Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 24.djvu/412

 380 T. C. Elliott versed with ease in three different languages and several Indian dialects, a delightful companion and reconteur, and the author of one item in our literature. It is known that he was a careful and honest administrator of affairs, the associate of Dr. John McLoughlin and James Douglas in their residence and management at Fort Vancouver on the Columbia, and the Chief Factor in control there during the important period of the arrival of the United States customs and army officers after the Treaty of 1846. It is more widely known that he was the one man in Oregon that last month of the year 1847 who was fitted to deal personally with the Cayuse Indians and rescue the forty or more women and children who were held in captivity after the massacre at the Whitman mis- sion near Walla Walla. But of that highest attribute, the intimate relationship of son, husband and father, of that it is more appropriate to briefly speak on this oc- casion. In 1852 Peter Skene Ogden was visiting in the East, on leave from duties at Fort Vancouver, and with a pos- sibility of permanent retirement. He was then a man of property, of the age of fifty-eight; but constant exposures during an active career in the field had whitened the hairs of his head and brought on some of the infirmities of years. Had he followed the inclinations of others, and the probable desires of relatives, he would have settled down to a life of ease in the society of congenial and well- to-do people in Montreal, or elsewhere in Lower Canada. For Peter Skene Ogden's mother was a patrician, from a family of wealth near New York City. His father was, at the time of marriage, a well known attorney in the present city of Newark, New Jersey. With the evac- uation of New York by General Howe during the Amer- ican Revolution the family departed to England, but later returned to Canada as Union Empire Loyalists, under appointment of Mr. Ogden as a Judge on the King's Bench. In Canada, both in Quebec and Montreal, the