Ogden, Isaac

  • DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY ARTICLE: Glyndwr Williams, “OGDEN, PETER SKENE (baptized Skeene) (Skeen, Skein),” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 8, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–. https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/ogden_peter_skene_8E.html
  • DCB profile:
    • Fur trader and explorer; baptized 12 Feb. 1790 at Quebec, son of Isaac Ogden, jurist, and Sarah Hanson; d. 27 Sept. 1854 in Oregon City (Oreg.).
    • Peter Skene Ogden is one of the most energetic and controversial figures to have left his mark on the North American fur trade. At the age of four, he moved with his family to Montreal, where his father had been appointed puisne judge and where, with two brothers already lawyers, he grew up in a family wedded to the law. But late-18th-century Montreal was a city which derived much of its atmosphere from its vocation as the organizing centre of the Canadian fur trade and, although Ogden seems to have received some tutoring in law, the legal profession evidently held few attractions for him. After a brief spell with the American Fur Company in Montreal, he joined the North West Company as an apprentice clerk in April 1809.
    • This was a critical period in the rivalry between the NWC and the Hudson’s Bay Company and during the final years of turbulent competition before the coalition of 1821 the young Ogden earned an unenviable reputation for violence. In February 1818 an account of the incident at Green Lake was forwarded to Lord Bathurst, secretary of state for war and the colonies, by Governor Joseph Berens of the HBC, who pointed out that with a judge for a father Ogden “cannot surely shelter himself under the plea of not knowing right from wrong or grounding thereupon an excuse for murdering an Indian in cold blood, merely because the Indian was attempting to trade with [the HBC].”
    • Geographical knowledge, however, was not his only, nor even his main, object and for the HBC it was clearly secondary to the task of trapping the country bare. Here the normal rules of company policy did not apply. If, as many believed, the region south of the Columbia was eventually to go to the United States, a careful trapping program of conservation would benefit only the Americans. On six separate expeditions between 1824 and 1830 Ogden did this, and more. The first expedition ran into trouble when Ogden lost many of his freemen, independent traders outfitted by the company, and their furs to a larger American group; the final expedition experienced tragedy near the end when 9 men, 500 furs, and Ogden’s papers disappeared in the swirling cascades of the Dalles on the Columbia River. But between these misfortunes Ogden’s returns delighted Chief Factor, his immediate superior, who wrote enthusiastically that the Snake country ventures were yielding 100 per cent profits. They were profits made at a cost, however, for even by tough fur-trade standards the hardships of the Snake country were exceptional. Men and horses fell sick and died, were killed by Indian arrows, froze in winter, and suffered from heat and fever in summer. In June 1827, as Ogden’s party was heading northeast from Goose Lake (Calif.), a region where liquid mud was their only drink, he wrote that “this is certainly a most horrid life in a word I may say without exaggeration Man in this Country is deprived of every comfort that can tend to make existance desirable.” Later that month the once-sturdy Ogden noted with disgust how illness, low rations, and excessively high temperatures had reduced him “to Skin and Bone.” His journals, sometimes cynical in tone and often outspoken, give the overriding impression of a persistent and tenacious personality. With his men and horses Ogden discovered the Humboldt River (Nev.) and sighted Great Salt Lake (Utah). On his last expedition he probably reached the lower Colorado River and possibly the Gulf of California. Either to carry out exploration or to trap furs was an achievement over such terrain and to combine the two was a remarkable feat.
    • Ogden’s last years at Fort Vancouver were frustrating ones as he coped with the problems of a fast-changing environment in which settlers and prospectors were more in evidence than fur traders and Indians. In August 1854, in ill health, he left Fort Vancouver for Oregon City, where he died in September at 64 years of age.
  • Son of United Empire Loyalist listed in Loyalist Directory: https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=13238
  • Find a Grave: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/6414/peter-skene-ogden