Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 11.djvu/196

182 the hunting mountain tribes, so that the wail for the dead and the gambler's tom-tom were common and monotonous sounds. When he learned that our provisions were low the General said, that he left his grain in the shock for lack of sheds to store it, and that if on our arrival, we would assist him in building we were welcome to the supplies he had brought.

General McCarver was at this time speaker of the house of the American Provisional Government, and few men could tell us more about public affairs, especially in regard to the assistance Dr. McLoughlin freely gave the American emigrants. Three of us, S. B. Crockett, Daniel Clark and myself, had already determined to return to the Dalles to assist our friends to western Oregon, and finding the General so warm in his praise of the doctor's course in lending boats to help the families down the great river, we asked him if he could and would aid us in getting the use of a boat; he said he would gladly write to the Doctor, and did. In fact, McCarver and Burnett had laid off lots for sale on the west bank of the Willamette, calling the town Linnton, and had led the way in cutting a passable wagon road to the extreme northern point of Tualatin Plains. This was already being used by the Red River settlers who had been induced by Sir George Simpson, Governor of the H. B. Co., to leave the Selkirk settlement in 1 841, and who, finding the open land about Nisqually gravelly and sterile, had already opened farms and were harvesting crops on the Tualatin plains nearest to Ft. Vancouver. Dr. McLoughlin was so much in sympathy with these people that he exchanged lots in Oregon City for lots in Linnton with Burnett and McCarver. If the papers of the H. B. Co. are ever opened to historical gleaners, I believe it will be found that the chief cause of the coolness between the Governor of the H. B. Co. and the Chief Factor was the latter's preference for the south side of the Columbia.

From the Dalles to Oregon City—Crossing the Cascade range was a different matter in 1844 from what it was after the Barlows finished their road in 1846. We just avoided