Confederacy of Ambition
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Confederacy of Ambition

William Winlock Miller and the Making of Washington Territory

William L. Lang

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eBook - ePub

Confederacy of Ambition

William Winlock Miller and the Making of Washington Territory

William L. Lang

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The promise of opportunity drew twenty-seven-year-old Illinois schoolteacher William Winlock Miller west to the future Washington Territory in 1850. Like so many other Oregon Trail emigrants Miller arrived cash-poor and ambitious, but unlike most he fulfilled his grandest ambitions. By the time of his death in 1876, Miller had amassed one of the largest private fortunes in the territory and had used it creatively in developing the region's assets, leaving a significant mark on the territory's political and economic history. Appointed Surveyor of Customs at the newly created Port of Nisqually in 1851, Miller was the first federal official north of the Columbia River. Two years later he helped organize the new territory's Democratic Party and quickly became a political and financial confidant of governor Isaac Stevens. His involvement in the Indian conflict in 1855–56, a term in the territorial legislature, and his bankrolling of key politicians made him the territory's most effective political networker. His role as a "hip-pocket banker" in a region without established banks made him a powerful financial broker and a major player in territorial affairs. But in his pursuit of success Miller compromised another ambition he carried west from Illinois. He postponed marriage and family until only a few years before his death and agonized about relationships with his family in Illinois. His experience reminds us that the pioneer settlement era was a period of social dislocation and that public economic and political success could mask personal disappointment. Lang's biography takes readers into the heart of Washington territorial politics, where alliances often hinged more on mutual economic interest than political principles and nearly all agreed that government should encourage ambitious and energetic men. In this world, Lang argues, Miller succeeded because he parlayed his talents in camaraderie politics and sharp-pencil business affairs with an unabashed mining of governmental opportunities. William Lang's account of William Winlock Miller and the first quarter century of Washington's history offers a new view of the pioneer era, emphasizing that the West was developed in large measure by men like Miller who manipulated government and its resources to their own and the region's advantage.

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Year
2014
ISBN
9780295802770

