Page:A History of the Pacific Northwest.djvu/112

Rh checking him. Assuming that the accounts presented by McLoughlin were correct, the net annual profit amounted in those years to a sum ranging from $80,000 to $1 15,000. In 1828 a visitor to Vancouver, the American trader Jedediah Smith, reported that McLoughlin had received during the year thirty thousand beaver skins worth $250,000, besides a large quantity of other furs.

Agriculture. Aside from the fur trade, which was the principal business, Vancouver was also the centre of other activities. By 1828 a fine farm had been opened on the prairie about the fort, and fields of wheat, oats, corn, peas, and barley flourished in the rich soil of this favoured locality. As the years passed, more and more land was brought under cultivation, until the farm aggregated several thousand acres, "fenced into beautiful corn fields, vegetable fields, orchards, gardens, and pasture fields, . . . interspersed with dairy houses, shepherds' and herdsmen's cottages."

Livestock at Fort Vancouver. In 18 14 the Northwest Company's ship Isaac Todd brought to the Columbia from California four head of Spanish cattle. The Astor people had brought a few hogs from Hawaii and they also had several goats. These were the beginnings of the livestock interests of the Pacific Northwest. The increase up to the time Dr. McLoughlin took control was by no means extraordinary, the cattle numbering, according to McLoughlin, only twenty-seven head in