Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 3.djvu/230

220 "by the use of sheep and rape the late Daniel Harvey was in the early 30's producing better crops of wheat from the company's farm on Mill Plain than I now (1880) see the American farmers getting."

The next record of sheep in Oregon is in Bancroft's Oregon, Vol. I, p. 338, quoting Wilkes for the fact of sheep being at the Waiilatpu Mission in 1841, having been obtained from the Hawaiian Islands. On page 346 the same historian tells us the Nez Perces, in 1842, owned 32 neat cattle, 10 sheep and 40 hogs, and that the Cayuses had 70 head of cattle, mostly cows, and also a few "sheep earned by herding the flock belonging to the mission."

This, doubtless, was the result of the Whitman mission policy of teaching the natives spinning and weaving, and we have good reason for believing Dr. Whitman was very anxious to have the United States add sheep to the medium of purchase of the native right to the soil, as one of the best agencies of civilization. The savage massacre, which destroyed this heroic man and all his plans, wiped out all connection between them and the American home builders, then confined to western Oregon, and we have no evidence that any sheep were in western Oregon, except at Vancouver, prior to the second cattle drive from California in 1842-43, when Jacob P. Lease, an American settler in California, yielding to the advice of Capt. Joseph Gale and his associates, started his flock of 900 head in the wake of Gale's drive of 1,250 head of cattle and 600 head of horses and mules to sell to the Oregon settlers.

According to Hon. J. W. Nesmith, who spent the winter of 1843 with Captain Gale, there were 3,000 sheep in this drive, 2,000 of which we may reasonably believe were for the Puget Sound Agricultural Company, formed by officers of the Hudson Bay Company as means of stocking the country from the Sound southward to the