Page:Centennial History of Oregon 1811-1912, Volume 1.djvu/540

 cruiser Guerriere, off the Gulf of St. Lawrence, on the 19th day of August, 1812, a trial of mettle and nerve was the result. The British captain had been anxious to encounter a "Yankee man-of-war," having no doubt of an easy victory, and the "Yankee" Captain Hull of the Constitution was ready to accommodate him. It was none of the modern steel-clad battle ships firing at each other from a range of eight or ten miles, but they were wooden ships and they sailed right into each other, firing their little cannon as rapidly as they could be loaded, until with grappling irons one ship laid hold of the other and her brave men leaped over all obstructions to end the fight at arm's length in a life and death struggle on the decks of the boarded ship. This was the real battle in which "William Johnson, who had his little log cabin on the present site of Portland seventy years ago, immortalized himself in. He was defending his adopted country against the injustice of the land that gave him birth, and he shed his blood that the Stars and Stripes should not be hauled doAvn in defeat. He was the first settler on the site of Portland, Oregon. He was a member of the first committee appointed to organize the provisional government, and he was one of the fifty -two who stood up at Champoeg sixty-nine years ago to be counted from the Stars and Stripes. And it is .justly due to his memory that his name and his great services be here duly recorded, that they may be honored for all time.

The original proprietors and their land claims will be better understood by reference to the drawing here given. William Johnson, the first settler within the present limits of old Portland, had taken the land south of the Overton tract, claimed by Lovejoy and Pettygrove, for the reason that the river valley south of the line of Caruthers street was open grass land, and furnished pasturage for cattle and horses. Etienne Lucier, one of the two Canadian French Catholics that stood up to be counted for American institutions at Champoeg, was the first settler within the boundaries of East Portland, and the first man to open a farm in Oregon, which he did on East Portland townsite in that year, 1829; but he made no claim on the land, and before Portland was claimed for a townsite, he removed to the open prairie lands called "French Prairie" (because so many Frenchmen settled there) in Marion county, and made his home there as a result of the offer of seed wheat to them by Dr. John McLoughlin, the head of the Hudson's Bay Company at Fort Vancouver. The wheat thus raised was sold to Dr. McLoughlin at Champoeg, and he, in turn, sold it to the Russian authorities at Sitka, and thus paid for trapping privileges in Alaska.

Lovejoy and Pettygrove were the next settlers filing claims on the Overton tract. And before any others came in they laid out sixteen blocks into lots, blocks and streets, making the block at the southwest corner of Front and Washington streets "block No. 1." James Terwilliger claimed the land south of the. Johnson tract. Daniel Lunt claimed the land south of the Terwilliger tract. Daniel H. Lownsdale claimed the land west of Lovejoy and Pettygrove, and Captain Couch claimed the land north of Lovejoy and Pettygrove. Then Johnson sold out to Finice Caruthers; Lunt sold to Thomas Stephens; Lownsdale sold to Amos N. King; Lovejoy sold out his interests to Benjamin Stark, and Pettygrove sold out to Lownsdale in 1848 for $5,000 worth of leather, and Lownsdale agreed to a segregation of the lands so that Stark got the sole title to the triangular tract bounded by the river on the east. Stark street on the south and the Couch claim (line of Ankeng street) on the north.

Daniel H. Lownsdale was the first man to get into the townsite who fully