Colonial Despatches

The Willamette Valley is a fertile region of land, in northwest Oregon State, fed largely by the Willamette River and its wealth of tributaries.

Throughout the mid-1800s, with Fort Vancouver as its economic and trading hub, the Willamette Valley became a focal point for farming, settlement, trade, and conflict—between Indigenous and settler populations and over US and British interests.1

• 1. J. S. Galbraith, The Hudson's Bay Company as an Imperial Factor, 1821–1869 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), 177-91.