Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 18.djvu/220



192 Fred Wilbur Powell

physical ability of speech, and was scarcely able to converse or write upon any subject, however familiar. At every eflFort my language was broken and full of errors. One of the hireling writers of my adversaries, in a Boston periodical in 1832, says
 * he murders the King's English.' It was too true."^

Equally severe were the criticisms in that joint product of youth and age, Wyeth's Oregon, where Kelley is described as a man "who had read all the bodes he could get on the voyages and travels in Asia, Africa, Europe, and America, until he had heated his mind to a degree little short of the valorous Knight of La Mancha, that is to say, he believed all he read."* Although yoimg Wyeth himself had turned back at a point several hundred miles east of the mouth of the Columbia, he boldly declared:

"I have since been well-informed that in the valley of Ore- gon, so much extolled for its fertility and pleasantness, wood to cook with is one among their scarcest and very dear articles of necessity. From all accounts, except those g^ven to the public by Mr. Kelly, there is not a district at the mouth of any large river more unproductive than that of the Columbia, and it seems that this is pretty much the case from tide water of that river to where it empties into the ocean. . . . Mr. Hall J. Kelly published about two years since a most inflated and extravagant account of that western tract which extends from The Rocky Mountains to the shore of the Pacific Ocean. He says of it that no portion of the globe presents a more fruit- ful soil, or a milder climate, or equal facilities for carrying into effect the great purposes of a free and enlightened na- tion .... Lewis and Clarke's history of their expedition had been published and very generally read; yet this extrava- gant and fallacious account of the Oregon was read by some people not destitute of a general information, nor unused to reading .... But all the world exaggerates ; not even were we of the Or^on expedition entirely free from it,

4 Kelley, Hist, of the Settlement of Oregon, 107.

5 J. B. Wyeth, Oregon. 3. The book was written by Dr. Benjamin Water- house ''from notes and Information" of W^eth to discourage what was thought to be the wild scheme of Westward migration.

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