Page:History of Oregon volume 1.djvu/57

6. Of game-birds found in woods there are also plenty; grouse, quails, pheasants, and wood-doves inhabit the thickets of young firs, and the groves of oak and fir that skirt the older and darker forest. Singing birds which make their homes in trees are rare. The only really musical bird of Oregon is the meadowlark, which carols to the passer-by of the happiness he finds in his humble life near the ground.

The streams are well stocked with fish—the brooks with trout, and the rivers with salmon of two or three species. The most palatable and largest of these, the salmo quinnat, has been one of the chief articles of food for twenty years, and constituted a staple in the Hudson's Bay Company's supplies; in fact, the company's servants received dried salmon and nothing else when other articles were scarce.

Such were the natural conditions of life in Oregon in 1834. European civilization, however, had already driven in its stakes here and there about the wilderness preparatory to its overthrow. For some time past the country had been dominated exclusively by fur-traders from Canada and Great Britain; now people from the United States begin to come and settle. Ownership becomes a moot question; the territory is held by the United States and Great Britain under treaty of joint occupancy. Although in the History of the Northwest Coast I have given full descriptions of the fur-traders' forts and incipient settlements, I deem it advisable to review them here, so that the reader may have the picture fresh in his mind at the opening of this part of my history.

The most important post and place in all the Oregon Territory was Fort Vancouver, the Hudson's Bay Company's headquarters. It was situated upon a beautiful sloping plain, on the north bank of the Columbia, about six miles above the mouth of the Multnomah River, as the Willamette below the falls was still called, and opposite the centre of the Wil-