Fort Hall was established by Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth, an inventor and businessman from Boston, Massachusetts, as a trading post on the Snake River in the eastern Oregon Country, part of southeastern Idaho in the present-day United States. He also established 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. Great Britain and the United States both operated in the Oregon Country in these years.