Page:Centennial History of Oregon 1811-1912, Volume 1.djvu/527

Rh three scientific men in record all their experiences and discoveries on their journey through the wilderness. On reaching Oregon, Lovejoy fell in with the missionary, Dr. Marcus Whitman. And no sooner had Lovejoy reached the Walla Walla valley than Whitman besought him to return to the states with him (Whitman) as a companion. Not one man in ten thousand, for love or money, would have undertaken that trip in the approaching winter, after just finishing a like trip from Missouri to Oregon. But he yielded to Whitman's entreaties, starting to the states in the month of November, and reaching Missouri in February, by the southern route through Santa Fe, Mexico, and suffering every imaginable trial, privation, danger and distress while living on dog meat, hedgehogs, or anything else of animal life that would sustain their own lives. In May following his return to Missouri, Mr. Lovejoy joined the emigrant train of 1843, and again returned to Oregon, arriving at Fort Vancouver in October. He had thus made three trips across the western two-thirds of the continent, over six thousand miles in travel, on horseback altogether, suffering all the trials and dangers of the plains, being once taken prisoner by the Sioux Indians, and breaking all records in Overland Oregon trail travel, in the space of seventeen months. And such was the courageous and determined character that founded Portland, Oregon.

In organizing and maintaining the Provisional Government, Mr. Lovejoy took a leading, useful and honorable part. He occupied first and last nearly every office in the government, and was elected supreme judge by the people, and was exercising the duties of that office when the United States finally extended its authority over the territory in 1849.

Francis W. Pettygrove who joined Mr. Lovejoy in developing the Portland townsite, was born in Calais, Maine, in 1812; received a common school education in his native town, and engaged in business on his own account at an early age. At the age of thirty years he accepted an offer to bring to Oregon, for an eastern mercantile house, a stock of general merchandise, suitable for this new country. Shipping the merchandise, and accompanying the venture with his family on the bark Victoria, he reached the Columbia river by the way of the Sandwich Islands, transferring his merchandise at Honolulu from the Victoria to the bark Fama. This vessel discharged cargo at Vancouver, and Pettygrove had to employ a little schooner owned by the Hudson's Bay Company to carry the goods from Vancouver to Oregon City. After selling out this stock of merchandise, Pettygrove engaged in the fur trade, erected a warehouse at Oregon City and was the first American to go into the grain trade, buying up the wheat from the French Prairie farmers.

But to return to the townsite, we find that after buying out Overton, Lovejoy and Pettygrove employed a man to build a log house on their claim and clear a patch of land. The house was built; a picture of which may be found on another page, near the foot of the present Washington street. The next year, 1845, the land was surveyed out, and a portion of it laid off into lots, blocks and streets. That portion of the land between Front street and the river was not platted into lots and blocks, it being supposed at the time that it would be needed for public landings, docks, and wharves, like the custom in many of the towns and cities on rivers in the eastern states. But if such was the idea and intention of the land claimants, they failed to make such intentions