Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 5.djvu/60

50 It was common report that, in answer to a direct question of Lieutenant William Peel to Hon. Jesse Applegate at the home of the latter, "If he believed his neighbors would fight for possession of Oregon?" "Fight, Lieutenant, yes; they would not only fight you Britishers, but their own commanders also if they did not command to suit them." I cannot vouch for the truth of this, but it sounds like Mr. Applegate, though he, himself, was always for peaceful methods, if the object could be so attained, as were Burnett, H. A. G. Lee, General Palmer, Robert Newell, and James Waters, I believe. A strong indication that this question and answer between Lieutenant Peel and Mr. Applegate did occur is the fact that within fifteen or twenty miles of the Applegate residence, from which Mr. Peel and his party were traveling northward, the writer, listening to Mr. Daniel Matheny's question to Peel as to how he liked Oregon, heard the latter deliberately reply, "Mr. Matheny, it is certainly the most beautiful country in its natural state my eyes ever beheld," then after a slight pause, continued: "I regret to say that I am afraid we (the British) are not going to be the owners of it." This occurred within a month after the arrival of Lieutenant Peel and Captain Parks in Western Oregon as emissaries of the British Government at the head of which was Peel's father, Sir Robert Peel. At that time the open discussion of this question was often raised and sometimes hotly debated by the parties confined together in a single chinook canoe. The writer remembers having to take some very rough comments made by a Scotch sailor named Jack McDonald for the shamefulness, as he termed it, of my preferring the American cause against the country of my birth. I had to endure Jack's tongue, he being in one end of the canoe and I in the other, but, on landing he declined to support his right to question my right of choice.

Early in 1846 the finishing of Doctor McLoughlin's flouring mill at Oregon City was made the occasion of a ball by the young Americans, many of whom had assisted in the building. Lieutenant Peel and officers of the Modeste and of the Hudson Bay Company at Vancouver were invited. It was a good