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304 REVEREND EZRA FISHER

of flour to the American squadron at San Francisco Bay. 121 The package may be a year in reaching you, and it may be that he made over his letters for the States to the war ship which was dispatched to take Captain Howison to the States to account for the loss of the Schooner Shark. 122 It is pos- sible that you will receive it in two or three months, but, through fear of a long delay, I shall repeat some of our obstacles in the promotion of the cause of Christ in Oregon. By the abounding grace of God we are alive and in good bodily health; yet our remote situation from the seat of op- erations of American churches, together with our temporal embarrassments, and the inconvenience of reaching the remote settlements, both as it relates to the time employed and the expense of traveling, has compelled me to confine my labors to the few people in Clatsop County. The winter has been extremely severe, and to human appearances Providence has frowned upon my attempts temporal.

We moved to this place last fall, as probably possessing the most favorable indications of future usefulness, and with pretty strong encouragement that we should be joined by other Baptist friends this spring. But the severity of the winter which has been destructive to cattle in this place and to the wheat already in the barns probably determined our Baptist friends otherwise. My cattle, which were more than twenty head in the fall, are now reduced to two, and I feel myself compelled to remove to Clatsop Plains on the coast immediately south of the mouth of the Columbia, but cut off from this place by Young's Bay, three miles in width, as the most probable place of sustaining my family by my own hands and at the same time sustaining a small congregation; our daughter Lucy Jane Gray can have a small school part of the time, and a small Sabbath school may probably be sustained during the year. In the meantime we hope that the day is

121 This was, of course, the Pacific squadron which had helped in the American occupation of California in this and the preceding year. Bancroft, Hist, of Cat. V, passim. Captain N. Crosby was prominent in the history of early Oregon ship- ping. Bancroft, Hist, of Ore. 11:26.

122 The "Shark" was wrecked at the mouth of the Columbia, Oct 10, 1846. Bancroft, Hist, of Ore. 1:587.