Willamette Post

OREGON HISTORY WILLAMETTE POST Willamette Post was established in December 1813, on a knoll just east of here, by the Montreal-based North West Company, close to the Kalapuyan village of Champeog. The two-room log cabin, also called Fort Kalapuya, was a place for trade and a depot for fur-trapping and hunting expeditions supplying the North West Company's Fort George near the mouth of the Columbia River. The post was still standing in the late 1820s, as French Canadian-Native American families began to settle in this area called French Prairie. Retired Hudson's Bay Company voyageur Pierre Belleque and his French Canadian-Chinook wife, Genevieve St. Martin, used the building as their family home beginning in the early 1830s. It was swept away in the 1861 flood.