Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 7.pdf/382

376 were in a valley affording a more than ample expanse of prairie and woodland, well distributed, and in a climate free from extremes, and that made the soil, with little cultivation, yield bountifully. The only hostile tribes of natives that much needed to be feared lived beyond the mountains to the south and to the east. Their problem connected with defense against these will be discussed in connection with public expenditures for a military establishment.

Turning then to the composition of this Oregon community, it is to be noted that in the spring of 1841 there were three distinct groups of settlers: First, there were the officers and servants of the Hudson Bay Company at Fort Vancouver, and still more or less bound to the Company were the retired servants with their native wives and families on French Prairie fifty miles up the Willamette; secondly, we have the Methodist Mission group, with the main station some twenty miles beyond the Canadian settlement—there might be mentioned along with these a small number of independent missionaries as having the same civic point of view but unconnected with the quasi-civil organization of the Methodists; thirdly, there were the American settlers who had come separately, or in very small bands, from far and wide. Fewer in numbers than either of the other groups and without organization, they were probably equal in influence because of greater individual force and political facility.

The incipient movements toward organization were not participated in by the Fort people and their ex-servants, but consistently discouraged, fearing no doubt that if a government was set up it would interfere with their British allegiance and organization.

When organization was effected in 1843, the Canadian settlers in the Willamette Valley acquiesced, as they had the recognition of their land claims at stake, but the officials of the Fur Company and all British residents north of the Columbia failed to respond. The Legislature during its first session, in June, 1843, retaliated by passing an act having for its intention the exclusion of the Hudson Bay