Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 2.djvu/114

98 government. Most of the subjects of Great Britain naturally held aloof from a movement in which American influence was likely to be paramount. We had three classes of Americans in the Oregon country: First, American trappers or mountain men, who were hostile to the Hudson's Bay Company and strongly attached to the United States; second, the American missionaries, who were ardently attached to the institutions of their own country, which are bound up with religious freedom; third, American settlers, who had come to make homes and to cultivate the soil. But the whole American population in 1842 was no more than one hundred and thirty-seven, of whom thirty-four were white women and thirty-two were white children. A considerable number of the American settlers and mountain men had native wives.

On the seventh of February, 1841, a meeting of some of the inhabitants was held at Champoeg, then the center or seat of the principal settlement, "for the purpose of consulting upon the steps necessary to be taken for the formation of laws, and the election of officers to execute them.' The call was cautiously worded, so as to avoid the troublesome question of national sovereignty; for the Americans, who were making this initiatory movement, thought it prudent not to go too fast, realizing that the population of the country, though divided in their allegiance, yet had to live together. Rev. Jason Lee, of the Methodist mission, presided over this meeting. The Methodists were the leaders in missionary enterprise in Oregon. They had established the Willamette mission, under direction of Rev. Jason Lee, in 1834. In 1835, Samuel Parker, a Presbyterian missionary, came for the purpose of making examination of the field and selecting stations for missionary labor. Next year he returned by sea to New York. Whitman, with a small party, followed