and the Bradfords had also established a place of trade.96

These were the people, together with some who have yet to be mentioned, and others who may never be mentioned, who had spread themselves over the western portion of Washington previous to its organization as a territory, concerning which I shall speak presently."

96 Or. Spectator, Aug. 28, 1850; Coke's Ride, 319.

97 I have gathered the following names of the pioneers of 1852 not mentioned in the foregoing pages: Rev. Daniel Bagley, Rev. D. R. McMillan, R. M. Hathaway, Smith Hays, Logan Hays, Gilmore Hays, Stephen Hodgdon, Samuel Holmes, John Harvey, Richard B. Holbrook (married Ms Sylvester, née Lowe, of Maine), John Hogue, Levi L. Gates, Charles Graham, William H. Gillan and family, Daniel B. Fales, wife and chidren, Felt, Cortland Etheridge, W. B. Engle, Shirley Ensign, Joel Clayton, Joseph Cushman, Levi Douthitt, Frank P. Dugan, Gideon Bromfield, George A. Barnes and wife, Anna, Thomas Briggs, J. C. Brown, John Buckley, James Allen, G. W. L. Ailen, W. B. D. Newman, William Jarmin, Daniel Kaiser, A. W. Moore, John W. McAllister, Caleb Miller, Thomas Monroe, Stephen P. McDonald, Joseph Mace, William Metcalfe, Samuel McCaw, F. McNatt, Abner Martin, Asa W. Pierce, F. K. Perkins, James Riley, B. Ross and family, Daniel Stewart, Samuel D. Smith, David Shelton and wife, Christina, M. C. Simmons, James Taylor, Thomas Tallentire and family, Amos F. Tullis, J. K. Thorndyke, William Turnbull, J. S. Turner, John Vail, Charles Vail, D. K. Welden, H. R. Woodward, G. K. Willard, Benjamin Welcher, Lewis Welcher, William C. Webster and family, Samuel Woodward, John Walker, James R. Watson, B. F. Yantis, Judah Church, from Pontiac, Michigan, died in 1853, aged 60 years. William Rutledge, who settled on Black River, near Lake Washington, was also an immigrant of 1852. He died June 1, 1872, aged 78 years.

CHAPTER II.

POLITICS AND DEVELOPMENT.

1845-1853.

PUBLIC MEETINGS-SETTLERS VERSUS THE PUGET SOUND ACRICULTURAL COMPANY-REPRESENTATION IN THE OREGON LEGISLATURE-MOVEMENTS TOWARD THE FOUNDATION OF THE NEW TERRITORY OF COLUMBIAMEMORIAL TO CONGRESS-IF NOT A TERRITORY, THEN A STATE-QUEEN CHARLOTTE ISLAND EXPEDITION-THE OREGON LEGISLATURE PETITION CONGRESS FOR A DIVISION OF TERRITORY-CONGRESS GRANTS THE PETITON-BUT INSTEAD OF COLUMBIA, THE NEW TERRITORY IS CALLED WASHINGTON-OFFICERS APPOINTED-ROADS CONSTRUCTED-IMMIGRATION.

In the previous chapter I have made the reader acquainted with the earliest American residents of the territory north of the Columbia, and the methods by which they secured themselves homes and laid the foundations of fortunes by courage, hardihood, foresight, by making shingles, bricks, and cradling-machines, by building mills, loading vessels with timber, laying out towns, establishing fisheries, exploring for coal, and mining for gold. But these were private enterprises concerning only individuals, or small groups of men at most, and I come now to consider them as a body politic, with relations to the government of Oregon and to the general government.

The first public meeting recorded concerned claimjumping, against which it was a protest, and was held in Lewis county, which then comprised all of the territory north of the Columbia and west of the Cascade Mountains not contained in Clarke county, and probably at the house of John R. Jackson, June 11, 1847. The second was held at Tumwater November 5, 1848,

and was called to express the sentiments of the American settlers concerning the threatened encroachments of the Puget Sound Agricultural Association. "This fall," says an old settler, "the company conceived the design of making claim under the treaty for the immense tract called the Nisqually claim, lying south of the Nisqually River, and with that view drove a large herd of cattle across the river." The American residents, in a convention called to order by M. T. Simmons and presided over by William Packwood, passed a series of resolutions, a copy of which was presented to W. F. Tolmie, the agent in charge of Fort Nisqually, by I. N. Ebey who had just arrived in the country, and Rabbeson, with the declaration that the Americans demanded the withdrawal of the Hudson's Bay Company's herds to the north side of the Nisqually within one week from the day the notice was received.

The preamble set forth that the herds of the company would soon consume all the vegetation of the country ranged by them, to the detriment of the settlers on the south or west side of the river; and that, as these cattle were wild, if suffered to mix with domesticated cattle they would greatly demoralize them. It was thereupon resolved that the Hudson's Bay Company had placed obstacles in the way of the Americans who first designed settling on Puget Sound-referring to the Simmons colony-using misrepresentation and fraud to prevent them, and even threatening force; that they held the conduct of Tolmie censurable in endeavoring to prevent settlement by Americans on certain lands which he pretended were reserved by the terms of the treaty of 1846, although he knew they were not; that this assumption of right was only equalled by the baseness of the subterfuge by which the company was attempting to hold other large tracts by an apparent compliance with the organic land law of the territory-that is, by taking claims in the names of servants of the company who

A PROTEST OF AMERICANS.

