Page:History of Oregon volume 1.djvu/294

Rh down poured forth in tones of deep contrition what the missionaries, in their ignorance of the language, took to be a fervent prayer. The mountain men, however, recognized it to be one of Jandreau's campfire stories, and impiously mingled their coarse, smothered laughter with the rapturous hallelujahs and amens of the preachers.

Possibly the mountain men would not have thought the missionaries so churlish had they better understood that the orthodox plan of settlement in those days excluded from Oregon the renegades of civilization from the Rocky Mountains, and scarcely admitted the right of the frontiersmen of the western states to settle in the Oregon Territory. Later in the history it will be seen how the missionaries succeeded in the struggle to maintain this predominance.

Our unwelcome colonists now drove their stock along the river as far as Wind River Mountain, where the natives assisted them in crossing to the trail on the north bank, down which they continued until opposite the mouth of the Sandy, when they recrossed to the south side, and drove the cattle through the woody northern end of the Willamette Valley to the mouth of the Clackamas below the Willamette Falls, where Newell and Meek arrived in December, travel-worn, wet, hungry, and homeless, and altogether beneath the notice of the missionaries, who very unwillingly sold them a few potatoes.

There was now nothing to do but to seek at Fort Vancouver the relief denied by the Americans. They easily obtained supplies from the fur company, where-