Fort Hall was built in 1834 as a fur trading post by Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth on the Snake River in the eastern Oregon Country, part of southeastern Idaho in the present-day United States. He was an inventor and businessman from Boston, Massachusetts, who also founded a post at Fort William, in present-day Portland, Oregon, as part of a plan for a new trading and fisheries company. Unable to compete with the powerful British Hudson's Bay Company, based at Fort Vancouver, in 1837 Wyeth sold both posts to it.