Chinook

Chinook country lies at the mouth of the Columbia, where the great river opens into a tidal estuary and the Pacific. Chinookan villages occupied the shores and controlled important trade routes along the lower river. Salmon supplied food, while canoes carried people and goods between communities. Maritime fur traders arrived in growing numbers in the late eighteenth century. In 1805 the Lewis and Clark expedition met Chinook people near the river mouth; William Clark recorded his party's decision on where to spend the winter at a Chinook trading village.

In 1811 John Jacob Astor's Pacific Fur Company built Fort Astoria at the entrance of the river, the first American-owned settlement on the Pacific coast of North America. Cut off by the War of 1812, the company sold the post in 1813 to the North West Company of Montreal, and later that year a British naval party took possession of it and renamed it Fort George. The American post later became one of the grounds for the United States' claim to the Oregon Country.

The later city of Astoria lies here.