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Murray C. Morgan
Henry Warre and Merwin Vavasour, British Spies
Tacoma News Tribune
December 9, 1973
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Copyright, 1973, Murray Morgan
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Henry Warre and Merwin
Vavasour, British Spies
 An
aborted mission to the Pacific Northwest in 1845 by two British
spies has provided us with our most accurate information about the
Puget Sound country at the time of the 54-40 or Fight crisis and
as a bonus a charming folio of paintings and sketches.
On
April 3 of that year Sir George Simpson, governor of the Hudson's
Bay Company in North America, was closeted at Number 10 Downing
Street with Sir Robert Peel, the British Prime Minister and the
Earl of Aberdeen, foreign minister. Sir George, who gloried in the
nickname of "Little Emperor" and thought in Napoleonic
terms, noted that a dispatch just received by sailing packet from
America reported that the new American President, James K. Polk,
in his inaugural address had declared that the United States claim
to all Oregon, the entire region from the Rockies to the Pacific,
from Mexico to Russian America, as "clear and unquestionable."
The
Little Emperor proposed that England send four war ships to the
Oregon Country, occupy Cape Disappointment at the north side of
the mouth of the Columbia and place artillery on the bluff.
He
proposed using two of the ships to guard the Strait of Juan de
Fuca and Puget Sound while 2,000 Indians and mixed blood
auxiliaries trained for service in the Northwest in case of war.
Peel
and Aberdeen were inclined to interpret President Polk's tough
talk about "all Oregon" as preliminary bluster, the
establishment of a bargaining position from which he could afford
to make concessions.
The
fifty gun British frigate America was already on her way to the
Oregon Country. Though she drew too much water to enter the
Columbia River, her presence in the Strait of Juan De Fuca should
give pause to Yankee Hawks and comfort to British fur traders.
But
Prime Minister Peel did agree to send a pair of undercover agents
west "...to gain a general knowledge of the capabilities of
the Oregon territory in a military point of view, in order that we
may be enabled to act immediately and with effect in defense of
our rights in that quarter, should those rights be infringed by
any hostile aggression or encroachment on the part of the United
States."
Chosen
for the mission were Lt Henry J. Warre, aid de camp to the
governor of Canada and Lt. M. Vavasour of the Royal Engineers.
They
were instructed to pass themselves off as young gentlemen visiting
the west "for the pleasure of field sports and scientific
pursuit."
Warre
who had considerable talent as a painter took along a sketch pad
and water colors.
The
young spies were rushed west from Montreal in a Hudson's Bay
Company express canoe. They covered the 2,300 miles to Fort Garry
on the Red River in the month. From there they traveled with a fur
brigade on horseback.
The
trip to Fort Vancouver on the Columbia took from June 16 to August
12, claiming the lives of 33 of their 60 horses, and convinced
them that the idea of supplying a military force by the overland
route was, in the words of Warre's report "quite impractical."
He
was deeply impressed with Eastern Washington. "The barrenness
of the soil, the total absence of wood and water, completely
excludes all hope of its ever being adopted to the wants of men."
During
their six month stay in the Oregon Country the spies gave a good
demonstration of their idea of the wants of man, running up a
considerable bill at the Fort Vancouver commissary.
The
expense account submitted along with their spy reports shows they
worked hard at their role of young gentlemen of leisure. They
purchased several beaver hats of the highest quality ($8.88 each),
frock coasts ($26), cloth vests, figured vests, tweed trousers,
nail brushes, hair brushes, fancy handkerchiefs, shirts, tobacco,
pipes, wines, whiskeys and a quantity of extract of roses.
Wherever
the sweet smelling spies went in the Oregon country, and their
travels took them down the Willamette to the American settlements
to the mouth of the Columbia, up the Cowlitz River and across the
plains to Puget Sound, down the Strait of Juan De Fuca to the new
Hudson's Bay Company post at Victor, Warre sketched and painted.
Indians
and settlers and fur traders might occupy the foreground of his
pictures, but the back ground often included areas of military
importance; the guardian rocks at Camp Disappointment, the
defensible defiles on the Columbia, the wooden bastions of Fort
Nisqually, and Fort Victoria. And while Warre sketched, Vavasour
gathered information about the Indian population and the attitudes
of the English and American settlers.
