Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 24.djvu/394

 366 Frederick V. Holman Ogden's ancestor took the name "Okeden" or "Okedean," meaning a man who lived in a sunken vale, glen, or dale in which oak trees grew. In course of time the spelling of the name was changed to "Ogden." One of Peter Skene Ogden's ancestors, John Ogden, settled in this country about the year 1642. The Ogden family is of high class in England, in Canada, and in the United States. So Peter Skene Ogden, by a long line of ancestors from Saxon times, inherited the Anglo-Saxon instincts and traditions and was guided by them. Among these instincts and traditions are the rights of life, of liberty, of property, and the pursuit of happiness. His was an heredity of the highest type, and he showed his quality at all times, especially in the rescue of the survivors of the Whitman massacre. He was aristocratic in his birth and breeding, but he was democratic in his feelings and actions. Undoubtedly Judge Isaac Ogden desired that his son, Peter Skene Ogden, should be a lawyer, as his grand- father and father had been not only distinguished law- yers but also judges. In fact, before he was seventeen years old, Peter Skene Ogden began the study of law. But a large part of Canada was then being exploited by the old, the original, Hudson's Bay Company, and by another fur trading company known as the NorthWest Company, organized in Montreal, which had its head- quarters at Fort Williams, on the north shore of Lake Superior. Prior to 1821 there was great rivalry between these two fur trading companies, resulting in practical warfare between them. In 1821, by an Act of the Brit- ish Parliament, these two companies merged and became known as the Hudson's Bay Company, and its jurisdic- tion extended from Hudson's Bay on the east to the Pacific Ocean on the west. The stirring events in the early part of the Nineteenth Century, the lives of those engaged in the fur trade, with