Page:Portland, Oregon, its History and Builders volume 1.djvu/108

70 They governed a wilderness empire filled with more natural wealth than any other equal territory in the world. They successfully managed a population of two hundred thousand wild Indians, which but for their tact, perseverance, and courage would have been two hundred thousand murdering savages. And while it is true they did not look forward to the fruits of labor which might bestow upon them offices, honors and distinctions, which the wilderness could not confer, they sacrificed pride and ambition to faithfully and loyally serve their employer, looking only to the present and to their salary for reward; and still none the less, performed so great a work in moulding and controlling the character and natural bent of the Indians as to make the eventual settlement of the country an easy conquest over native savagery. The gradual and comparatively easy substitution of civilization in all the vast territory once ruled by the Hudson Bay Company, as compared with the stern and relentless warfare which greeted and decimated the Scotch-Irish and Virginian pioneers who settled the Ohio valley sixty years prior, is little less than a miracle in the development of the west. If any one will turn to the history of the settlement of the states of Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee and see with what nameless horrors, indescribable tortures and devilish savagery the Indians in that country fought the white settlers, they will see that the old Oregon Indians were peaceful men, by comparison. All the Indian wars of Oregon put together would not make three years actual warfare. And in all of it, so far as can be learned, there were but few prisoners put to torture by the Indians. But from the time Daniel Boone crossed over the Alleghany mountains and settled on the lonely wilds of Kentucky in 1769, down to the great battle with the Indians October 5, 1813, when their great leader and hero Tecumseh was killed, over forty years, there was almost continuous warfare with the Indians of the Ohio valley. Warfare, characterized by all the horrible tortures which the devilsh ingenuity of the savage could imagine, and of which slow burning at the stake, with burnings arrows thrust into the eyes of the helpless victims was the least horrible.

Let the impartial reader contrast the settler's experience in the Ohio valley, with the Indian wars of Oregon, and then thank such a man as John McLoughlin and Peter Skene Ogden that our pioneer fathers and mothers of Oregon were spared the trials and sufferings which their fathers and mothers passed through in reclaiming Ohio, Missouri and other eastern states from their savage foes.

The Indians of the vast Hudson bay provinces did not lack the courage or the brains of the Indians of the Ohio valley. Neither did they lack natural resources to make effective opposition to the advances of the white man. They were simply managed and kept quiet until effective opposition was impracticable. The men who did this great work for Oregon, no matter what their motive was, deserve a large space in the history of this state and of this city. It cannot be pretended that they managed the Indians for the purpose of making them accept the rule of the white man in the establishment of civil society. It may be truly said they builded wiser than they knew, but for all they performed, all they accomplished, and all their labors to tame the red man, let us give them generous recognition and deserved honors. And while it is not within the purview of this history to give extended biographical notice in this volume, yet for the purpose of more perfectly showing the kind and character of men who ruled this vast region of old Oregon, in that age and era of thought and development which is wholly unlike and altogether foreign to the thought and civilization of the present, we give one example of a man who is of all others, the most perfect type of those who served the vast work of the Hudson Bay Company, and swayed the destinies of the Indian population of this region—Peter Skene Ogden. And for this purpose we make liberal use of a very able and painstaking address delivered before the Oregon Historical Society by Mr. T. C. Elliott of Walla Walla:

"Peter Skene Ogden was born in the city of Quebec, in the year of 1794, the exact date not yet having been traced. His father was then a judge in the admiralty court at Quebec and a leading U. E. Loyalist of Canada. His mother