When the Hudson’s Bay Company established their Fort Vancouver post, the site was already a meeting place of different native peoples. Mixing of peoples intensified there as a village of about 1,000 people grew by the fort. Native peoples associated with the company lived in the village alongside French-Canadian, English, Scottish, Iroquois, and Hawaiian support workers for the trading company. Through the British company’s fur trade, village residents became part of an international economy.

However, contact with outsiders was not safe for native people. At the time of early contact, native people here, as elsewhere, were overcome with smallpox, malaria, and influenza. In a span of about thirty years, nearly all native people of the Lower Columbia River died after contracting these unfamiliar diseases.