USA > Washington > History of Washington; the rise and progress of an American state, Vol. II > Part 30
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The colonists comprised eighty persons belonging to twenty-three families. They were members, or descendants of those who had been members, of that colony which Lord Selkirk had attempted to plant on the Red River during the years 1811 to 1815, when the fight between the Hudson's Bay Company, in which he was perhaps the largest stock- holder at that time, and the Northwest Fur Company was at its hottest. They now started for the coast under an agreement signed by Duncan Fenelon, acting governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, by which the Company agreed to furnish each family ten pounds sterling in advance, also horses and goods for the journey, with food and necessary supplies at the Company's posts along the way. On their arrival at their destination in the Puget Sound country, each family was to be provided with a house and barn, with fenced fields, fifteen cows, one bull, fifty sheep, and with oxen or horses, and seed for the first year's planting. In return for this they were to deliver to the Company one-half of the crop raised each year for five years, and at the end of that period one-half the increase of the live stock.
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This party started west on the fourth of June 1841. Twenty-eight days later they were overtaken by Sir George Simpson, who had then started on his famous trip round the world, and was traveling across the continent in his own boat, manned by its crew of picked paddlers, and accom- panied by his highland piper, his bugler, his halberdiers, and the other barbaric accompaniments with which he delighted to travel. They crossed the mountains in safety and reached Fort Walla Walla on October 4th. That night, or early the following morning, the fort was destroyed by fire, and the emigrants aided materially in saving the goods and other property it contained, which, but for their pres- ence, would have been destroyed. The remainder of their journey down the Columbia to Fort Vancouver was with- out incident, apparently, but at that point they were told by Sir George, whom they found there, that the Company would only keep the engagement it had made with such of them as would go to Nisqually. If any wished to go to work as trappers for the Company, it would supply them with the usual trapper's outfits, and they could go to Cali- fornia. If any wished to go to the Cowlitz the Company would help them some, but for those who went to the Willamette it would do nothing.
John Flett, afterwards for many years a respected resident of Pierce County, was one of these colonists, and the story, as given above is, substantially, as he wrote and published it during his lifetime. Only thirteen of the twenty-three families went to Nisqually, where they passed the winter, but they did not all remain there. Some went to the Wil- lamette, where they became loyal supporters of the pro- visional government, after it was formed, and some seem to have gone to California. No further effort was ever
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made by either company to bring Canadian colonists into Oregon, or the Puget Sound country, and the plans of those who organized the emigration, whatever they were and whatever their purpose was, were aban- doned.
The early missionaries in the Sound country found their way first to Fort Nisqually, and were welcomed, and as hospitably entertained there as Jason Lee and Whitman and others had been at Fort Vancouver. Rev. David Leslie, accompanied by Mr. William H. Willson, were the first to arrive. They reached the fort on April 10, 1839, and Mr. Kitson made this entry in the journal: "This evening the Rev. Leslie and Brother Willson arrived with an intention of making at this place a small missionary establishment for converting the Indians around." On the following day he "showed them a spot of ground north of the small river, for building a house for the mission, as desired by Mr. James Douglas," and the next he "took a ride out near the Poolapa* River with the two gentlemen strangers. They were delighted with the country." The Indians were assembled and Mr. Leslie told them of his intention to establish a mission if agree- able to them, and this announcement was so favorably received that Mr. Willson immediately began work on a mission house, while Mr. Leslie returned to the Wil- lamette. When the building was so far completed that it could be occupied, Mr. Willson also left the fort, and did not return until after the Lausanne arrived in 1840, more than a year later.
While Mr. Willson was still at work on his building Father Demers arrived and remained for several days
* The Puyallup River.
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at the fort, during which time he baptized several In- dian children and two adults, and performed a marriage ceremony .*
* The entries in the journal for several days are as follows:
"Sunday 14-The Indians of the place, having been brought into the big house, and Mr. Leslie told them of the purpose of their mission, that is, that they intended to settle here if they, the Indians, wished it for the purpose of giving them instruction in religion, and learning their children to read.
"15th- . . . Mr. Leslie has gone home and Mr. Willson is left to begin building.