CHAPTER 2

In the Government’s Service

I know that men sometimes play green and it is always a strong game but this finessing is not always necessary when you are complete master of the subject before you. . . . Never let your fire be drawn but keep your own counsel and your judgment to yourself.
Josiah M. Lucas to William W. Miller, 1855
As he headed north down the Willamette River in 1851, William Miller had little idea of what lay ahead of him. He knew that his new position as surveyor of customs had attracted many job-seekers, perhaps for the salary or maybe the recognition, even standing, it might bring, but he had only the barest knowledge of its requirements and protocol. He had almost no image of Olympia, no intimation of what the place Congress had selected for the new port might be like, who had settled there, or what kind of community they had created. But as he later confessed, because he could only “depend on his own exertions” to make his way in life, he had not hesitated to embrace another risk and move from the Santiam.1 He had stepped out again on the itinerant track his family experience had endorsed, but this time it would be different. Although he could not have known it as he traveled north in the last days of July, Olympia would be his home for the rest of his days.
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For a man born, raised, and familiar with inland prairies and river valleys, living at the saltwater port of Olympia must have required adjustment from the first day. Lying at the tip of Budd Inlet, a long finger of Puget Sound that pointed south toward the Cowlitz Plains and the distant Columbia River, the town had been hacked out of a thick forest environment less than two years before Miller arrived. Even by Oregon Country standards, Olympia was raw. The settlers had barely cleared the land—“A dog couldn’t get through the woods,” one early resident later claimed—and roads were virtually nonexistent. The area’s first non-Indian settlers, Edmund Sylvester and Levi Lathrop Smith, had staked claims in 1846 at the mouth of the Deschutes River, in part because other Americans had already settled at nearby New Market (present-day Tumwater) the year before and in part by whim. “I do not know what attracted my attention this way,” Sylvester later confessed, “except I was destined to settle here.”2
The Puget Sound and Cowlitz Plains had not drawn many men like Sylvester previous to the mid-1840s. Most of the overland migrants had headed south of the Columbia to the Willamette Valley, where Methodist missionaries had created a thriving community in the late 1830s. The valley’s fertility pulled the emigrants away from the gravelly soils to the north, and the hegemonically powerful Hudson’s Bay Company, headquartered at Fort Vancouver since 1825, discouraged American settlement north of the Columbia. The HBC had long considered the northern portion of Oregon as its domain, investing heavily in Fort Nisqually, its port on Puget Sound, and in an extensive farming operation at Cowlitz Plains. The company had encouraged settlement in the area by its own retired employees, but most had chosen instead to settle in the Willamette Valley or the Tualatin Plains south of the Columbia. Some retired HBC men had settled along the lower Cowlitz River, however, and a few Americans had ventured north of the river before 1846, when the Oregon Treaty gave the United States control of the disputed territory all the way north to the 49th Parallel.
The most important American settlement party, one led by Kentuckian Michael T. Simmons, had come west in 1844 and had paused for a season on the north bank of the Columbia upriver from Fort Vancouver. With advice and aid from Chief Factor John McLoughlin at the fort, Simmons headed north in 1845, crossing the Lewis and Cowlitz rivers to the Deschutes, not far from its mouth on Budd Inlet. Simmons had scouted the area earlier and had selected the falls of the Deschutes because of its potential for waterpower. The settlers took a series of claims, calling their settlement New Market. By late 1847, Simmons had enlisted eight partners—including Maine-born Edmund Sylvester—in building a sawmill at the falls, the first on Puget Sound.3 Other settlers had made claims in the area, including John Jackson, who had come in 1844 and homesteaded near the HBC farming operations on the Cowlitz, and George Washington Bush, a black settler who had steered north to British-dominated territory in 1845 because Oregon’s Provisional Government had passed a Black Exclusion Law that outlawed African American settlement south of the Columbia. A large settlement of HBC farmers had come from the Red River country in 1841, but fewer than ten families remained in the Puget Sound region by the late 1840s. Not until after passage of the Oregon Treaty did more settlers take up land north of the Columbia. By 1848, enough of them had moved in to prompt HBC complaints with U.S. authorities that Americans had illegally squatted on company lands. But even with the increasing settlement, the population north of the Columbia remained small. What headstart they had toward some growth quickly dissipated in 1849 when news of the gold strike in California swept the Oregon Country, taking two thousand or more settlers—including Sylvester and other Cowlitz men—along in a stampede south to find gold. By 1850, only 280 Americans were clustered in widely scattered communities, existing in a kind of semi-isolation with only unimproved traces connecting them.4
