Talk:Oregon Country
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This page has some good facts and is the basis for a good article. It think it needs a little cleaning up, and has some duplicate information.
I removed the statement in the article about it being indentical to the Oregon Territory, which is the formal name of a territory that created from the US portion of the Oregon Country. It now has its own page and does not redirect here.
-- Decumanus 18:26, 30 Jan 2004 (UTC)
Wasn't northern Idaho part of this region too? RickK 23:50, 1 May 2004 (UTC)
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- A bit late for this reply, given the 2004 timestamp there, but yes, northern Idaho was part of this region; ALL of Idaho was.Skookum1 19:16, 10 November 2006 (UTC)
- In Made In America, when discussing the various things named after Columbus, Bill Bryson describes an area of the north-Pacific coast of North America which includes areas of modern B.C., Washtington, Oregon and Idaho, as being named "Columbia". Is this an alternative name for Oregon Country, and if so is it notable enough to mentioned in the intro? Joe D (t) 14:07, 10 July 2005 (UTC)
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- See Columbia District, and yes, I added it to the intro. heqs 13:02, 31 July 2006 (UTC)
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- That's funny; I thought I'd added it to this page quite a while ago; implying someone didn't like it or thought it wasn't relevant and took it out; typically APOV (American point-of-view) as also in Oregon boundary dispute and Alaska Boundary Dispute and Pig War; until I got at 'em some anyway; the dispute pages still need work, and still hang on the topics of congressional debates and the like, without equal rep from Whitehall or Westminster (not New West, the other one), where the Columbia issue was debated; don't have my copy of AJP Taylor's book where he discusses it briefly (but pointedly) and the like; all these articles need lots of work to bring them up to NPOV; most Canadians are unaware of the issues, and only a few British Columbians are (and that often doens't include the professional historians, who assume the 49th Parallel to have been inevitable, which it wasn't). Anyway, I'll have to study the history of this page and see when it happened; must've slipped my eye; thanks for putting it back in. And for the record, BC's "Columbia" component is not named for Columbus, but for the river/basin by way of its name being the name of the fur district of which the remainder was/is the British half. And the river was named for Capt. Grey's ship, the Columbia Rediviva, which allegedly sailed up the river now bearing his ship's name (allegedly only, as his journals have questionable geography in them), which was also not named after Columbus but rather was named in tribute to the US itself, as "Columbia" is a poetic name for the republic, etc. The further complication in this is that BC's French name, colombie-britannique (two t's?), varies from this history, as in French the river is la fleuve Columbia and "Columbia" was also the French name for the fur district; doesn't stop 'em from treating it like is British Columbia, y'know, not like that other one in South America, which is la Colombie. Fudging of BC history/culture/identity by Central Canadians, English or French, is nothing new of course...Skookum1 17:32, 31 July 2006 (UTC)
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[edit] BC & Pacific Northwest History Forum
Please see RE BC & Pacific Northwest History Forum re: Talk:List of United States military history events#Border Commission troops in the Pacific Northwest. If you think maybe I should also move some or copy some of my other stuff from NW history and BC history pages let me know; I never mean to blog, but I'm voluble and to me everything's interconnected; never meaning to dominate a page so have made this area to post my historical rambles on. Thoughts?Skookum1 03:49, 14 July 2006 (UTC)
- Comment on my posting of this: if anyone has any questions or wants to debate any issues relating to the Oregon Country/Columbia District history or other NW history, please feel free to drop by the forum and start a thread/topic, or just butt in at yer leisure.Skookum1 05:50, 14 July 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Ban on "coloured" immigration/settlement in Oregon Territory/State?
- The goal of the slogan was to rally Southern expansionists (some of whom wanted to annex only Texas in an effort to tip the balance of slave/free states and territories in favor of slavery) to support the effort to annex Oregon Country, appealing to the popular belief in Manifest Destiny.
