In the gray drizzle of a Pacific Northwest winter, Sauvie Island seems quiet, almost self-contained. The low, flat expanse lies between the Columbia River on one side and the smaller Multnomah Channel on the other, its fields quilted with pumpkin patches, grain crops, and pasture. To the casual visitor, it feels timeless. But two centuries ago, this same island was a point along a high-stakes artery of global commerce. It is hard to picture this quiet island as a place that once sat in the middle of a fur trade network stretching from the marshes of the Willamette Valley to the markets of London and the hatter’s shops of Paris. But in the 1830s, Sauvie Island was exactly that, a checkpoint in the journey of “soft gold,” the beaver pelts that fueled one of the most lucrative and ecologically costly industries in the world.
A Natural Crossroads
Long before the arrival of the Hudson’s Bay Company or Boston traders, Sauvie Island was home to the Multnomah band of the Chinook people. Known as Wappatoo Island, it was rich in wapato root, waterfowl, salmon, and beaver. The Columbia River’s main stem ran on one side, and the Multnomah Channel, a sheltered waterway connecting to the Willamette River, ran on the other. This geography gave the island unusual importance: anyone moving goods from the Willamette Valley or the interior Columbia Basin toward the Pacific had to pass its shores.
When the fur trade exploded in the Pacific Northwest in the early 1800s, this strategic position took on new meaning. Sauvie Island was not just farmland or wetland. It was a staging ground, a rest point, and in the brief life of Fort William, an attempt at a fur-trading post to challenge British control of the Columbia.
Fort William: The American Beachhead
In 1834, Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth, a Boston merchant determined to break into the Pacific Northwest’s fur and salmon trade, established Fort William at the north end of Sauvie Island. His plan was ambitious: gather beaver pelts from the Willamette Valley, intercept inland fur brigades heading down the Columbia, and ship goods directly from the Columbia’s mouth to markets in Hawaii, China, and beyond.
For two years, Fort William stood as a small but symbolic American foothold in territory where the Hudson’s Bay Company had the upper hand. Beaver pelts collected here were sorted, stored, and prepared for shipment downriver. Every bundle that passed through represented the labor of trappers working deep into the interior — French Canadian voyageurs, Métis families, Iroquois hunters, and Americans who had crossed the Rockies. The fort was close enough to intercept pelts from both the Willamette Valley and the inland Columbia Basin, making Sauvie Island a choke point in the trade.
But the Hudson’s Bay Company was too well established. Based at Fort Vancouver, just across the river, they undercut Wyeth’s prices, out-supplied his goods, and discouraged their Indigenous and Métis partners from trading with the Americans. By 1837, Wyeth’s venture collapsed. He sold Fort William and its remaining assets to the Hudson’s Bay Company, who promptly dismantled the post and converted the site into a dairy operation to provision their northern outposts. Even so, for a short, vivid period, Sauvie Island was the last stop for thousands of beaver pelts before they began their journey into the world market.
From Sauvie’s Shore to the China Circuit
A beaver pelt on Sauvie Island in the 1830s was only partway through its journey. Once sorted and bundled into 90-pound “packs,” the pelts moved down the Columbia in bateaux or small sailing craft. From the mouth of the river, they entered the China Circuit, one of the most important maritime trade loops of the 19th century.
In this triangular system, furs from the Pacific Northwest, including those staged on Sauvie Island, sailed to Canton (now Guangzhou). There, they were exchanged for tea, silk, porcelain, and lacquerware. These goods then sailed to London, where they fetched high prices, and manufactured goods made the return trip around Cape Horn to the Pacific Northwest. Some pelts also went east overland, but the China Circuit gave traders a faster and more profitable outlet, bypassing the Hudson Bay route and tying Sauvie Island directly to the economies of Asia and Europe.
For every gentleman tipping his beaver hat in London’s West End or Paris’s grand boulevards, the supply chain reached back to places like Sauvie Island. The pelt may have been trapped hundreds of miles inland, but it passed through this low island at the confluence of major trade routes before joining the currents of global commerce.
