Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 13.djvu/160

 152 ROBERT CARLTON CLARK There are in existence three known contemporary copies of this address of the Canadian citizens. Two of these, one writ- ten in French, the other apparently an English translation, have been preserved in the, office of the Secretary of State at Salem and are apparently the original copies presented to the meeting mentioned above. The third, an English translation sent by John McLoughlin, Chief Factor of the Hudson's Bay Company at Vancouver to the home office, is to be found in the foreign office of the British Government. 36 No one of these three copies is dated. The two English copies are not duplicates nor are they good translations of the French. The English translation found at Salem was printed, with errors of tran- scription, in Grover's Oregon Archives, in 1853. The French original seems to have been overlooked or at least is unnoticed in any existing account of the Provisional Government. All of these accounts alike place the document in 1842 and 1843 as noted above. Apparently the only reason for so dating it has been because the copyist who made the copy for the printed Oregon Archives in 1853 took the indorsement to be found on the back of the English translation and made it read "Address of the Canadian Citizens of Oregon to the Meeting at Champoeg, March 4, 1843." No note is made of the fact that the indorsement is written in a hand different from that of the document itself and that the name of the place of meet- ing is of doubtful reading. Accepting the heading as given and finding no record of a meeting for the purpose indicated by the address on March 4, all writers on early Oregon his- tory have concluded that the address was made to the meeting at Champoeg, May 2, 1843. They have further been encour- aged in this error by the misleading English translation and by the statement of W. H. Gray, one of the members of the legislative committee of 1843, who says37 that the address was handed in to a sub-committee of three, of which he was a member, by the clerk of the legislative committee, examined and handed back to him. Gray, how- 36 A copy has been loaned me by Professor Schafer who has also called to my attention the existence of the French original. 37 History of Oregon, 273.