"17th- . . . This day the first tree was cut down for the missionary building. Mr. Willson gave the first blow and I the last. An Indian hired by Mr. Willson to assist at building.
"18th-Mr. Willson was arranging our grindstone for grinding his broad axe.
"2Ist-Sunday; About II o'clock a. m. Mr. Demers, the Roman Catho- lic priest, arrived from the Cowlitz and brought letters from Vancouver.
"25th-Thursday; Eighty-nine men, women and children of the Sawa- yewamish (Snomomish) have come in to see the priest.
"28th, Sunday- , Seven children baptized by Mr. Demeres.
"29th, Monday- . . This afternoon Miss Helen McDonald and Miss Margaret Riedout Orriber were both baptized by Mr. Demers, and after, the latter was married to her old husband, Joseph Pin. At seven o'clock, Miss Helen McDonald was married to William Kittson, (Chief Trader in charge) without much ceremony, the latter being a protestant and the former a Roman Catholic. The rites were performed in a civil manner. Witnesses Mr. William Holder Willson, a brother of the Missionary Society and Joseph Pin.
"May 6th- . . Mr. Willson has lost his Indian. The scamp received pay in advance, and shammed sickness in order to pay a visit to his friends with whom he has gambled a part of his gains."
Unfortunately the volumes of the "Journal of Occurrences" covering the period between May 31, 1839, to January 20, 1846, have disappeared and cannot now be found. Mr. Edward Huggins, who had possession of all the books and papers of the Puget Sound Agricultural Company, up to the time of his death, did not know where these volumes were, but supposed that they might be in the files of the State department in Wash- ington, as part of the record in the arbitration proceeding by which the sum to be paid to the stockholders of the Company, by the national
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The first protestant missionary who came to reside at the fort was Rev. John P. Richmond, M. D., of Illinois, who was accompanied by his wife and four small children- the youngest born just as they were about to leave New York and named Oregon, in honor of his intended home-and by Mr. Willson, and Miss Clark of Connecticut, a teacher. They came down the Columbia from Vancouver in a boat furnished by the Hudson's Bay Company and manned by its employees, and thence up the Cowlitz by the same con- veyance. From the Cowlitz they crossed to the Sound on horseback, arriving some time during the summer of 1840. They took possession of the house which Mr. Willson had erected and nearly completed during his visit the year before, and, soon afterwards, Mr. Willson and Miss Clark were married, Rev. Richmond performing the ceremony. They were the first American couple to be married in Wash- ington. They remained at this new station only one year, and returned to the Willamette in 1841. The Richmond family stayed one year longer, and then left the country, returning to the eastern coast by the Chenamus in 1842. While living at the mission another son, Francis Richmond, was born to them, on February 28, 1842, and he was the first American white child born, in what is now western Washington. Before leaving the country, and while on board the Chenamus, then lying in Bakers Bay and making ready to put to sea, Dr. Richmond performed the marriage
government, under the treaty of June 15, 1846, was fixed. At my request Hon. F. W. Cushman has had that record very carefully examined, and the books were not found. This is to be regretted, as they doubtless contain much interesting and valuable information, not only about the early missionaries, but also in regard to the first American settlers, who arrived on the Sound in July 1845. It is probable that these settlers came direct to Nisqually from Fort Vancouver, but whether they did or not nobody now certainly knows.
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ceremony for a second time in this district, uniting Mr. Rogers, of the American Board of Missions, to Miss Leslie, a daughter of Rev. Leslie of the Methodist mission.
Dr. Richmond's work as a missionary was not attended with encouraging success, and for this reason, and because of family affliction, he gave it up after a little more than two years' trial. Soon after he left the fort the house in which he and his family had lived was burned, having been set on fire, as is supposed, by an Indian who had once attempted to steal one of their children. No further attempt at mis- sionary work was made by the protestants until after the settlers arrived, although Dr. Tolmie seems to have con- tinued his efforts in that direction. Some years after his death his daughter wrote to Mr. Clarence B. Bagley, of Seattle: "I remember driving from Nisqually to Tacoma, many years ago, and stopping at a farmhouse where an old white-haired man was leaning over the gate. When my aunt, Mrs. Edward Huggins, told him who we were he said : 'Your father taught my wife the Lord's prayer.'"