41

did not even know where to find the lands located in their names, but who were compelled to agree to convey these lands to the company when their title should have been completed.

They declared that they as American citizens had a regard for treaty stipulations and national honor, and were jealous of any infringement of the laws of the country by persons who had no interest in the glory or prosperity of the government, but were foreign-born and owed allegiance alone to Great Britain. They warned the company that it had never been the policy of the United States to grant pre-emption rights to other than American citizens, or those who had declared their intention to become such in a legal form, and that such would without doubt be the conditions of land grants in the expected donation law.

They declared they viewed the claims and improvements made subsequent to the treaty by the Puget Sound Agricultural Company as giving them no rights; and as to their previous rights, they were only possessory, and the United States had never parted with the actual title to the lands occupied, but that any American citizen might appropriate the land to himself, with the improvements, and that the claims held by the servants of the company would not be respected unless the nominal settlers became settlers in fact and American citizens.1

Within the week allowed the company to withdraw their cattle from the Nisqually plains they had withdrawn them, and there was no trouble from that source. The threat implied in the resolutions, to sustain any American citizen in appropriating the lands claimed by the company and not by individuals who had renounced allegiance to Great Britain, together with the improvements, was carried out to the letter during the

1 Or. Spectator, Jan. 11, 1849. I. N. Ebey is said by Rabbeson to have draughted the resolutions, though Rabbeson was chairman of the committee, and S. B. Crockett the third member. He knew of the long feud between certain of his countrymen and the Hudson's Bay Company, and without knowing the merits of the case on either side, was prepared in any event to be strongly American.

following twelve years, their lands being covered with squatters, and the products of the Cowlitz farm taken away without leave or compensation, not by the men who composed this meeting, but by others who adopted these views of the company's rights.

The land laid claim to by the agricultural company, in their memorial to the joint commission provided for by the convention between the United States and Great Britain March 5, 1864, was "the tract of

2 George B. Roberts, in his Recollections, MS., 89, 91, 94, speaks very feelingly of what he was compelled to suffer from 1846 to 1871, by reason of his membership and agency of the company at the Cowlitz farm. The fortunes of the company were upon the fast ebb,' he says, and rather than go north, or elsewhere, I thought 1 had better settle as a farmer on the Newaukum. I made out very poorly as a settler, and when Stevens' war broke out, I left my family and went for a short time as mail-guard, but was soon employed as a clerk to Gen. Miller, quartermaster-general of volunteers...In the Fraser River excitement of 1858, I went to Victoria and arranged with Tolmie, then agent of the P. S. A. A., to carry on the Cowlitz farm on a small scale for my own benefit; but I was to keep the buildings in repair and the farm at its then size until some action was had with the government. I took possession unopposed, and all went well until my hay was put up in cocks, when here came a lot of fellows, armed with rilles, and carried it all off. One of these squatters was the justice; so my lawyer, Elwood Evans, recommended chang. ing the venue. The jury decided that they knew nothing of treatics, and of course I had all the expense to bear. The company said the crops were mine, and they would have nothing to do with it. Then followed the burning of a large barn, etc., poor Kendall's letter and murder, then injunction and dissolution, the loss of papers by the judge when the time of trial came, so as not to pronounce, and so this matter went from 1859 to 1871...The judge was a federal appointee, and in theory independent, but liable to be unscated at any time and returned to the people whom he had offended...I could not with any grace relinquish the property entrusted to my care, to say nothing of the squatters rendering me too poor to leave. Whether the company from any sinister motives helped these troubles I know not. I leave to your imagination the state I was kept in, and my family; sometimes my windows at night were riddled with shot, my fences set open, and in dry weather set on fire. It was an immense effort to unseat me, and cheat the government of these lands, and all the clamor against the P. S. A. A. was for nothing else... The P. S. A. A. one year paid Pierce county $7,000 in taxes, but it is likely the company was astute enough to do so with the view of the record showing the value of their property at that time. In 1870 or 1871 Salucius Garfielde succeeded in getting donation claims for the "hardy pioneers." Well, I always thought a pioneer was a person who hewed out a farm, not one who violently took possession of a beautiful property that had been carefully, not to say scientifically, farmed for over thirty years.' This shows to what acts the sentiment adopted by the early settlers toward the Puget Sound Company influenced rude and unscrupulous or ignorant and prejudiced men; and also the injustice inflicted upon individuals by the carrying-out of their views. For the previons biography of G. B. Roberts, see list. Or., i. 38-9, this series. He finally settled at Cathlamet, where he kept a store, and held the offices of probate judge, treasurer, and deputy auditor of Wahkiakum county. He died in the spring of 1883, and his wife, Rose Birnic, a year or two earlier. See note on p. 111 of vol ii., Hist. Or.