Boundaries
by Jack Nisbet

Jack Nisbet is the author of The Mapmaker's Eye, Sources of the River, Purple Flat Top, Singing Grass, Burning Sage and Visible Bones. His newest, The Collector, is due out in October.

Charles Wilson's Two Winters
February 2007

In 1858, the British team of the North American Boundary Commission appointed a 22-year old Royal Engineers lieutenant named Charles William Wilson to be their secretary in British Columbia. An active, sporting gentleman from Liverpool, Wilson used his position to explore the Pacific Northwest, moving inland with the survey and overseeing pack trains of supplies from Fort Walla Walla north to survey crews along the 49th parallel. Along the way he commented on familiar fur trade landmarks around the Spokane River, Lake Pend Oreille, and the Kootenai country into Canada. He also spent two entire winters at Fort Colvile, the fading Hudson's Bay Company trading post located at Kettle Falls.

Over the course of his adventure, Wilson kept a breezy, opinionated diary (collected as Mapping the Frontier, University of Washington Press). Anyone reading it today might think the lieutenant a little harsh on people who rubbed him the wrong way, and more than a little demeaning to Americans and tribal people, especially native women, but he was a man of his time. What Wilson loved more than anything was a good chase, and his hunts for sharp-tailed grouse and curlews around Fort Colvile, waterfowl and sandhill cranes in the Pend Oreille country, still make for exciting reading. Wilson was also a keen observer of natural events, and the diaries are full of eclipses, parhelions, sundogs, and general weather information. To anyone trying to figure out the parameters of climate change, they offer a chance to compare our current winter conditions to a pair of local winters a century and a half ago, right at the outbreak of the Civil War. By early November 1860, Wilson had been working in an office in Fort Colvile for two months. His journal entry for the 4th contains a description of getting used to the cold season typical of his lively mind.

Winter has commenced here, the last week we have had some very hard frosts & today it is snowing off & on, the Indians however seem to think we shall have a thaw before the regular downfall of snow, which lies on the ground all winter...we had hard frosts every night which used to turn us out pretty sharp in the mornings; the hoar frost settling on ones face, has a peculiar sensation; getting up in the morning the skin used to feel quite tight & brittle & as if, were one to laugh, the whole would splinter into a thousand small pieces.

Even in November Wilson was grousing about the confinements of the fort, but around Christmas, he seems to have settled in to a winter routine: playing cribbage and backgammon; waiting desperately for a mail delivery from the Dalles; thumbing through issues of Punch and the Illustrated London News when the postman finally arrived. For physical amusement he turned to "sleighing & snow shoe walking which is a first rate exercise but very hard work until you become accustomed to it."

Wilson also made a habit of talking to local tribal people as he tried to get a feel for the landscape. By February, he could remark that "We have had a very mild winter for this country, the Indians say they hardly remember such an open one."

An open winter in those times might look a little different that the ones we experience now. On Valentine's Day, Wilson began a horse trek to Fort Walla Walla via the established tribal trail/wagon road that can still be traced along the west side of the Colville Valley. He found the snow 3 feet deep all across the Spokane Plains, "over which we had to walk & drive the horses in front of us, whilst the wind, which generally blows there hard enough to take the hair off one's head, cut right to the bone almost stopping the circulation."

Wilson made it to Walla Walla, where he caught a steamboat downriver to Portland. From there he shipped to San Francisco, enjoyed the pleasures to that big city, and still made it back to Fort Colvile by the end of April. Even with the frenzy of the upper Columbia and Fraser River gold rushes in full swing, he found the fur post "decidedly a dull spot to remain in," and was more than happy when "on May 16, 1861 I left our winter quarters at Colville, popularly known as the "Penitentiary" from our long & weary winter imprisonment there."

After Wilson spent the warm months of 1861 again herding animals and supplies to the 49th parallel, he arrived back at Fort Colvile in October for his second winter. The American Civil War was all the talk now, and the British furmen regularly visited the American garrison at their post, also named Fort Colville. It wasn't long before they were making the trip by horse-draw sleigh, and by February 3rd, 1862, Wilson could write

This has been on of the severest winters any of the people here ever remember, the whole of January was intensely cold, for a week we had the thermometer down at nights to 28¼ & 31¼ below zero, 60 or 63 degrees below the freezing point, a most disagreeable time for us as we cannot warm our rooms up & it stops all work, everything frozen as solid as iron even to wine & treacle became thick like insufficiently boiled toffee...

The numbing cold snap brought changes to the Columbia River above Kettle Falls and to the cascade on the Colville River we now know as Meyers Falls.

even the might Columbia is frozen over at places & one can walk across on the ice just above the Falls & hear the roar of the water rushing underneath; the high falls of the stream which runs through the Colville valley are frozen solid & are a very curious sight, however now it has commenced snowing again & we consequently have milder weather & are in hopes that the worst of it is over.

As late as March 6, the lieutenant could still describe the shape of the Columbia River and Meyers Falls in terms that sound like some later British exploring team fighting their way across pack ice on a South Pole expedition.

the river has been frozen over for two months & after I shook off my cold I made several expeditions across, in one place the ice was heaped up to a height of twenty feet with deep crevices running through it & we had good fun scrambling about amongst the huge blocks; the river was frozen nearly to the edge of the fall the rush of water & blocks of ice under the frozen surface made a most disagreeable noise under the feet though it was so firm any number of waggons might have driven over. The high falls of the Mill creek running through the Colville valley were frozen hard as iron & were very beautiful. Two unfortunate men have been frozen to death near here, another has lost his feet

We all know weather is cyclical, and you can't draw any conclusions by picking one winter out of a bunch. A modern catalog of big winters in the North Columbia country might begin with the year of the Ice Storm and work its way back, one severe cold season every decade or so. Certainly there are people who can recall a week of -20¼ temperatures, or three feet of snow on the ground all winter, and we can always hold out hope that such conditions will roll around again. But those of us who long to scramble up 20-foot blocks of ice to peer over the edge of a roaring Kettle Falls, or stand in line with our ice ax to find a new route up Meyers Falls, might face a long wait.

Illustration: Lt. Charles William Wilson standing outside Fort Colvile in 1860. photo courtesy of the Royal Engineers.

Jack Nisbet Homepage