Ironically, Olympia was a product of that gilded enthusiasm. After one season of trial in the goldfields, Sylvester headed back to Oregon with other disappointed miners in the last days of 1849. Not eager to retrace his overland route, Sylvester sailed north on the brig Orbit, a ship he had purchased in San Francisco with three other partners. Sylvester’s Orbit, the first American commercial ship to sail into Budd Inlet, dropped anchor at the mouth of the Deschutes in January 1850. Back at his claim, where he “found things just as I had left them,” Sylvester transformed his homestead into a townsite. In the company of Isaac N. Ebey, Benjamin F. Shaw, Michael T. Simmons, Charles H. Smith, and a few others, he agreed to lay out the town on his land and name it Olympia.5
By the time Miller arrived, some eighteen months later, much had changed. Simmons had purchased the Orbit from his partners and sent it back to San Francisco with lumber from the New Market mill. He then stocked his new store at Olympia with the mercantile goods the ship brought back from California. Olympia had acquired a post office, and Simmons had been named postmaster.6 The incidental commerce with Fort Nisqually, the HBC post north of Olympia on Puget Sound, had grown with the population. Ships had begun carrying timber to Victoria, California, and Hawaii, and perhaps a dozen or more houses lined the waterfront. There was even talk of creating of a new Oregon county.7
Despite its growth and optimism in 1851, Olympia remained isolated, something Miller found out when he made his trip north. Leaving the mid-Willamette Valley, he traveled on a newly constructed wagon road to Oregon City and then by river to Portland, a new city that had been platted only a few years before and had just been granted a charter from the territorial legislature. At Portland, where a deep enough anchorage made it the head of navigation on the Willamette for seagoing vessels, steamboat service had been initiated a year before. At a cost of about ten dollars, Miller booked passage down the Willamette and Columbia rivers to the mouth of the Cowlitz.8
The Cowlitz River ran west from the Cascade Mountains and turned south at Cowlitz Plains, thirty-seven miles from its conjunction with the Columbia. A natural water arterial north to the prairies, the Cowlitz had served Chinook-speaking Indians for hundreds of years as a main travel route and had been adopted by HBC men, traders, and northbound settlers as the cheapest and easiest overland route to Puget Sound. Hiring Indian canoeists at the mouth of the Cowlitz, Miller traveled upriver to Cowlitz Landing, where the river took its sharp turn east. At the landing, he began the last leg of his trip, resting at John Jackson’s homestead way station and then proceeding by horseback via the Cowlitz Portage northwest to Fort Nisqually. The portage—a crude road with no bridges across streams and no ferry at the Nisqually—had been developed in the early 1840s by HBC to connect its farms on the Cowlitz with Fort Nisqually.9
It was the other way to Olympia, the sea route, that had necessitated the creation of a customs district and Miller’s new post. Sea commerce in the southern part of Puget Sound began in earnest in 1833, when HBC established Fort Nisqually to dominate the northern fur trade. The fort, located about fifteen miles north of Budd Inlet hear the mouth of the Nisqually River, constituted the only port on Puget Sound. Described in 1843 as “an enclosure of fir logs, on an average, eighteen feet high” with “a store for trading in furs and several small buildings,” the fort served as the main shipping point for the Puget Sound Agricultural Company, the HBC’s subsidiary that operated large farms at Cowlitz Plains and Nisqually after 1840. The Cowlitz farm and other similar operations at HBC forts in the Columbia River Basin supplied the company’s posts and Russian-American Company posts with foodstuffs. In 1847, for example, HBC shipped more than seven tons of wool, nearly two thousand sheepskins, and hundreds of cowhides and horns to London.10 Manufactured goods from England, trade with the Russian-America Company in Alaska, commerce with other HBC posts in the region—especially Fort Victoria on Vancouver Island—and shipments to and from Hawaii made Fort Nisqually a busy port. After the 1846 treaty, that sizable commercial traffic took place in newly decreed American waters, which soon came under the purview and control of the United States Customs Service.11
From the standpoint of American merchants in southern Puget Sound, Miller’s arrival could not have come any too soon. During the preceding half dozen years, enforcement of American customs regulations in Puget Sound had created conflict between the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Americans. The Sound’s labyrinthine waterways made surveillance difficult, but even more problematic was the location of the nearest customs office at Astoria at the mouth of the Columbia River, far to the south. Smuggling in Puget Sound, which had become a cottage industry, bedeviled American customs agents and sometimes led to conflicts with HBC shippers. For American shippers, the conditions were unsettling, for they not only shipped in goods from American ports but also both purchased merchandise from HBC and competed against it.
