Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 26.djvu/220

166 the plains along the banks of the Willamette above the falls. At Puget Sound, as at Fort Van Couver, you can count a population of from six to seven hundred souls, of whom more than three-fourths are free settlers; at Kaoulis, six hundred individuals, five hundred of whom are free settlers, and forty families of engages; in the Willamette Valley about two thousand persons, all free settlers. Each year a certain number who are not employes come from Canada. At the close of 1841, thirty arrived from the Red River colony; nearly half of them have settled on the Willamette. The Company does not have its land cultivated by its servants in this part of the country. The French have been established on the Willamette since 1831; if they have not the advantages of a harbor, as those at Nesqually have, they possess as compensation a land more fertile, they enjoy a milder climate, and above all they have more than the others the valuable convenience of easy access to California to procure cattle of all kinds. In a favorable season this journey can easily be made in three months as it is not more than four hundred leagues going and coming.

Having examined this valley with the utmost care, we remarked not without pleasure the eagerness with which the Frenchmen of Canada come, sometimes several leagues, to see a Frenchman from France, as they call us. One of them told us that his family had come from Normandy to Canada with the Marquis of Beauharnais, another that his grandfather had served in the Queen's regiment; they asked us a thousand questions about France, and expressed their keen desire to be reunited with her, and they wished while waiting to know that she was strong and prosperous. Whenever we stopped at their farms we were sure of finding the freest hos-