Operation
Wyeth and crew attempted various commercial interests from their outpost in the Pacific Northwest. They cut lumber and exported it to the Hawaiian Islands, built boats and canoes, and built a 60-foot (18 m)-long building to use in processing fish. They intended to ship salmon to the East and to Hawaii. Wyeth and his employees also attempted to trap animals in the Deschutes River watershed of central Oregon. They were unsuccessful and the young company was unable to survive against the HBC and, in the Rocky Mountains, the American Fur Company, made a monopoly by John Jacob Astor. John Ball, one of Wyeth's men, wrote that they were no match for the HBC, which up fur trade prices as much as ten to one whenever any American trader appeared on the lower Columbia River. The post had difficulties; its first supply ship sent to the Northwest Coast wrecked, and the second ship was late. The first ship was being used to export salmon. Wyeth abandoned the post in 1836 and the following year, leased it to the Hudson’s Bay Company. After Wyeth left the Pacific Northwest, John McLoughlin, the Chief Factor at Fort Vancouver, ordered Fort William demolished and a dairy farm built on the island. Wyeth also sold Fort Hall in present-day Idaho to the HBC the following year.
Read more about this topic: Fort William (Oregon)
Famous quotes containing the word operation:
“An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis. We call intuition here the sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what there is unique and consequently inexpressible in it. Analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known.”
—Henri Bergson (1859–1941)