Can't remember if it was the Territory or the State, but didn't Oregon bar blacks from settling there? And by the way, the many British subjects and employees of the HBC weren't considered "white" by the new government(s), either; most were mixed Metis, French, Iroquoian, Hawaiian and local native, including McLoughlin's own son (still a rabid Indian-hunter himself, though). So often US historical figures concerning the British presence vs. their own are skewed because the non-whites on the British side just weren't counted as citizens/subjects.Skookum1 01:40, 30 July 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Revmoed POV succession box
This was removed:
[edit] Government
| Preceded by Second Executive Committee* |
Provisional Governor of Oregon Country 1845-1848 |
Succeeded by Joseph Lane |
As the provisional government was co-extant and much preceded by the administration of the Hudson's Bay Company; and as I recall the provisional executive committee/governor was of the Oregon Territory no the Oregon Country. Anyway, having a US-based succession box without consideration of the dual POV necessary for this article is unsatisfactory and that box removed here for discussion/improvement.Skookum1 15:54, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Astor
- John Jacob Astor founded a fur-trading post at Astoria, Oregon in 1811, beginning the organized trade in furs that had already been initiated by a few hardy trappers and traders.
This makes it sound like Astor was on-the-spot and no he wasn't. True that neither the NWC or HBC were on-site yet, but there weren't any "hardy trappers and traders" in the area yet, either. Astoria was founded as a land base for the marine fur trade, largely still sea-otter in that time, and despite the Boston ownership and maybe an American manager, the staff were French-Canadians/Metis hired away from HBC/NWC operations on the Prairies/Great Plains (all theoretically British subjects, BTW). I HATE FUZZY HISTORY and get tired of stuff like this; will Americans adding to this page please do more research before contributing high-school curriculum memories/bowdlerizations?Skookum1 07:36, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
This article don't considere french settlers maybe this http://www.oregonvos.net/~clenzen/frprairie.html can contribute to that
- in reply to that, the original USAcentric content here hasn't fully been amended/emended; the French settlers (Metis mostly, actually) were HBC staffers, and part of the fur trade culture in the region, and also may have been shunted aside in mainstream history as, being half-aboriginal, and with aboriginal wives, they weren't considered "white" or "British"; which helps explain why many US histories focus on US settlers, and ignore the "British" (fur company) settlers already in situ, who were French/aboriginal, Hawaiian, and various others; only few were fully "white".Skookum1 00:19, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Question on Oregon Country category
Just wondering what to do with articles relating to north-of-49 locations that are part of the history of the Oregon Country, though maybe not known in US histories of the Oregon Country; e.g. the Fort Langley, Fort Hope, Fort Yale, etc; anything pre-1846 seems fair game, plus some afterwards; also native biographies such as Nicola (chief) (b.~1790 d. 1865).Skookum1 00:19, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Oregon a "republic" after 1818?
- Meanwhile, the United States and Britain negotiated the Anglo-American Convention of 1818 that extended the boundary between their territories west along the 49th parallel to the Rocky Mountains. The two countries agreed to "joint occupancy" of the land west of the Rockies to the Pacific Ocean.
- At this time, Oregon evolved into a de facto republic, with a 3-person executive branch and a chief executive. A certain faction of Oregonian politicians hoped to continue Oregon's political evolution into an independent nation, but pressure to join the United States would prevail by 1848. [citation needed]
I quoted both paragraphs because of the "at this time" that starts the second paragraph. This makes it sound like Americans in the Oregon Country organized their "republic" in 1818 or shortly thereafter. Very curious indeed consdering there were NO Americans in the territory until the 1830s, and then only a trickle; the American "flood" into the Oregon Country didn't start until about 1843 and I don't recall any American declarations of "republic" prior to 1846; if there were they were illegal as the area was still under joint occupancy with Britain. There are other mis-written bits of history on this page; this was a glaring one and, apposite to someone else asking me for cites about there being a "negligible" (on Pacific Northwest; see Talk:Pacific Northwest, the onus on the other hand is on Americans to prove there was a "flood of settlers" into Oregon in the 1830s (the context in that quote); or, in this case, on the claim that Americans had self-constituted as a republic in the wake of the Anglo-American treaty of 1818....Skookum1 18:46, 10 November 2006 (UTC)
