Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 13.djvu/118

 110 FREDERICK V. HOLMAN "That a Committee be appointed to take into consideration the propriety of taking measures for the civil and military protection of this colony." And a resolution was adopted that the said Committee con- sist of twelve persons, who were named in the resolution. It will be seen that the true beginning of the Provisional Government of 1843, was at the Wolf Meeting, or the ad- journed March meeting, and not May 2, 1843. The lattei meeting merely authorized carrying the plan into execution. But each of these earlier meetings lacked the dramatic setting and action of the meeting of May 2. The intention to hold the May meeting provoked active opposition in addition to the opposition of Rev. Jason Lee and George Abernethy and others. Prior to the meeting of May 2, called by the Committee of Twelve, meetings were held by those opposed to the forming of a government, at Fort Vancouver, Oregon City, and French Prairie. THE MEETING OF MAY 2, 1843. It has been sometimes asserted that the meeting at Cham- poeg May 2, 1843, was attended by all the male inhabitants of Oregon. This is a misstatement of fact. Excluding the Hud- son's Bay Company's officers, employes and servants and all persons then living north and west of the Columbia River, and including men living south of the Columbia River and west of the Cascade Mountains, it seems to be unquestioned that there were then not less than 61 white men, other than French-Canadians, who were not connected in any way with the Hudson's Bay Company, and most of them American citi- zens, and not counting men of the immigration of 1842, who were then in the Willamette Valley. The exact number of these immigrants, then in Oregon, cannot be ascertained. A low estimate of the number of men would be 40. So, May 2, 1843, only 42 American citizens and 8 British subjects af- filiating with them, out of about 100, were present at this meeting. The estimate of the number of French-Canadians in the Wil- lamette Valley made by J. Quinn Thornton, W. H. Gray and F. X. Matthieu, the latter of whom I personally interviewed last