If customs officials applied the revenue laws to HBC shipments—the 1846 Walker Tariff had specified 30 percent duties on most imported consumer goods—there was a considerable difference in retail prices. If violations occurred and ships were detained, however, then either receiving merchandise or shipping it out could be delayed for weeks. The Cadboro, for example, was sequestered in port for customs infractions in 1850 for more than two months. Both HBC and American businessmen on Puget Sound operated in an economically circumscribed arena. What affected one affected all. This was especially the case for Michael Simmons and many of his associates. Simmons had long done business with HBC Chief Factor William Tolmie, including bartering services and renting out the Orbit to haul the company’s produce. Thomas Glasgow, sometime inspector of customs in Puget Sound for Customs Collector John Adair in Astoria, often sold Tolmie lumber. Speaking for his own interests and others entangled with HBC, Simmons petitioned for a new customs district both to rationalize commerce and to ensure some protection for trade through the enforcement of revenue laws.12
In part, then, Miller had been sent to Nisqually because local American interests had requested help, but the situation also had broader implications than the fortunes of Olympia’s nascent merchants. It was part of the aftermath of the Oregon Treaty of 1846. Although the treaty had allowed HBC to retain its lands, installations, and trading privileges in the territory south of the 49th Parallel, and even though most American settlers were favorably disposed toward the company, occasional disagreements and frictions between Oregonians and HBC interests had created a contentious situation. Some of it focused on land policies and trading practices, but much of it revolved around HBC dominance of the sea trade in Northern Oregon. Samuel R. Thurston, Oregon’s first territorial delegate and an anti-HBC politician, lobbied Congress and the James K. Polk administration to create a customs district for Oregon in part to hold HBC accountable to U.S. revenue laws (as specified by the treaty). Congress satisfied Thurston’s request in 1848 by choosing Astoria, Oregon, as the first customs office on the Pacific Coast. Even though the gold rush would soon make California ports the busiest on the Pacific, it made sense in 1848 to select Astoria, the oldest non-Indian settlement in Oregon and the gateway to inland transportation. In the spring of 1849, Polk’s choice for collector of customs, John Adair of Kentucky, arrived at Astoria ready to administer the nation’s revenue laws.13
Adair’s aggressive application of law exacerbated an already uneasy situation and set in motion a chain of events that resulted in declaring Nisqually a port of delivery in January 1850 and establishing the Port of Nisqually in February 1851. Adair had been in Astoria just a few weeks in mid-April 1849 when he detained the HBC’s Columbia in the harbor and levied duties on all goods in the ship’s hold destined for resale, including items bound for Vancouver Island, north of the 49th. Company officials cried foul and appealed to Washington, complaining that the United States had no legal basis for taxing goods shipped to ports in British territory. The government agreed and rescinded the duties, but the Columbia incident proved to be a harbinger. The next year, customs officials seized the British ship Albion as it loaded spars near Dungeness Spit in violation of a trading regulation. Within weeks, officials detained and searched the Cadboro at Nisqually, brusquely informing HBC Chief Factor William F. Tolmie of several violations of the revenue laws. Tolmie “made several remonstrances against [t]his proceeding but with[ou]t effect.” In these and other incidents, U.S. customs officials rendered a squeaky tight reading of the laws and often overstepped their authority. Washington later overruled local officials, but the immediate effect at Nisqually was to put the Hudson’s Bay Company on the defensive.14
By May 1850, harassment of HBC commerce had become customs policy. Delegate Thurston, who had made diminution of HBC influence in Oregon his personal goal, finally prevailed on Secretary of the Treasury William M. Meredith to require all British vessels sailing to Nisqually to clear customs at Astoria, forcing all ships from Victoria on a 350-mile detour and two dangerous crossings over the Columbia River bar. While this regulatory decree sparked HBC complaints and diplomatic correspondence between London and Washington, it also added stimulus to Michael Simmons’s request for a customs district on Puget Sound. The local Olympia petition aside, it was also clear that requiring HBC ships to go to Astoria for clearance did not solve all of the problems in Puget Sound. Collector Adair in Astoria still had to patrol the Sound to prevent smuggling and enforce the laws, as he reminded the Treasury Department in early 1851.15 He urged the department and pleaded with Thurston to create a new customs district.16 Congress responded in February 1851, but the new district did not become a reality in Olympia until Miller arrived in early August.
What Miller knew about the immediate history of customs enforcements on Puget Sound and the conflicts between customs and the HBC is unclear. The Oregon Spectator had publicized the ship seizures, and it is likely that Oregon Governor John Gaines had discussed the HBC question with him before Miller went to Olympia.17 If Miller had any predispositions on the situation before arriving in Olympia, however, he kept them to himself. It is clear that he had no specific instructions from the Treasury Department, but that was not uncommon. The Customs Service had expanded rapidly during the previous two decades, and many collectors and deputy collectors had no training or even information when they took over their posts. In most isolated regions, such as Puget Sound, communications between local customs officials and Washington, D.C., were unpredictable, so collectors and surveyors tended to operate on their own.18 It is likely that Miller got most of his information about conditions on the S...

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