So why was there a Frenchtown at this battle site? Well for starters, as mentioned earlier, most of the French-Canadian West ended up in the U.S

So why was there a Frenchtown at this battle site? Well for starters, as mentioned earlier, most of the French-Canadian West ended up in the U.S.

As such, the worlds of the U.S. Army and the Canadians intersected all across the American West. This is clearly not the West in the mind of the general public, which is more geared to Hollywood, and dime-novel distortions.

One of the most important members of Lewis & Clark’s Corps of Discovery had been their principal scout, translator and hunter, Georges Drouillard. Then when Astor decided to set up a trading operation near the mouth of the Columbia a few years later, Canadians of French and Scottish origins constituted a major proportion of his employees and partners. Then with Fremont’s expeditions in the 1840s, though Kit Carson got all the press with the American reading public who wanted to hear about one-of-their-own, Fremont’s other principal scout was Basil Lajeunesse. A few years later, in September 1849 Captain William Warner headed up into the mountains of northeastern California from Sacramento to scout the region for alternative trails entering Oregon from the south. And who was beside Capt. Warner when they both went down in a hail of arrows at the head of an Army column? Nobody named Juan or Pedro, but there was a scout named Francois Bercier. As for the mountain range, it was named, of course, for the martyred Captain, not the scout. Likewise, whenever Governor Stevens ventured into the interior, though his trust in them was highly variable, he found himself forced by circumstances into relying on the likes of Pierre Boutineau, Antoine Plante, Andre Dominique Pambrun, and Georges Montour.

Following the return of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, it took decades for American settlers to actually start to migrate out to the Pacific Northwest, several more years to establish a new

border (1846), and then three more years for the first U.S. Army units to arrive in 1849. The latter had in the interim been preoccupied in Mexico and California. The principal public authority in the region during the intervening period had been a British chartered trading monopoly – the Hudson Bay Company (HBC) – responsible for the Western two-thirds of British North America. It was the Hudson’s Bay Company that intervened to save the 56 surviving hostages of the Whitman Massacre in December 1847. There were still no American authorities on hand, and would not be for another 18 months. In fact, it would not be until 1872 that the company and the British Army withdrew from their last enclaves in Washington Territory, where Indians still outnumbered whites till around 1860. The HBC’s current and former employees in the region, mostly of Canadien extraction - along with their mixed-blood families – totaled approximately one thousand people by the early 1840s, as the Americans began to arrive in significant numbers over the Oregon Trail.

Reservations.

A major issue of the session was the status of the French Canadians formerly employed by the Hudson Bay Company who continued to reside in the territory. Some of the legislators argued that most of the Canadians were pioneers who helped open up the country and who paid taxes. Some citizens petitioned for the denial of voting privileges to anyone who could not read or write English, and, after hot debate, the legislature granted the vote to half-breeds who the election judges determined had adopted the habits of civilization, a compromise that allowed Canadian farmers to vote but excluded those living among the Indians. [Richards p. 188]