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Sam Black, Hudson's Bay Company Man
In a year that marks then sesquicentennial of the military Fort Walla Walla, it’s good to remember that the name is older still. Fort Walla Walla was the name of the Hudson's Bay Company trading post from 1821 - 1855. Before 1821, the post near today’s Wallula on the Columbia River was known as Fort Nez Perce. On Sunday, September 14, Tom Williams of the Fort Walla Walla Museum Living History Company brings that story to life. Williams portrays Sam Black in a program scheduled for 2:00 pm in the Museum’s pioneer settlement. Sam Black, a tall, powerful, raw-boned man, with red hair was the master of Fort Nez Perce at the mouth of the Walla Walla River from 1825 to 1830. He was 46 years old when he assumed charge of the Walla Walla post. Governor George Simpson said of him in his Character Book, “The strangest man I ever met.” Black first came to North America from Scotland about 1810. He eventually went to work for the North West Company as “muscle.” From 1812 to about 1820, Black and Peter Skene Ogden specialized in intimidating their Hudson’s Bay Company competitors at Lake Athabasca and Lake Ile-a-La Crosse, in the modern-day Canadian Provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan respectively. When the Hudson’s Bay and North West Companies merged in 1821, changing the post’s name to Fort Walla Walla, neither Ogden nor Black was rehired. They both made a trip to London to meet the “Committee” operating Hudson’s Bay Company. Ogden and Black convinced the Committee to re-hire them, but were found themselves reduced in rank to clerks, but still officers in Company structure. Black was transferred from Fort Walla Walla in 1830 to Fort Kamloops, located at the confluence of the North and South Thompson Rivers at modern-day Kamloops, British Columbia. He remained there until his death in 1841. Unlike some other Hudson’s Bay Company officers who recorded only their commercial transactions, Black was a very perceptive bourgeois at the post. Because of him, we have a “vocabulary” of the Cayuse language that was the beginning of all later efforts to revive an extinct language; historians and anthropologists also gleaned much other cultural and ethnographic information about regional Indian people from Black’s writings. Black was easy to irritate. He once challenged famed botanist David Douglas to a duel; probably alcohol had something to do with this Fort Kamloops incident that occurred in the 1830’s. Sam Black was killed by an 18-year old Sushwap Indian at Fort Kamloops in 1841. Accounts differ as to the circumstances of his death; some claim that he was hated among the Indian people, while others claim he was respected and well-liked. Though Black was slain in February of that year, his killer remained on the loose until October. |
discovering, preserving and sharing Walla Walla regional heritage |
755 Myra Road - Walla Walla, WA 99362 - (509) 525-7703
Fax: (509) 525-7798 - Email: info@fortwallawallamuseum.org
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