Fort Langley and the 49th Parallel

We're going to finish our visit to B.C. with a history lesson; it's one I found fascinating.  One day Mrs. F.G. and I drove down the highway to Fort Langley, a historic site with ongoing re-enactment illustrating life in a fur trading post of 200 years ago.  And it ties us to the earliest exploration of the west coast of North America.

There was an interesting display of the barrels they used for shipping food, and of barrel making.  Encouraged by the local Kwantlen people the fort took salmon and cranberries in trade as well as furs, hence the need for the barrels..

Here a visiting student is using a draw knife to try making a barrel stave.  She was with one of several visiting groups of students that day.

Of course they had a blacksmith's forge.

I had an interesting chat with this fur trader, ending up learning about his real life back home in Ontario.

Furs were of course the main coin of the fur trade.

Hudson's Bay blankets were a popular trading good.

If there was a key ingredient to the fur trade it was the famous beaver hat, made out of felted beaver pelts.  This drove the huge demand for furs back in Europe.

I found it quite an interesting history lesson getting the boundaries between the U.S. and Canada straight in my mind.  I know where they are of course, but I hadn't linked them to the fur traders and explorers of over 200 years ago.

The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 on the American side (the dark green), involved an enormous area of land from Louisiana to Montana purchased from France (basically the Mississippi River drainage basin on the west side of the river).  The Lewis and Clark Expedition was sent out in 1804 to explore this area.  They reached the Pacific at the mouth of the Columbia River in 1805.  At this point a huge tract of land from present-day Texas to northern California was still part of Mexico.  The Oregon Country was an American label; not a British one.

 

On the Canadian side. although it's not shown on this map, Simon Fraser, a fur trader from the North-west Company, reached the mouth of the Fraser River in 1808.  The Fraser River reaches the Strait of Georgia just north of the 49th parallel and Fort Langley sat just a few miles up the river.  The mouth of the Fraser River is just a few blocks north of Boundary Bay, so-named because the 49th parellel runs right through the middle of the bay.

So in 1846 when politicians in Washington were negotiating a boundary from the Rockies west, they looked at these explorers from nearly 50 years before, and decided the boundary had to be at the 49th parallel.  It already existed at this parallel from Minnesota to the Rocky Mountains.  Those who argued for '54.40 or bust' lost their case, but there were plenty of later disputes over the San Juan Islands, settled in the aftermath of the Pig War.

And thus I learned the link between Fort Langley, the fur trade and the Canadian/U.S. border.