Fort Walla Walla

HMdb has reported the highway board here missing; the Kiwanis stone beside it still stands. Both mark a post the North West Company's Donald McKenzie raised in July 1818 at the mouth of the Walla Walla, a palisade of planks twenty feet high with cannon in its corner bastions, called the Gibraltar of the Columbia. He named it Fort Nez Percés, though it stood in the country of the Walla Walla people. It burned in 1841 and was rebuilt in adobe. The ground itself has been under Lake Wallula, behind McNary Dam, since 1953.

What the plaque says

Fort Walla Walla To the west, at the junction of the Walla Walla and Columbia Rivers, is the site of a trading post built in 1818. Fort Walla Walla was a vital link in the region's fur trade, and helped open up the Northwest to the white man. From this post traders and trappers pushed into the rich Snake River basin. Pioneers on the overland trek to the Oregon country in the 1840's found its farms a source of supply, and employees of the fort were among the area's first permanent settlers. The fort was abandoned by the Hudson's Bay Company at the start of the Indian War in 1855. Erected by the Washington State Highway Commission in Cooperation with the State Parks and Recreation Commission. Here stood Fort Nez Perce Also called Fort Walla Walla Fur trading post of Hudson's Bay Company 1818 - 1856 Built by Walla Walla Kiwanians

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Frenchtown Historic Site — 19 mi
  Where the Walla Walla leader Peopeomoxmox, who had come to the Oregon volunteers under a white flag, was killed as their hostage on December 7, 1855.
• Whitman Mission National Historic Site — 21 mi
  For forty years the only marks at Waiilatpu were a granite shaft on the hill and a marble slab over a common grave, and the stone arrived from Vermont too late for the anniversary it was made for.

More markers nearby

• Ainsworth — 11 mi
• Sacagawea — 11 mi