Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 26.djvu/241

 Adams, at the mouth of the Columbia, and at Willamette Falls, others at Nesqually, at the fort of the Nez Perces, and at Fort Colville.

This last station is very important for the English Company; it is situated on the left bank of the Columbia river, three days' journey above the river of the Flat Heads. Fort Colville was erected in the midst of a plain of fifteen hundred hectares square, which constitutes the only land fit for cultivation on the Columbia above Van Couver. The Company has there two farms, a blacksmith shop, a mill, one hundred beeves, and some horses; it harvests about twelve hundred hectoliters of wheat, barley, peas and oats, and a great many potatoes. It is this place that furnishes the forts of the North and West the greatest part of their provisions.

Most of the Methodist and Baptist ministers are married; they live in little wooden houses; but they gather about them so small a number of Indians that at the end of 1842 nearly all of them left for the Sandwich Islands on board English and American ships, regarding their presence as useless in Oregon. Let us say in passing that the Hudson's Bay Company and its agents at the Sandwich Islands always grant passage on their boats readily and gratuitously to the Methodists, their attendants, and generally to all Americans who go either from the Columbia to the Islands or from the Islands to the Northwest coast. English ships do not refuse even to transport without expense cases of merchandise belonging to the Methodists. It is plain that this apparent generosity has no other object than to