Page:Letter from the Secretary of the Interior, re Whitman Massacre, 1871.pdf/5

 thousands of men, women and children, should have dissipated this spell, yet still it clings to the region like the fabled shift of Nessus, and even now the great Northern Pacific Railroad incurs its greatest hostility, because those who never visited these shores cannot appreciate the vast importance, resources, and desirability of Northwest America. So with the weapon of groundless prejudice, soi disant statesmen damnify the country, and call the shortest route across the American continent within the United States, clearest of obstacles and freest from obstruction by snows, a Siberian trail. These are the curiosities of our history, endowing it with a lively interest.—Hon. Edward Erans.

Senator Benton, in 1825, when the joint occupancy was before the Senate:

“The claim of Great Britain was nothing but a naked pretension, founded on the double purpose of benefiting herself and of injuring the United States. That fur-trader, Sir Alexander McKinzie, is at the bottom of this policy. Failing in his attempt to explore the Columbia River in 1793, he nevertheless urged upon the British government the advantages of taking it to herself and of expelling the Americans from the whole region west of the Rocky Mountains. He recommended that the Hudson's Bay Company and the Northwest Company should be united, and they have been: he proposed to extend the fur trade to the Pacific shores, and it has been so extended; he proposed that a chain of posts should be formed from sea to sea, and it has been done; he recom mended that no boundary line should be formed which did not give the Columbia River to the British, and the British ministry declare that none other shall be formed; he proposed to obtain command of the fur trade from latitude 45° north, and they have it even to the Mandan villages and the Council Bluffs; he recommended the expulsion of the American fur-traders from the whole region west of the Rocky Mountains, and they are excluded from it."

Sir James Douglass's testimony, given in answer to interrogatory 11, in the case of The Hudson's Bay Company's Claim vs. United States: “The honorable Hudson's Bay Company had fifty-five officers and five hundred and fifteen articled men. The company, having a large, active, and experienced force of

servants in their employ, and holding establishments judiciously situated in the most favorable portions for trade, forming, as it were, a network of posts, aiding and sup porting each other, possessed an extraordinary influence with the natives, and in 1846 practically enjoyed a monopoly in the fur trade in the country west of the Rocky Mountains north and south of the forty-ninth parallel of latitude. The profits of their £m 1841 to 1846 were at least seven thousand pounds sterling annually—about 35,000."

£

III.—HOSTILITY OF THE HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY TO AMERICAN CITIZENS.

Swan's work, 1852, page 381:

“The officers of the company also sympathized with their servants, and a deadly feeling of hatred has existed between these officers and the American emigrants, in coming across the mountains to squat upon lands they considered theirs; and there is not a man among them who would not be glad to have had every American emigrant driven out of the country.” FitzGerald on the Hudson's Bay Company, before the British Parliament, in 1849:

“A corporation who, under authority of a charter which is invalid in law, hold a monopoly in commerce and exercise a despotism in government, and have so exercised

that monopoly and so wielded that power as to shut up the earth from the knowledge of man and man from the knowledge of God.” Sir George Simpson, in his “History Around the World,” fore part of 1847:

“I defy the American Congress to establish their Atlantic tariff in the Pacific ports.” General Brouilett's “Protestantism in Oregon,” p. 51 of the edition published by order of the House of Representatives, says:

“The massacre at Waiilatpu has not been committed by the Indians in hatred of heretics.

If Americans only have been killed, it is only because the war had been

declared by the Indians against the Americans only, and not against foreigners; and it was in their quality as American citizens, and not as Protestants, that the Indians killed them.”

Senator Benton, before the Senate, May, 1848, urging Government to extend its arm of protection over Oregon Territory, in answer to the urgent call of the citizens after the Waiilatpu tragedy:

“But which has had the effect of depriving those people of all government and of