The Felt-Making Alchemy
Once in Europe, the transformation from raw pelt to finished hat was a craft in itself. The dense underfur of the beaver was removed from the skin and treated with a mercury nitrate solution in a process known as “carroting.” This roughened the fibers so they would mat together when exposed to heat and moisture. The treated fur was then shaped, shrunk, and pressed into thick, resilient felt. Hatters molded the felt over wooden blocks, giving it form and style before trimming and finishing it for sale.
These hats, broad-brimmed riding hats, stiff-crowned toppers, or the tall stovepipes made famous by Abraham Lincoln, were durable, water-resistant, and fashionable. A fine beaver hat could last decades, and its association with refinement made it an essential part of a gentleman’s wardrobe. Sauvie Island, far from the fashion capitals, was nonetheless a part of this chain, one of the quiet places where the raw material for Europe’s most coveted headwear paused on its journey.
Sauvie’s Wetlands and the Beaver’s Ecological Role
While Sauvie Island’s role in the fur trade was economic, its wetlands tell the ecological side of the story. Before heavy trapping began, the island and surrounding waterways teemed with beavers. Their dams slowed water flow, creating ponds and marshes that nurtured salmon fry, waterfowl, and an abundance of plant life. These beaver-shaped landscapes were biodiversity hotspots.
The Hudson’s Bay Company’s strategy of over-trapping, especially south of the Columbia to deter American expansion, devastated these ecosystems. The term “fur desert” came to describe areas stripped of beavers, where the wetlands dried, salmon runs diminished, and plant communities shifted. Sauvie Island’s sloughs and channels were not immune. As beaver numbers fell, the island’s hydrology changed. Seasonal flooding became more extreme in some areas, while others dried faster in summer. The loss rippled through the food web, affecting everything from otters to osprey.
Choke Point for a Disappearing Resource
By the 1840s, the pelts passing Sauvie Island were fewer. Decades of intensive trapping had reduced beaver populations to a fraction of their former numbers. Trappers working in the Willamette Valley and Columbia lowlands were traveling farther and staying out longer to find animals. Records from Hudson’s Bay Company clerks in the region note declining catches year over year.
Yet the island remained a choke point. Even as the trade contracted, pelts from upriver brigades and the Willamette still passed its shores. The dairy pastures established by the Hudson’s Bay Company at the former site of Fort William supplied their trading vessels and upriver posts, making the island’s economy shift from extraction to provisioning, but still in service of the fur trade network.
The Global End Point
The fashion that drove Sauvie Island’s role was not infinite. By the mid-19th century, silk hats began to replace beaver felt in popularity, and the price of pelts dropped. The China Circuit carried fewer furs and more agricultural goods, and by the 1860s, the beaver hat had become more of a relic than a necessity.
But for nearly four decades, Sauvie Island’s location had made it a minor but crucial cog in a vast machine: a place where furs from the interior paused, where goods were consolidated, and where the flows of trade bent toward the world’s fashion capitals.
Sauvie Island’s Fur Trade Legacy
Today, the island’s fur trade history is easy to overlook. Pumpkin patches and u-pick berry farms have replaced the log storehouses of Fort William. Birders scan the wetlands for sandhill cranes without realizing those same sloughs once echoed with the splash of beaver tails. Yet the story remains in the landscape. The Multnomah Channel still carries traffic past the island, though it is pleasure craft now instead of fur brigades. The fertile fields owe part of their richness to the beaver-created wetlands that came before, and the place names, from Wapato to Sauvie, echo its layered history.
In the story of the beaver hat, Sauvie Island is a reminder that global markets are built from local places. A single fashion trend in Europe reshaped an island in the Columbia River, altering its ecology, its economy, and its place in the map of human movement. For a generation, it stood as a checkpoint in a network that spanned continents. And in that way, the quiet farmland of today carries the imprint of a time when it was part of one of the most lucrative and far-reaching trades in the world.
