subarctic fur trade post for the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) in central Yukon from 1848-1852.  The company’s priority was the trade of European goods in exchange for furs trapped and hunted by Northern Tutchone and other Indigenous groups in the region. A review of Fort Selkirk journal records indicates the fort employed and housed a pluralistic population which included British, Indigenous and Metis men who worked as clerks, labourers and meat hunters. Mostly...