Every year trade goods and supplies from London arrived either via ships sailing to the Pacific Ocean or overland from Hudson Bay via the York Factory Express.

Funded largely by John Jacob Astor, the PFC operated without many opportunities for military defense by the United States Navy.

[6] Robinson did not agree to the proposal and subsequent talks did not focus on establishing a permanent border west of the Rocky Mountains.

[10] In the early 1820s a general reorganization of all NWC properties, now entirely under HBC management, was overseen directly by Sir George Simpson.

[11] Using the HBC position that any settlement of the Oregon boundary dispute would confirm the border placement along the Columbia; Simpson selected a location situated opposite from the mouth of the Willamette River.

[12] An employee of the HBC, wrote a general description of Fort Vancouver and its structural composition as it was in 1843: The fort is in the shape of a parallelogram, about 250 yards long, by 150 broad; enclose by a sort of wooden wall, made of pickets, or large beams firmly fixed in the ground, and closely fitted together, twenty feet high, and strong secured on the inside by buttressess.

The area within is divided into two courts, around which are arranged about forty neat, strong wooden buildings, one story high, designed for various purposes...[13]The fort was substantial.

Inside, there were 24 buildings, including housing, warehouses, a school, a library, a pharmacy, a chapel, a blacksmith, plus a large manufacturing facility.

[15] After dinner the majority of these gentlemen would relocate to the "Bachelor's Hall" to "amuse themselves as they please, either in smoking, reading, or telling and listening to stories of their own and others' curious adventures".

All sorts of weapons, and dresses, and curiosities of civilized and savage life, and of the various implements for the prosecution of the [fur] trade, may be seen there.

[15]Outside the ramparts there was additional housing, as well as fields, gardens, fruit orchards, a shipyard, a distillery, a tannery, a sawmill, and a dairy.

[18] With high demand from Europe for fur-based textiles in the early 19th Century, the HBC was forced to expand its fur trade operations across North America to the Pacific Northwest.

From its establishment, Fort Vancouver was the regional headquarters of the HBC's fur trade operations in the Columbia District.

[19] The territory it oversaw stretched from the Rocky Mountains in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and from Sitka in the north to San Francisco in the south.

Fur trappers would bring pelts collected during the winter to the fort to be traded in exchange for company credit.

The population of the fort and the environs was mostly French Canadians, Métis, and Kanaka Hawaiians; there were also English, Scots, Irish, and a variety of Indigenous peoples including Iroquois and Cree.

The common language spoken at the fort was Canadian French, while company records and official journals were kept in English.

James Douglas spent nineteen years in Fort Vancouver; serving as a clerk until 1834 when he was promoted to the rank of Chief Trader.

Fort Vancouver eventually began to produce a surplus of food, some of which was used to provision other HBC posts in the Columbia Department.

In time, Fort Vancouver diversified its economic activities beyond fur trading and begin exporting agricultural foodstuffs from HBC farms, along with salmon, lumber, and other products.

The HBC opened agencies in Sitka, Honolulu, and Yerba Buena (San Francisco) to facilitate such trade.

These men carried supplies, furs and correspondence by boat, horseback and in backpacks for various HBC posts and personnel along the route.

Recruitment from retired HBC laborers residing in the Willamette Valley as agriculturalists, through the use of priests François Norbert Blanchet and Modeste Demers,[24] utterly failed to convince any farmer to leave for vicinity of the Cowlitz farms.

[27] James Sinclair was later appointed by Finlayson to guide the settler families that signed the PSAC agreement to Fort Vancouver.

[29] Signed in 1846, the Oregon Treaty set the Canada–United States border at the 49th parallel north, putting Fort Vancouver within American territory.