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Francis Xavier Matthieu, a pioneer of French Prairie, near the old town of Champoeg, of the year 1842, and a participant in the movement for the Oregon provisional government of May, 1843, was a French-Canadian by birth. His native town was Terrebonne, twelve miles from Montreal, and his father and mother were of pure French descent the father's family being from Normandy, and the mother's from Brittany; and both branches were very early immigrants to Canada. They belonged to the working class, and the parents of F. X. were only in the moderate circumstances of the independent farmer. Owing to this circumstance, young Matthieu was obliged at an early age to begin life on his own account. He went to Montreal when quite young, and engaged as a clerk in a mercantile house. There was, however, still earlier, while he was yet a schoolboy in his native town, a very powerful formative influence that moulded all his ideas, and though somewhat blindly as it first seemed, finally, with wonderful selective affinity, turned his course westward, and made him almost the deciding factor of free government in Oregon.

The date of his birth, 1818, brought his early life and schoolboy days into the very critical time of the patriot movement in Canada. With that disregard of political obligations for which the British government was formerly noted, such as had caused the rupture with her .greatest American colonies, the royal authority had failed to keep the promises made to the Canadian provinces; and, now restive under a rule that seemed both tyran-