Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/161

 "A short thick-set man, with a Nez Percé wife; a good honest farmer; has done credit to himself and family in giving them every possible advantage for education and society,... ; his family are respected; his Indian wife he considers as good as some of his neighbors', that don't like her or her children. In this opinion all who are not saturated with our cultus mixture agree with him...."

Mr. T. C. Elliott gives a copy of a marriage agreement in 1840 between fifteen-year-old half-breed Sarah Julia Ogden and a thirty-year-old Scotch husband, Archibald McKinlay, sufficiently affidavitted, one would say, for any marriage, though no representative of the church was present. On the basis, however, of individual cases known not to have been certificated in any way, Mr. Elliott perhaps generalizes a little too widely in believing that such notaried agreements were common among Hudson's Bay Company officers and employes, at least before 1840.

Peter Skene Ogden himself was never ritualistically married to Sarah Julia's mother, a Spokane woman, his second wife. On his death bed in Oregon City he still refused, even when urged by Dr. John McLoughlin whose own knot had been formally tied several years after the event by James Douglas as a justice of the peace and not ecclesiastically by the uppish Reverend Herbert Beaver. Ogden is reported to have declared that he would "be damned if he would," and while he lay dying said in effect that the kind of life he had lived with his wife was enough and would have to stand. And so obdurately —with final words of faith and love that ought indeed to have been as valid to the public and as precious to a wife as any certificate—he was borne to the Mountain View Cemetery in Ore-