Dr. Richmond returned to Illinois, in 1842, where he was for many years the firm friend of Peter Cartwright, the famous missionary and politician, whom Mr. Lincoln defeated in the Congressional campaign of 1846, and like him was active both in political and religious work. He was elected to the legislature for several terms, and served in the Senate when Mr. Lincoln was a member of the lower house. He was also speaker for one term, when the house numbered among its members Hon. Melville W. Fuller, the present chief justice, General John A. Logan and Hon. W. R. Morrison. While at Fort Nisqually he took part with Commodore Wilkes and his men in the first Fourth of July celebration on the coast.
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The British warship Fisgard spent a large part of the summer of 1846 in the Sound near the fort, while the steamer Cormorant, also an armed vessel, made two visits to the neighborhood, on each of which she remained for a consider- able time. The Modeste still lay in the Columbia, where she had been for two years previously. Presumably these ships were sent to the coast, at that time, in the expectation that there might be some need for them in connection with the settlement of the boundary question, but none arose. The officers and men spent a large part of the summer ashore, and fared sumptuously every day on fresh beef and fresh vegetables procured from the herds and gardens of the Company, and frequently the sailors and marines helped the farmers and gardeners and herders with their work.
The Fisgard arrived on May 16th, having been forty-eight days coming up the coast from San Blas. She cast anchor near Ketron Island, and Captain Duntze and the other officers were furnished summer quarters in the buildings at Old Fort Lake, which were speedily fitted up for their accommodation. On July 1 Ith the Cormorant arrived, towing the brig Rosalind for which a cargo of piles was sought, presumably to be used for improving the harbor of Victoria, the new port on Vancouver Island which Chief Factor Douglas had founded three years earlier. Timber suitable for the purpose was found on Anderson's Island, and the cargo was procured there, although the land and timber then belonged indisputably to the United States, the boundary treaty having been signed a month earlier; but this, of course, the officers did not then know.
In August the Cormorant made a trip down the Sound, with Captain Sangster of one of the Hudson's Bay Com- pany's ships on board as pilot, in search of a vein of coal,
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which somebody was reported to have seen near the coast. She was absent nearly three weeks, but the journal says nothing as to whether or not the coal was found.
All the British holidays and other notable days as they occurred during the time the ships were in the Sound, were celebrated with due form and ceremony. On the morning of May 24th, a royal salute was fired in honor of the Queen's birthday, and another was fired on August 26th, in honor of Prince Albert's. The eighteenth of July, Waterloo day, was duly honored with horse racing, a favorite sport with sailors when on shore. Two or three dancing parties were also held in one of the larger buildings, for which the band of the Fis- gard furnished the music. Of one of these the journal says : "Our women, hitherto so backward, became infected with the dancing spirit, and tripped it on the light fantastic toe, much to the amusement of the Fisgardites." Captain Duntze and his officers also gave a launch party one afternoon, when Dr. Tolmie and a few of his associates were taken for a trip to Steilacoom Bay, and it was agreed, before parting, that the bay should thereafter be known as Fisgardita Cove, in honor of the launch in which they had enjoyed such an agreeable excursion.
During the last days before the ships took their final departure the carpenters, some of the sailors, and a few of the employees at the fort selected a suitable tree, which they cut and hauled to the fort, where they made a fine flag pole of it, and set it up as a memorial of their visit. But their own colors never waved from its top as an emblem of British sovereignty in the country which British diplomacy had so long struggled to retain. Within a month after the pole was raised the news was received that the boundary had been agreed upon, and the whole Puget Sound country was thenceforth and forever to be American.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
THE IRRESISTABLE SETTLER ARRIVES.
