Columbia, Meet Columbia
A river, a district, a ship, a legacy
This story is a follow-up to the bit (PART 1) I recently wrote about the naming of Washington state.
Back in 2011 when Kris and I moved from Washington state to Washington, D.C., we could at least lay claim to still being Washingtonians, even if we had to add those two mysterious letters, D and C, to our newbie address. D for District, of course, and C for Columbia.
Who stops to think of the stories behind those two simple letters that most of us probably regard as little more than a name tag? Maybe some curious guy who’s come from a state and former territory named Washington, but also nearly named Columbia? (For more on the naming of Washington state, see my previous piece).
Washington. Columbia. Semantically, it was like we never left.
I’m intrigued by place names, so if I was going to live in another Washington with the two extra letters, I wanted to know at least a snippet of the story. Before l get to the actual naming of Washington, D.C., as the nation’s capital, I think it’s worth expounding more generally on that second letter: C for Columbia.
As far as I can gather, the tag “District of Columbia” has nothing to do with the state or the territory in the Pacific Northwest that was almost called “Columbia,” nor the really big river that forms a good part of the boundary between Oregon and Washington today. Out west, when we hear the word “Columbia,” most of us think of the river. For good reason.
By volume, the Columbia River is the largest river flowing into the Pacific Ocean from anywhere in North or South America. With its headwaters in British Columbia, the drainage basin extends across seven states, an area larger than France. Before the rise of salmon canneries in the 1840s and the construction of large dams beginning in the 1930s, the river hosted the largest salmon and steelhead runs in the world.
The Columbia cuts a deep gash across the Cascades Range, where the coalescence of a cacophony of streams and rivers pushes through a 4,000-foot deep, 85-mile long gorge. The place was deemed pretty enough in 1986 to be designated as the Columbia Gorge National Scenic Area. Dramatic waterfalls, abrupt basalt cliffs, temperate rainforest, grassy savannas, 200-plus miles of trails, and endless magical views attract as many as two million visitors annually.
So it’s no surprise that when you say the word “Columbia,” most of us Left Coasters will immediately think of the river. Some of my globetrotting friends might also envision dramatic landscapes in South America’s Republic of Colombia, the most biologically diverse country in the world. A close runner-up might be our nice neighbors to the north in the sprawling, sub-continent-sized Canadian province whose common name is also neatly reduced to two letters: B.C.
Readers may correctly presume that nearly all references to “Columbia,” “Colombia” and “Columbian” derive from the legendary explorer and alleged discoverer of America, Christopher Columbus. To keep things straight, it’s widely accepted now that he didn’t actually discover America, and that he was responsible for some atrocious things, even if his voyages were pivotal to the spectacular discovery by Europeans of a “New World” that lay far to the west across thousands of miles of the Ocean Sea (later, the Atlantic Ocean).
Imagine a time when there is no such thing as flight, and that the only world we know is the one that mariners and explorers have been telling us about for a thousand years. Then one day some wily captain returns to port in his caravel claiming he found some islands, among them the Bahamas, 4,000 miles across the ocean. Others investigate and find they aren’t just islands. Tucked behind them is a land mass the size of a continent, land that heretofore we knew nothing about. Holy cow.
Columbus apparently remained convinced to his dying day that in his heroic quest to sail west around the globe to Asia, he’d successfully landed in the East Indies. A Columbus contemporary, the Italian explorer and navigator Amerigo Vespucci, was among the first to assert that, beyond the islands, the principal land mass was indeed continental in size. He coined the term “New World,” which so impressed the German mapmaker Waldseemüller that he applied the name “America” to his 1507 map—where the term first appears. (Imagine what we’d be called had the mapmaker used Amerigo’s last name instead. Terre Vespucci? We’d all be singing Vespucciland the Beautiful.)
Columbus died in 1506, the year before “America” appeared on Waldseemüller’s map (above). But notice that everything to the west was still “Incognita.” The extended map label actually reads “Terra Ultra Incognita,” so not your run-of-the-mill land of mystery.
Six years after Columbus’ death, Vasco Núñez de Balboa bushwhacked across the isthmus of Panama to “discover” another sea, thanks to the local natives who showed him the way. Since the Panama region essentially extends from east to west, Balboa called his personal ocean the “South Sea,” and immediately waved his sword and laid claim to the entire thing and all the lands around it. To please the Spanish crown, of course.
