Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 8.djvu/235

 THE VANCOUVER RESERVATION CASE. 227 and, finally, one Francis A. Chamberlain, an employee of the Hudson Bay Company, the only one who testified in favor of the mission. They were a queer-looking lot, antiquated and awkward, soiled, snuffy and redolent with a rather too pungent ordor of sanctity. Their talk and manners recalled the traditions of a buried past. If they had all floated down the Columbia in a canoe, with red blankets around them, it would have seemed natural and proper. The leading witnesses for the defense were John Stensgair and Napoleon McGillvray, old Hudson Bay Company ser- vants; William HJ. Gray, the historian of Oregon and an early pioneer; William H. Dillon, Peter W. Crawford and Silas D. Maxon, Charles J. Bird and John J. Smith, county officials and surveyors; Louisa Carter and Sarah J. Ander- son, women who came out as early as the Whitman massacre; and, finally, General Rufus Ingalls and Mr. Lloyd Brooke, who represented the Quartermaster's Department. These wit- nesses were also advanced in years, but they looked like people who had "kept up with the procession. " The first set of witnesses swore that the mission people were entirely independent of the Hudson Bay Company and intent solely on the saving of souls. The government witnesses testified that the priests were paid and willing servants of the company, and that it was the trappers who converted the Indian women, &nd that the church here was not a mission but a congregation. The trial also brought to light the fact that the record of the first injunction suit against the post authorities had been cut out of the first record book of the county court and the book itself thrown in the river; but it was recovered, water-stained and mutilated. The testimony of the old witnesses was, apart from its legal value, very inter-, esting. It recalled the feudal ways of the old Hudson Bay barons; the contrasted savagery and gentleness of the In- dians ; the wild ways of the pioneers ; the zeal of the priests ; the earnestness of the Protestant missionaries. One of the questions at issue was: What was a mission? The answer revealed, by a strange sidelight, the difference in