Page:History of Oregon volume 1.djvu/273

222 tion, was likewise sold. Many of the immigrants of the previous year would have been glad to purchase part of the property, but the missionaries secured it for themselves.

Hamilton Campbell purchased, on a long credit, all the Mission herds, and was thereafter known among the indignant immigrants as Cow Campbell, a sobriquet he always continued to bear. George Abernethy came into possession of the Mission store, and bought up at a discount all the debts of the French settlers, to whom a considerable amount of goods had been sold on credit. In a similar manner houses and farms were disposed of to the amount of over $26,000, or at less than half the original cost, the sales amounting to little more than a distribution of the society's assets among the missionaries.

The manual-labor school building, which had cost the Mission between $8,000 and $10,000, with the farm belonging to it, and the mill site, was sold to the trustees of the Oregon Institute for $4,000, and that institution was removed from the site first selected on Wallace Prairie by Jason Lee, to the larger and better building on Chemeketa plain, where in the autumn of 1844 a school for white children was first opened by Mrs Chloe A. Clark Willson, from which has grown the Methodist college known as the Willamette University. Soon afterward the trustees developed a plan for laying out a city on the land belonging to the institute, which was accordingly surveyed into lots and blocks, and named Salem by Leslie, president of the board of trustees. Here, for the present, I leave the history of the