Page:Centennial History of Oregon 1811-1912, Volume 1.djvu/424

 his vie-

tuals were sent him every meal until he left in 1836." But the facts were that Kelley while remaining at Vancouver was housed in a hut outside the fort, and treated as a mendicant or worse, and debarred the recognition on an honest man, or a gentleman, in the country he had done so much to advertise to the world.

Kelley was undoubtedly greatly embittered against the Americans he found in Oregon, and, as he said, induced to come here by his representations of the country. He did not hesitate to charge the trader Wyeth with having gone over to the support of the Hudson's Bay Company. Wyeth personallj^ knew that Kelley was an educated man in good standing in Boston, and not to be thought of an instant as as a horse thief; and the neglect of Wyeth to assist a fellow countryman in such straits shows him to have been a coward and an ingrate. And neither did the Methodist missionaries come to the rescue of the man who had so largely contributed to their undertaking their noble work in Oregon. But as McLoughlin had posted the letter of the Mexican governor up in the Willamette valley, and was all-powerful against everybody at that early day, the missionaries evidently concluded that "prudence was the better part of valor," and left their fellow Christian patriot to sink or swim as best he could.

But after all his pains and heart-aches, he staggered once more to his feet, and in a most wretched, ragged and dilapidated condition he commenced to look around on the land he had so extensively advertised as the best in the world. He had brought some surveying instruments -v^dth him, and on the peninsula between the Willamette and the Columbia rivers, where we have in our day seen but little but burnt out dead trees and stumps, and impassa- ble scrub underbrush, Kelley walked under the magnificent groves of tall firs, and made a survey of the site for the great city he had proposed and which is noticed on the plat thereof on another page. This plat of Kelley 's city was sur- veyed and located in about 1835 about where Francis I. McKenna's University Park addition to Portland is now located, and was the first surveyed location of a town north of California west of the Rocky mountains. After surveying out his town site Kelley proceeded to make a survey of the Columbia river from Vancouver down to Astoria, and when he returned to the Eastern states turned his survey over to the United States Navy department. The Englishman, Lieutenant Broughton, had made a survey of the river prior to Kelley 's sur- vey, but the Americans got no benefit of that as it was given only to the Hudson's Bay Company, and British war ships. That town site and river survey, con- nects for aU time the name of Hall J. Kelley with the history of Oregon.

After completing this work, Kelley left the country in March, 1836, on trans- portation via the Sandwich Islands, furnished by Dr. McLoughlin, and which was acknowledged by Kelley in his narrative of his journey to Oregon, saying McLoughlin kindly furnished him comforts to start home with, and some raonej', which he felt verj' grateful for. On his return to Boston by a whale ship from the islands, Kelley published the first satisfactory report of the Willam- ette and Columbia river valleys ever made, giving far more information about the climate, soil, timber and other natural resources of wealth upon which to found a prosperous state than was given by Lewis and Clark. And notwith- standing his failure to enlist public support of his colonization schemes, or to get aid from Congress, or even decent treatment in the wilds of Oregon