Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 18.djvu/80



58 Lesue M. Scott

barley, 1000 bushels of oats, 2000 bushels of peas and large variety of garden vegetables; also seedling fruits — ap(des, peaches, grapes, strawberries, etc. A dairy there contained SO cows. At Fort Cblville were a five-acre garden patch, a water gristmill, and a supply of hogs. Operations at Cowlitz farms went on quite extensively also; we have the testimony of Sir George Simpson, Governor-in-Chief of Hudson's Bay Company, that in 1841 there were at that place: 1000 acres under the plow ; a large dairy ; 8000 bushels of wheat ; 4000 bushels of oats and much barley, potatoes, and other products. There were then at the farm at Puget Sound, 6000 sheep, 1200 cattle and many hogs and horses. The British used these supplies not only for their own consumption, but also for trade with the Russians in Alaska.

Until 1846 the British and the Americans held Oregon jointly; that is, they had equal right to occupy the land and use its resources. Up to 1843 law and order were preserved by the British Hudson's Bay Company, through Dr. McLough- lin, chief factor at Fort Vancouver. After that, governmental functions were exercised by a Provisional Government, insti- tuted by American farmer-settlers, until establishment of the Oregon territorial government in 1849, following the treaty of 1846 with Great Britain, under which the United States secured the Old Oregon country up to the present boundary of Canada.

Until 1835 agriculture was wholly in British hands, except that John Ball, an American, raised a crop of wheat near Champoeg (west of Aurora, in Willamette Valley) in 1833, on what was called French Prairie. The Hudson's Bay Com- pany had extended its farming operations to French Prairie in 1830, by locating there a number of its retired fur hunters, many of them bearing French names, from the old French settlements of Canada ; hence "French Prairie." The earliest independent American settler was Ewing Young, who had crops growing in Chehalem Valley (near Newberg) in the Spring of 1835. In that same year, Captain Nathaniel Wyeth,