Jane Barnes was Oregon Territory's first adventuress

One of the more interesting things about Oregon history is how much of a role “colorful characters” played in it.

Until a few dozen years ago, historians didn’t much like talking about the contributions of prostitutes, swindlers, shanghaiers, and other underworld characters to Oregon’s history, preferring to talk about brave pioneers and clean-living homesteaders and noble missionaries and such.

So it’s no surprise that the name and identity of the first woman of European extraction to set foot in the Oregon territory has gone mostly unremarked. Her name was Jane Barnes, and she was, in every sense of the word, an adventuress.

The fact that she made it into the historical record at all is a testament to what an interesting person she must have been.

In 1813, Jane Barnes was a young, pretty blonde barmaid working at a tavern in Portsmouth, England.

By the end of that year, Jane had gotten into a love affair with a customer — an adventuresome Scottish gentleman named Donald McTavish, an employee of the North West Company. This British fur-trading company merged into the Hudson’s Bay Company a few years later.

Donald was something of a VIP. The Company had tapped him to take over as chief factor of Fort George — essentially, governor of the British Northwest, which included the north half of today’s Oregon and all of Washington and British Columbia. The Company had purchased Astoria from the Americans during the War of 1812 and, having renamed it Fort George, now needed to build it up into a proper trading fort with all the necessary organization.

McTavish was scheduled to leave for the Columbia River shortly to take his new position.

Historian Kenneth Porter writes, with that adorable condescension characteristic of mid-century historians when they write about interesting women, that Donald “without much difficulty, succeeded in adding her to all those comforts of home, including ‘bottled porter,’ ‘excellent cheese,’ and prime tinned English beef, with which he and his fellow-proprietor, John McDonald, intended to solace their long ocean voyage and subsequent exile in the Indian country of the Northwest coast.”

Porter assumes that it was Donald who talked her into traveling with him, but it does seem somewhat more likely that it was the other way around — that having Donald bring her along was her idea. He must have liked her. Porter’s assumption to the contrary, anyone who thinks Donald McTavish planned to go out and find a random barmaid to drag along on a dangerous journey halfway around the world to an outpost in the wilderness should go immediately to a doctor’s office for a head examination, taking great care to stay away from bridge salesmen on the way.

When Donald McTavish crossed the Columbia River Bar on April 17, 1814, she was on board his ship, the Isaac Todd. And a week later, she accompanied him ashore, where he took up his duties as the company’s governor of what you might call British Oregon.

Jane’s romance with Donald McTavish hasn’t lasted very long. McTavish had planned to drag her along on an overland journey to Montreal after he got Fort George properly organized, which he thought would be a pretty quick job, but she soon made it clear that that journey was more arduous than she was willing to endure.

So McTavish arranged for her to travel back to England on the Isaac Todd, which was scheduled to leave on August 1 and would return to Portsmouth after a stop in Canton. McTavish thought he’d have everything in place well before that, so he asked an associate, Alexander Henry, to take charge of her and watch out for her after his departure.

Henry, who had a wife and family back in England and seemed to have been worried about what all this would involve, agreed to the deal “more as an act of necessity than anything else.”

Once the deal was struck, McTavish sent Jane ashore to Henry’s place and immediately took up with a pretty Chinook maiden, much to Henry’s moralistic disgust. McTavish seems to have been a bit of a hound, and it would be nice to know more about how his colleagues and Jane felt about his behavior.

In any case, it didn’t last long because while McTavish and Henry were being rowed back to the Isaac Todd from Fort George on May 22, the boat was swamped, and both of them drowned.

As a result, Jane was considered a widow by the local Chinook Indians, several of whom promptly proposed marriage. In particular, Prince Cassakas, son of Concomly, presented himself in a full state ceremony to propose a marriage to her.

When Jane rejected Prince Cassakas’ proposal, it caused a diplomatic rift between the tribe and Fort George. The only way to fix it was to get her out of there as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, she was stuck until Isaac Todd could get underway, and because of various delays, that didn’t happen until September. So for four months, Jane Barnes was stuck at the fort, unable to leave its walls by herself for fear Cassakas’ people would abduct her.

However, Jane seems to have had a good time during that time. For diplomatic reasons, she had to remain single — anyone she might give her heart to after rejecting the Chinook prince would be in serious peril, as would the whole fort, as the tribe would consider it a further insult. Historian Porter suspects the ship’s doctor, Richard Swan, constituted himself as her secret cavalier; he accompanied her to most social events where a girl couldn’t go stag. But no one knows.

While stuck in the fort, she entertained herself as best she could. At one point, she tried to establish a literary salon, but although she was nobody’s fool, Jane didn’t have the education to hold up her end of a conversation with an English gentleman. Ross Cox tells of an incident in which she was chatting up a company clerk and made what she thought was a Shakespeare reference that everyone present recognized as a quote from Alexander Pope. Doubtless, that was the end of that idea!

Finally, the day came when Isaac Todd set sail for Canton and stood out over the bar westward bound. We can only imagine with what relief, surely not unmixed with regret, the Company employees at Fort George watched her go.

At Canton, Jane once again landed butter-side up. There, she met and fell in love with an English gentleman working for the East India Company.

This gentleman — who none of my sources mention by name — “offered her a splendid establishment,” as Cox puts it. Naturally, she accepted, and Cox writes in 1832 (by which time Jane would have been nearly 40 years old), “the last account I heard of her stated that she was then enjoying all the luxuries of Eastern magnificence.”

But, you know how rumors are — another account says Jane was back in England by 1916, trying to claim a small annuity promised to her by Donald McTavish.

In any case, that’s the point at which the record goes silent. Either Jane Barnes found her “forever home” with a man she met in a waterfront Canton bar, or she finished her run battling for a small annuity with a company of tight-fisted Scots who likely blamed her for a good share of the trouble they ran into at Fort George.

I think it’s more likely Jane found a congenial mate and disappeared into respectable obscurity in a then-approved manner. Had she remained single, she indeed would have made more news, and the men of the late Georgian period cannot have been so unromantic and stodgy as not to find the Jane Barnes style of adventuresome spirit irresistible.

But as with almost all stories of “misbehaving” women in the 1800s, we’ll never really know.

(Sources: “Jane Barnes, First White Woman in Oregon,” an article by Kenneth W. Porter published in the June 1930 issue of Oregon Historical Quarterly; Adventures on the Columbia River, a book by Ross Cox published in 1832 by J. Harper; “Fort George,” an article by William L. Lang published Aug. 30, 2022, on the Oregon Encyclopedia website)

Finn J.D. John teaches at Oregon State University and writes about odd tidbits of Oregon history. His most recent book, Bad Ideas and Horrible People of Old Oregon was published by Ouragan House early this year. To contact him or suggest a topic, go to [email protected] or 541-357-2222.