Page:Oregon, End of the Trail.djvu/88

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Agriculture

HPHE first independent and successful American farmer in Oregon -*- was Ewing Young, erstwhile fur-trader, who came in 1834 and in the following year had crops growing and cattle grazing on the rich acreage of the Chehalem Valley. Before his arrival, various ventures in agriculture had been attempted, the earliest being by Nathan Winship and his crew of the Albatross, who brought hogs and goats and did some planting along the lower Columbia River bottoms in 1810. This experiment was flooded out, and a year later the Astor expedition brought hogs, sheep, and cattle, and planted vegetables at Fort Astoria. Dr. John McLoughlin, of the Hudson's Bay Company, started a farm at Fort Vancouver in 1825; and three years later he placed Etienne Lucier, one of his trappers, who had become superannuated, on a tract of land at the present site of East Portland. In 1829, James Bates established a farm on Scappoose Plain, and three years later John Ball began wheat growing in the Willamette Valley. These men were share-croppers for the fur company. In 1835, Nathaniel Wyeth brought cattle, hogs, and goats, with grain and garden seeds, to Sauvie Island, but later relinquished the land to Dr. McLoughlin, who established a dairy on the island under the supervision of Jean Baptiste Sauvie.

Favorable reports concerning the fertile valleys of Oregon brought a trickle of eastern farmers into the new and unclaimed country in the late 1830*8. Thereafter, immigration increased rapidly, until the trickle became a stream and then a flood. The cry of "Free land!" echoed back over the Oregon Trail, and the route became crowded with long processions of covered wagons.

Wheat was the pioneers' first and principal crop. Many of the early homeseekers arrived in the Willamette country destitute, and Dr. McLoughlin, partly with an eye to future profit and the enhancing of British influence, staked them to clothing, tools, and seed-wheat, to be repaid in kind, so that thousands of settlers were at length in debt to him. In 1846 more than 160,000 bushels of wheat were produced in the Oregon country. By an act of the provisional government, wheat