Spies Ignored
Henry
Warre and Mervin Vavasour, the British secret agents who visited
the Pacific Northwest in the winter of 1845-46 in the guise of
young gentlemen seeking amusement, were assigned to assess the
military potential of the area.
They
were less than sanguine about the capacity of the Hudson's Bay
Company posts to withstand the impact of missiles impelled by
energy greater than that released from a bent bow. The buildings
at Fort Nisqually, they wrote off as totally incapable of defense,
those at Fort Vancouver as "poorly located," and at
Cowlitz Farms the only structure they considered of any military
worth was the Catholic church and it "...was in want of
loopholes."
While
they deplored the state of British fortifications, the spies were
even more alarmed by the rising tide of American immigration.
Whereas British movement across North America still was along the
canoe routes of the Hudson's Bay Company beaver trade, the
Americans had found, far to the south, passes through which they
could roll wheelers. The covered wagon caravans were moving
through the Rockies, bringing to the Oregon country not ragged
individualists dropping out of the fur business but ready made
farm families looking for land.
Warre
and Vavasour foresaw the danger to British interest in the
Americans' westward movement though they did not state them as
vividly as an American Congressman who, in an address to the House
declared that the United States should neither fight Britain for
possession of Oregon, nor agree to a diplomatic settlement, but
rely on time and sex. "We will win the contest for Oregon in
our bedrooms. We will outbreed them."
While
not mentioning the fecundity of the young American families moving
west, the British agents noted their numbers. Already the
Americans had taken up most of the Willamette Valley and were
beginning to stake out claims along the Columbia and even on Puget
Sound from which the Hudson's Bay Company had managed until 1845
to exclude them by denying supplies from the post at Nisqually.
"Till
the year 1842-43, not more than thirty American families were
resident in the country," Warre wrote in his secret report. "In
1843 an emigration of about one thousand persons with a large
number of wagons, horses, cattle, etc., arrived on the Willamette
having traversed the vast desert section of the country between
the Missouri, the Rocky Mountains and the Columbia...
"The
American immigrants have as yet confined themselves principally to
the valley of the Willamette which has by far the richest soil and
finest land in the whole country. The cultivable part of it,
however, cannot be said to extend more than sixty to eighty miles
in length, and fifteen or twenty miles in breadth. Nearly all the
Prairie land is now taken up, and the Immigrants are too indolent
to clear the woods.
"They
are consequently forming new settlements on the banks of the
Columbia at the mouth of the same river and on the beautiful but
not very rich plains to the north, in the neighborhood of
Nisqually and Puget's Sound.
The
mention of Puget Sound was the first reference by the spies to the
arrival at Tumwater of a party led by Michel Troutman Simmons, a
wagon train colonel, and George Washington Bush, a black pioneer.
They were the first Americans, other than missionaries to settle
north of the Columbia.
In
the final spying mission along the Wallamette at the end of their
six month stay, Warre and Vavasour found "...the village at
the falls (Oregon City) much improved in appearance, many
buildings having been erected and the trees, etc. cleared from the
adjacent heights."
They
recommended that if war came, the community be occupied by British
troops. "A small force could overawe the present American
population and obtain any quantity of cattle to supply the troops
in other parts of the country."
The
agents noted too, that "since the summer a village called
Portland has been commenced between the Falls and Lenton."
Lenton was Linnton, the town founded by Morton Matthew McCarver,
who later helped promote Tacoma.
The
spies, both engineering officers, proved better judges of
townsites than the professional boomer. "The situation of
Portland is superior to that of Lenton," they said flatly, "and
the back country of easier access."
In
the Spring of 1846 Warre and Vavasour returned to Montreal, from
where their report was forwarded to England. It arrived too late
to influence the officials who had commissioned it. Prime Minister
Robert Peel had already decided to yield the area between the
Columbia and the 49th parallel to the Americans.
The
Warre and Vavasour spy reports gather dust in the Public Records
office in London.
Warre
did find some use for his sketches. He wrote a book "Sketch
of a Journey Across the Continent of North America from Canada to
the Oregon Territory and the Pacific Ocean." He illustrated
it with many pictures, but made no mention that they had been done
while he was spying.
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