In the century between the 1740s and the 1840s, different nations competed with one another, and with native peoples, to take control over the area that is today known as the American Pacific Northwest and the west coast of Canada. In one sense this competition had begun in 1492, when Columbus landed in the New World, claimed it for Spain, and inaugurated a European rivalry for territory. Over the next two years, the Pope responded to the discovery and the threat of competition over it essentially by dividing the western hemisphere into Spanish and Portuguese zones of influence and assigning the Pacific Northwest to Spain. Yet Europeans would not actually see Alaska and the Pacific Northwest until the 18th century, when their ambitions spurred one another to explore the territory. The contest ended in 1846, when the Americans and British divided most of the region between themselves by drawing a boundary between Canada and the United States at the 49th parallel; another key event occurred when Russia sold Alaska to the United States in 1867. It thus took more than three and a half centuries for peoples of European descent, following up on Columbus’s first voyage, to establish some degree of mutually respected authority over the Pacific Northwest (and for decades longer, even that authority remained contested by native peoples). This long span of time illustrates just how isolated the region once was from European centers of power.

The period 1774-1795 marked an especially intense era in this rivalry, for it was when sailors from different nations first visited the lands between Alaska to the north and California to the south and engaged their countries directly in a contest over who would control the territory. The Spanish arrived first, in exploratory voyages of 1774 and 1775, and performed ritual acts of possession that asserted their claim to the territory.  The British soon followed, with the first ship arriving in 1778 and many more coming thereafter. Other nations also made appearances in this period: the United States, a relatively weak competitor, showed up belatedly; Russia coveted lands south of Alaska but never really established an effective claim to any (except at Fort Ross in California, between 1812 and 1841); and France sent only a single exploratory expedition in this era. But Spain and Great Britain were the main contestants, and the nature and outcome of their rivalry loom large in understanding the European forces increasingly at work on the coast of the Pacific Northwest.