Page:California Historical Society Quarterly vol 22.djvu/109

 sized in the Columbia River as he neared Fort Vancouver. His records were lost.

The next brigade of the Hudson's Bay Company to reach California was that of John Work which left Fort Vancouver on August 17, 1832, and returned to that post on October 31, 1833. Work's journal of the expedition will be published in subsequent issues of this.

John Work was sober, industrious, reliable, faithful to his employers, loyal to his friends and devoted to his Indian wife and their family of eleven children. These are not spectacular traits with which to enliven a biographical sketch, nevertheless they must be assumed to form a background for the dramatic incidents of exploration, fur-hunting, and Indian fighting in which he participated, and for his life at distant Fort Simpson. These same traits graced the serenity of his declining years in the picturesque settlement which grew up at Fort Victoria on Vancouver Island.

John Work brought to the Pacific Northwest standards of conduct from which he did not deviate. He chose as a mate a half-breed Indian girl, whose father was a wandering French Canadian trapper, and treated her with much consideration and affection. This consort accompanied John Work on his long and dangerous journeys, and his life was so closely linked with hers that his story without hers would be incomplete. Just as the background of his character must be assumed to color his every action, so must the presence of the wife be taken for granted in the thick of every episode, even those punctuated by the flight of arrows and the flash of firing muskets.

John Work was born in 1792 near Londonderry, Ireland, where the family had resided for three hundred years. His correct name was WARK, not WORK. Upon his enlistment in the ranks of employees of the Hudson's Bay Company his name was entered on their books as "JOHN WORK," and this spelling he adopted henceforth. His Irish friends and relatives were very indignant that the time-honored name of WARK had been anglicized. A tradition that the change was due to an error in the Office of Land and Works is discounted by family members. John Work's associates adapted themselves readily to the new spelling, as is attested by their letters, but the pronunciation was another matter, and descendants still refer to their progenitor as "Wark."

In letters now on file in the Archives of British Columia John Work makes occasional reference to a much younger brother who also had emigrated to Canada. This brother has been identified as the late Senator David Wark who celebrated his one hundredth birthday in 1905. A nephew, John Wark or Work, joined his uncle in Victoria in 1 850 and remained as his amanuensis until 1861.

At the time of the coalition of the North West Company and the Hudson's Bay Company in 1821, John Work was at Red River. On July 18, 1823, he started for the Columbia District. In the party was Peter Skene Ogden, already a veteran of the Pacific Northwest fur trade. Ogden was returning from London where he had gone to reinstate himself with the Hudson's Bay Company after service with the Nor'westers. There is no evidence that any