Page:McLoughlin and Old Oregon.djvu/386



"He saved our lives."

"He gave us seed."

"He gave us food."

"His good deeds cannot be told."

"He has been foully dealt with."

"We have brought his gray hairs in sorrow to the grave."

The murmur for restitution grew high and higher, until, five years after his death, the State Legislature by special act restored the land claim to his heirs, too late, alas! to gladden the philanthropic heart.

The peculiar circumstances under which he was situated, make McLoughlin's benefactions unique in history. It is a trite saying on the Columbia, that had any other than a John McLoughlin been at the head of the Hudson's Bay Company's affairs in Oregon, American settlements might have been crushed in their inception. With all the savages at his command, a single hint could have hurled the adventurous immigrants back across the Rocky Mountains, and the United States would never have carried a war of invasion so far from her frontier. The conduct of McLoughlin, his humanity and magnanimity, lift him above the range of common heroes into the sublimated realm of Christian ideals, where he and Whitman walk together, the Father and the Martyr of the Pacific Northwest.

Not in vain did Nathaniel Wyeth, the first American, knock at the gates of Fort Vancouver, not in vain did he sink $100,000 in his Oregon enterprise, not in vain did Whitman fall or the immigrants toil across the Rockies. Out of McLoughlin's semi-barbaric empire has risen the better empire of to-day. From the ceded territory Oregon had been cut, a part of Montana, Washington with her Mediterranean, and Idaho with