Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 26.djvu/242

188 avoid at any price the presence of United States ships in the Columbia, of which the Company claims to hold the monopoly.

The principal establishment of the Americans is that of the Willamette, where Abernethy and Whitman reside with Lee. These gentlemen have founded a hospital and a school; they engage in agriculture, and have two flour mills and a saw mill, managed by Mr. Beers, a carpenter. The unrestricted liberty that reigns in the United States is too well known for any one to suppose that the character of the Methodists is purely religious. Several of them have been induced to come to Oregon only for commercial or agricultural business. Almost all of them collect an allowance made by the committee at Boston.

Mr. Lee has established a farm of considerable size, where he has about eighty hectares of enclosed land, and where he harvests two hundred hectoliters of wheat, and as much of leguminous grains and potatoes. We saw in his school about twenty children of every kind, who are taught English, and who are put to work in the fields and at the duties of the farm. Mr. Lee is the most important personage of all the Americans in Oregon; it was he who in 1839 addressed to Congress the petition of which we have spoken, asking for a civil magistrate or governor to protect the citizens of the United States, who, he said, form the germ of a great State.

Mr. Lee is in close touch with his compatriot, Mr. Bingham, head of the Methodists of the Sandwich Islands, known in France for the odious persecution which 'he caused to be exercised against our missionaries, Abbes Bachelot, Short and Maigret. He maintains some relations also with the American merchants of the Islands; but all other American citizens have commercial relations only with the Hudson's Bay Company. However, in