Page:Centennial History of Oregon 1811-1912, Volume 1.djvu/102



gaged in fur trading to the Rocky mountains under the name of the Missouri Pur Compan^y. Henry took charge of the trapping expedition of his company to the Rocky mountains in 1808, and confined liis operations to the upper Mis- souri and Yellowstone rivers; but being attacked and harassed by the Black- feet Indians, he passed over the Rocky mountains in the spring of 1809, and built a cabin on the far-east branch of Snake river, which ever since has been known as Fort Henry on Henry's river. This cabin was the first structure in the shape of a hou.se erected by white men in the great Columbia river valley. Henry did not cross the mountains for the sole reason of getting away from the Blackfeet. His original orders were to continue his explorations westward, and see what he could do in the fur trade west of the Rocky mountains. Not suc- ceeding in doing any business, Fort Henry was abandoned in 1810, and when the Wilson Price Hunt party came along in 1811 and sought to rest and recruit at the Henry cabin they found it abandoned and of no aid to them.

The next we hear of Henry is as Alexander Henry in company with Alex- ander Stuart (whom we left last with Simon Eraser at the Rocky Mountain House in 1807) now coming down the Columbia river to Astoria with two big canoes and sixteen voyageurs in the employ of the Northwest Company, on the 15th of November, 1813. Henry had left the service of the Americans some time between 1810 and gone over to the British. By the time Henry and Stuart reached Astoria the Northwest Company had concentrated a force of seventy- five men at that point in addition to the sixteen in the Henry and Stuart flotilla. The Northwest Company were then hotly and corruptly pressing their scheme of buying out for a song all the property of Astor, while Hunt was absent, and would very probably not have hesitated to have boldly robbed Astor if his Cana- dian partners had not betrayed and sold him out.

The next we hear of Henry is at a post up on the Willamette river — Fran- chere thought in his book somewhere near the present site of Corvallis — and to this post the remnant of the Astor party went to spend the winter of 1814, probably because Henry was an American. At all events; they lived on the fat of the land, fish, deer and elk being too numerous to mention, and captured without trouble. And so ends the Henry expedition to Old Oregon.

EXPEDITION OF JONATHAN W'lNSHIP — 1809

The next year after Lisa's Henry venture, Captain Jonathan Winship. of Brighton, Massachusetts, organized a trading expedition to the Columbia river by the way of Cape Horn, and two ships were secured, one of which, the 'Cain, was commanded by himself and the other, the Albatross, was commanded by his brother, Nathan Winship. They sailed from Boston July 6, 1809, and the Albatross reached the mouth of the Columbia river May 25, 1810, being over ten months on the way. The ship was provided with a com- plete outfit, and to her original ■ company of twenty-five white men were added twenty-five Kanakas, picked up at the islands, and being the first of those islanders imported into the United States. For want of charts, which did not exist on the Columbia one hundred years ago, and from ignorance of the chan- nel, and the stiff current of the spring floods, the passage up the Columbia was beset with much trouble and delay. But after ten days' cruising around on the