Page:Centennial History of Oregon 1811-1912, Volume 1.djvu/190



as chief factor and governor of this Old Oregon country for and on behalf of the Hudson's Bay Company. Under this royal grant the Hudson's Bay Comjjany as- sumed the control and monopoly of the fur trade in Oregon, and held it until ousted by the treaty of 1846 which settled the boundary line. There were a few independent trappers like Jedediah Smith, but they amounted to nothing, and had to sell their furs to the Hiidson's Bay Company.

This history of the fur trade, commencing in Canada and working across the continent to the Pacific ocean, is thus given in detail of dates and acts of the British government to show how securely and carefully the subjects and officials of the king of P]nglaud had proceeded to get and hold possession of this country under the forms of law. Secretly, stealthily, cautiously, they proceeded year by year, post by post, fort by fort, to occupy, surround, fortifiy, claim, nail up and batter down every avenue of possible access to the country, so that no Ameri- can citizen dare enter therein save at the risk of starvation or a violent death. The only mistake they made was in the selection of a broad-minded, humane man (John McLoughlin) to enforce their royal decrees. And when the tremendous odds against them is considered, the heroic examples of Jason Lee. Marcus Wliit- man, Robert Newell, Joe Meek, W. H. Gray, Medorem Crawford, Le Breton and the fifty-two immortals at Champoeg, in bearding the British lion in his Oregon den, and successfully organizing an American government in the face of this gigantic power, their acts and success seems to be more like the supernatural and miraculous than sober history.

It remains, and deserves to be considered, what, if any, services the fur com- panies have rendered to civilization and progress. The first and most patent influence observable in the great Northwest which is traceable to the fur traders, was their influence on the native races. There was some, but not a characteristic greater difference between the Indians of the great valley of the St. Lawrence reaching as it does far north of Lake Superior, and the Indians of the British and Spanish colonial settlements of the present United States. Fur trading com- menced in one section about as early as in the other. Furs were in fact about the first thing that the hard-pressed Colonists in America could sell for money. But mark the difference which history must record in the management of the Indian in these two great rival regions of North America. The French in the valley of, the St. Lawrence recognized the Indian as a man, not exactly their equal, but worthy of and deserving humane consideration. And, although the French woman would not marry an Indian, the French man would not hesitate to take the Indian woman for a wife when a woman of his own race was not available. And this practice of miscegenation of the French and Indian blood, commencing at the first white settlement on the St. Lawrence, was carried far north over upper Canada, west over the great valleys of Red river and the Saskatche\vau, over the Rocky mountains and into Oregon. And whether this proclivity of the bourgeois Frenchman to intermarry with the native Indian can be ascribed to the teachings of the early Catholic priests, to the necessities of the situation in a new and unpopulated countrj', or to the selfish interests of his employer matter but little in this review, the great fact stands out clear and incontrovertable that it was the French voyageur and trapper — the hiisband of and with his squaw — that traversed the wilderness in safety, that made and kept the peace between the native savage and the fur-hunting trader, and who explored the vast areas