Page:Letters to Mrs. F. F. Victor, 1878-83.djvu/1



George B. Roberts' letters to Mrs. Frances Fuller Victor, 1878-83, were elicited by her informed inquiries and general interest in Pacific Northwest history. Roberts lived in the region from the early 183os, and had much to offer a historian. His letters to Mrs. Victor were written thirty years after the Cowlitz Farm journal, were personal rather than semi-official, and cover a different range of experience. Sometimes Roberts' statements shade the past with the tolerance of age or the pleasant color of recollections of younger days; but his memories as a figure representing a British monopoly in a hostile frontier community are unhappy memories of the 'bending' of 'the law' by the land hungry and by naturally ambitious politicians.

Events which brought about the treaty of 1846 had not led either American or British government to insist on settling all details of their Oregon dispute; officially, the question of just what was involved in the "possessory rights" of the Hudson's Bay and Puget Sound Agricultural companies remained vague for many years. But to Pacific Northwesterners the question was much more urgent: the settlers' 'interested' view of the British companies often resembled Andrew Jackson's view of the national bank. And the impact of that view on the local representatives or officers of the companies, even though some became American citizens, was in immediate and specific actions. American land claimants reacted to what they felt were unreasonable exclusions or perquisites in their promised land-such as the Puget Sound Agricultural Company's claim of 26I square miles at Nisqually—with equal unreason.

The companies, while they continued to claim payment or reimbursement at the level of national government, lost their regional claims much as Great Britain lost the Pacific Northwest-by distance and attrition, if not by lack of interest. The Cowlitz Farm difficulties George Roberts writes of so feelingly were matched by Dr. William F. Tolmie's troubles at Nisqually, where "squatters" on PSA Company lands, according to company estimate, killed more than 6,000 of the