Oregon and Empire

Goal: The year is 1840, and the British Empire is on the verge of losing the Oregon Territory to its former colonies, the United States. Perhaps a rail network will strengthen the British claim to the region...

Author's Comments: OREGON AND EMPIRE is set in what is today the Pacific Northwest of the United States. The year, however, is 1840, and the political destiny of the region is not yet settled. The British call the area the Columbia River District of the Hudson's Bay Company; the Americans call it the Oregon Territory. Both nations have designs upon Oregon -- at first, the hope was that the Columbia River could be exploited as a highway to the continental interior, but in the early 1800s it was learned that the Columbia was too wild to serve as an efficient artery of commerce. The attention of the Brits and the Americans then shifted to Puget Sound, as both empires wanted a deep water port on the Pacific coast. (Spain, and then Mexico, controlled San Francisco Bay at the time, but that's another story...)

It's your job to secure the British claim to the Oregon Territory despite the opening of the Oregon Trail in 1843, when hundreds of American settlers crossed half of the North American continent in covered wagons and settled in the Willamette Valley, south of Fort Vancouver. Historically, the Americans organized a Provisional Government in 1843 and took control of the Oregon Territory by sheer weight of numbers -- thousands of American settlers arrived in the following years. By the time Oregon was officially annexed by the United States in 1849, the British Empire had recognized the reality of the situation and elected to settle "the Oregon question" diplomatically.

If you meet the initial conditions and secure the British claim to Oregon, you will be radically changing history. The events which follow are a mixture of this "alternate history" of the American west and actual historical events. A reasonably complete accounting of which events are true and which are fictional is included in this document.