Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/169

 after many soul struggles, he faced his duty nobly, and calling in the minister took upon himself the marriage vows that bound him as well as the woman.

Dr. McLoughlin was married after the English fashion in 1836, eleven years after he and his wife had come to Fort Vancouver. Sir James Douglas was married at the same time, while another prominent Hudson Bay man and his wife were joined together in the white man's fashion by the same minister that married their daughter to her husband and at the same time.

Romance treats it lightly, but whole tragedies of self- renunciation were bound up in many of these marriages...

George Winslow, designated in the various histories as "a colored man," came up from California with Ewing Young and his party in 1834.

None of the others appear to have been conspicuous in any direction, except George Winslow, the negro, who took an Indian wife and settled with her in a cabin on Clackamas Prairie, six miles below Oregon City, and raised a family of black red-skins. George assumed to be a doctor, and complained to subsequent emigrants to Oregon that the advent of Doctor Barclay of the Hudson's Bay Company had "bust out" his business. He also sometimes repudiated his antecedents, and related how he came to Oregon in 1811 as cook to John Jacob Astor! Truth was never a conspicuous ingredient of his character, and in his large stories he sometimes seemed almost to forget his name; as ten years after his arrival in Oregon I find a negro calling himself Winslow Anderson living near Oregon City.

In Ewing Young and His Estate appears this memorandum for October 24, 1840: "Winslow commenced for a years work." Winslow's name occurs many times in these records for 1840 and 1841, in the first series of entries as Anderson Winslow or Winslow and