After rounding Cape Horn in 1520, Ferdinand Magellan would rename the world’s largest sea the Pacific Ocean, since it seemed kinda calm at the time. So not only had the mariners found a new world called America, they pushed through the terra incognita to find a whole new ocean as well. This sneaky sea lay between the New World of really two Americas (North and South) and East Asia. It was as if the Earth had suddenly expanded by a third or more.
Strangely enough, Columbus’ “East Indies” naming error stuck, and thus we have “Indians” in the Americas and a substantial group of islands between the North Atlantic and Caribbean Sea still formally known as the “West Indies” (because to get there, you would sail west from Europe). Confusing, yes.
Fast-forward a bit. As exploration and colonization of North America advanced and the new “Americans” demanded autonomy from the Brits, the story of George Washington emerged, along with a grand victory in the Revolutionary War. (How’s that for summing up a century and a half of American history in a single sentence?) While that might crudely suffice as a founding story of the United States, where is the founding story of America? Washington wasn’t even born until more than a century after the pilgrims’ 1620 landing at Plymouth Rock.
So as not to give Britain any of the credit, pilgrims and nation builders as early as the 1730s began to trace their collective beginning to the Age of Discovery and its leading Italian celebrity, Christopher Columbus. He would be widely regarded as the discoverer of America. The word “Columbia,” a female form of the explorer’s name, had been coined by a promient English writer, Samuel Johnson, in reference to British colonies in the New World. The colonists began to apply it like poetry to the world they were creating.
Personified, Columbia was often represented as a young woman or Indian princess elegantly adorned with stars and stripes and possibly a headdress or liberty cap. The image was consistent with the sense of many that a divine purpose permeated the emergence of the thirteen colonies and the birth of the United States.
Even after the United States had been firmly established, many commonly referred to the new nation as “Columbia.” It became a weighty term signifying or recalling greatness, and was much more commonly used than we might presume. The World’s Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893 marked the 400-year anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the Americas, while also asserting the greatness of the United States on the world stage.
But let’s back up a little and return to the river.
By 1787, a three-masted ship originally built in Norwell, Massachusetts, and named the Columbia was rebuilt and renamed the Columbia Rediviva. Captained by Robert Gray, it would become the first American ship to circumnavigate the globe. In 1792, it would be the first ship to dare the standing waves and enter the dangerous mouth of a great river known to the region’s indigenous people as the Wimal or Nchi wana. Gray would name the river for his ship: Columbia.
For a time, the Columbia Rediviva was tendered by the Lady Washington, a 90-ton sloop built in 1787 and named for the wife of, well, George. After a second mast was added, it became the first American ship to reach the west coast of North America, and the first to sail to Japan and Hawaii. Well into the voyage, the two captains swapped ships, so it was Gray and Rediviva that entered the Columbia. In 1989, a full-size replica of the Lady Washington was built in Aberdeen, Washington, and still plies the state’s coastal and inland waters as an educational vessel. The ship has also starred in “Star Trek” and “Pirates of the Caribbean.”
Thanks to Captain Gray’s naming of the river for his ship, the term “Columbia” is now ingrained with everyday life in the Pacific Northwest. In the 1800s, fur traders, including the Hudson’s Bay Company, would refer to the entire region as the “Columbia District,” or more succinctly, “Columbia.” The district extended well beyond the river’s enormous watershed, and far to the north into what would become the Colony of, and later, the Province of British Columbia. Its center of commerce was Victoria, named for the queen. The queen herself would name the province.
Although the Oregon Treaty of 1846 settled the boundary between American and British interests at the 49th Parallel, a gold rush on the Fraser River in 1858 worried the crown that the Americans might try to claw back some of the territory north of that line. To perhaps better clarify the situation, the queen decreed a most logical place name: British Columbia.
So Columbia the river was named for Columbia the ship, which in turn was named for Columbus the admiral.
How does all this jabber about “Washington” and “Columbia” relate to our nation’s capital, the “District of Columbia?” Part of the answer is obvious. But after moving there, I found the details compelling enough to share that story next.
Watch for PART 3, coming soon.
Why Ken, you’re now a historian. Congratulations!