T HE LONG cherished hope of the British cabinet, and the Hudson's Bay Company, that they would be able to make the Columbia the northern boundary of American enterprise in the Pacific Northwest, had now to be abandoned. But the Hudson's Bay people at Fort Vancouver and Nisqually did not relax their efforts to hold the country north of it as long as there was a hope that they might do so. For more than a score of years after those who came with Wyeth and Jason Lee had shown their determination to remain permanently in the country, they succeeded in keeping all who followed them from making dangerous explorations beyond the lordly river. This, indeed, was not very difficult to do. The valley of the Willamette was easy of access, and still afforded ample room for all who came. There was an abundance of land there, still unclaimed, and as good as any that had been taken. Some of the advantages of civilization were, withal, to be obtained there, such as access to schools and religious worship, and the companion- ship of neighbors, if desired. The earlier pioneers had found by experience that the climate was agreeable, and the Indians were not troublesome, nor wild beasts either disagreeably numerous or dangerous. If any did not incline to accept the advantages thus offered, and discovered a desire to investigate the country toward the north, they were discouraged by representations as to its inhospitable nature, its inaccessibility, the hostility of its Indian inhab- itants and the ferocity of its wild beasts, and if these repre- sentations proved ineffectual, they were discouraged by other means.
These methods were entirely successful down to the autumn of the year 1844. Previous to that time no
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persistent Yankee settler had disturbed the quiet of any of the Company's posts. Its great farms at Vancouver and on the Cowlitz were extending and enlarging year by year; its herds at Nisqually were thriving, while its posts at Walla Walla, Colvile and Okanogon, and even at Boise and Fort Hall, attended to their regular business of buying furs and paying for them with blankets, shirts, guns, ammunition and gewgaws, "at an advance of fifty per cent. on prime cost in London," undisturbed by any anxiety as to the future. A few, a very few pious and devoted missionaries pursued their self-sacrificing labors, but otherwise all of what is now, scarcely more than sixty years later, a thriving State, was a wilderness almost as wild as when Lewis and Clark saw it forty years earlier. The whole eastern part of it was inhabited only by Indians and a few missionaries, some of whom were soon to be butchered. In its western part, there were only six white residents who were not then connected with the Hudson's Bay Company or the Puget Sound Agricultural Company, and these had all been con- nected with it. They were James Birnie, who had for several years been in charge at Fort George, and who, with his relative George B. Roberts, afterwards long and favorably known in the territory, were now making homes for themselves on the north bank of the Columbia near Cathlamet; Captain James Scarborough, who had for years commanded one or the other of the Company's ships, who had taken a claim known as Scarborough Hill, nearly opposite Astoria, Simon Plomondon, Marcel Bernier and Antonie Gobar, who had become settlers near the Cowlitz farms. These six and their families, the officers and agents of the Hudson's Bay Company, and the savages were the only human occupants of western Washington.
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Its rich valleys were uncultivated, its mines unopened, its vast wealth of timber undisturbed. The Indian paddled his graceful canoe on the waters of the Sound, or poled his way laboriously up the rivers, as his ancestors had done for centuries. If a trail was made anywhere, it was along the bank of a stream, where some solitary trapper plied his lonely vocation, or through the woods where it was necessary for him and his Indian neighbors to make their way, with much labor, from one stream to another, on their trips to the trading posts. Nature everywhere lavished her bounty with a prodigal hand, but there was no one to profit by it. The symmetrical and imposing peaks of the Cascades looked down on one side on vast stretches of fertile valleys and undulating hills, that waited only for water and the plow to change them into teeming farms and bending orchards, and on the other upon great forests which had not yet heard the ring of the settler's ax, or upon a vast inland sea that would soon harbor the mer- chant navies of the world, but which had rarely felt the pressure of a keel heavier than of the Indian canoe.
But a great change was about to take place. With the close of the year 1844 things began to be different with the Hudson's Bay Company. The immigrants of that year numbered four hundred and seventy-five, according to Dr. McLoughlin's estimate, and Bancroft and some others think there may have been fully eight hundred of them, and among them were a few of those indomitable spirits to whom opposition is rather an incentive to further effort than a disheartening or depressing influence. One of these was Colonel Michael T. Simmons. He was of Irish ances- try, though born in Kentucky, married, and was then about thirty years of age. He had come with the immigrant train
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that Gilliam commanded, and had been its second in command, with the title of Colonel. With the same com- pany had come William Shaw, a veteran of the war of 1812, and George Bush, a colored man, though born free in the State of Pennsylvania. It was said that he had been with Jackson at New Orleans, though in what capacity is not mentioned. He had lived for some years in Missouri, where he had traded in cattle, was fairly well to do, and had assisted Simmons, either in procuring his outfit, or in some way during their journey, and, though strangely assorted, the two had become firm friends. Their original intention had been to seek homes in the Rogue River Valley, supposing from its latitude, probably, that its climate would be more agreeable to them than that four or five degrees further north. Bush left Missouri because he had found that free people of his color were not altogether welcome there. The Constitu- tion of that State, when it applied for admission to the Union, twenty-three years before, had made it the duty of its General Assembly to forbid free negroes or mulattoes ever to enter it on any pretence whatever, and, although this provision had met with severe criticism and aroused violent opposi- tion in Congress, the State had been finally admitted, in the closing days of the session, with this "fundamental condition," that "nothing in her constitution should ever be construed to allow the passage of any laws, and that no laws should ever be passed, by which any citizen of any state, should be deprived of any of the privileges and immunities, to which he was entitled under the Constitution of the United States." It was to escape from a public sentiment that made such enactments possible, that Bush had left Missouri, but on his arrival in Oregon he found that while its laws prohibited slavery, in the language of the ordinance of 1787, they also
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prohibited people of his color from residing in the territory, in practically the same language as that of the Constitution of Missouri. This must have been a bitter disappointment, both to him and his friends, and it did more than anything else to fix their determination to locate north of the Columbia. That region was still a part of Oregon, it is true, but in the settlement of the boundary question, about to be made, it might become British territory.
But it was too late in the season to attempt to go further with their families, in a country where there were as yet no roads, and no trails over which it was practicable to take their goods or their animals, and they accordingly stopped at, or near, Washougal, on the north bank of the river, not far from Fort Vancouver, where they made themselves as comfortable as might be for the winter.
In December Simmons, accompanied by three brothers, John, Henry, and James Owens, and two other men, named Loomis and Williamson, made a trip down the Columbia, to the mouth of the Cowlitz, and thence up that river for a distance of thirty or forty miles, to a point near where it turns southward, after flowing west and southwest from its source. This trip was made with almost incredible labor. They were required to pole their boat most of the way, against a rapid current, made more rapid by the rains of winter, and through a channel frequently blocked by logs and driftwood, over or around which they were compelled to carry their boat and all their outfit. They were finally forced to turn back because their provisions were running short. It is reported that notwithstanding this disappoint- ment, Simmons regarded it as a fortuitous circumstance for, before leaving Missouri, he had dreamed that he would find such a river as this, turning from a westward course to
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the southwest, and that he would be compelled to abandon his first enterprise at that point. The party returned to its point of starting, and none of its number, except Simmons, made any further attempt to settle in the Sound country.
In February 1845, Henry Williamson and Isaac W. Alderman built a cabin within the limits of the Hudson's Bay Company's improvements, at Vancouver, staked a claim and posted notices that they had taken up a section of land there. This created no small commotion at the fort, and Dr. McLoughlin caused the cabin to be removed, which led to an altercation in which loud words were exchanged and threats made on both sides. Alderman then abandoned the undertaking and left the neighborhood. He was a turbulent character, who, two or three years later, "died with his boots on," in a quarrel near Sutter's Fort in Cali- fornia. But Williamson, who is represented to have been a very quiet and peaceably disposed young man, undertook to have the claim surveyed and duly marked. Dr. Mc- Loughlin and James Douglas, who was then about to succeed him in the management of the Company's business, addressed a letter to the Executive Committee of the provisional govern- ment, in which they set forth what Williamson had done, and expressed the hope that the committee would feel justified in taking measures to have him removed from the Company's premises, "in order that the unanimity now happily subsisting between the American citizens and British subjects residing in this country, may not be dis- turbed or interrupted." With this letter they enclosed a copy of an address to the people of Oregon in which they set forth how the Company had been established in the coun- try, under the provisions of the treaty of joint occupation;
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