Page:Portland, Oregon, its History and Builders volume 1.djvu/206

150 Mexican governor of California to make a survey of the Sacramento valley, which being declined, he made a reconnoisance of the valley on his own account and made a map of the valley. Here he fell in with Ewing Young, whose estate without heirs, was afterwards urged as a reason for organizing a provisional government in Oregon. Young was an American trader from New Mexico, and Kelley persuaded him to undertake a trading venture up to Oregon with horses. And gathering up a party of adventurers and deserting sailors, with a lot of cheap horses, one hundred and fifty or more, they all started for Oregon. Getting as far as the mountains of southern Oregon, Kelley was taken sick. And here he fell in with the Frenchman fur trader, Michael La Framboise, who seeing Kelley's unfortunate condition in the grasp of a racking ague fit at once proceeded to alleviate his distress with quinine and hot venison broth. Kelley remained with and traveled with the Frenchman for several days, until overtaken by the Young party, when they all came down to Fort Vancouver. Here, weary and worn out, sick from a relapse, he finds the gates of Vancouver closed against him. He is informed that the Mexican governor of California had sent word to Dr. McLoughlin that Young and his party were a gang of horse thieves, and cautioning McLoughlin against the whole company. In vain does the sick man, a scholar and educated gentleman, and a christian, protest his innocence. McLoughlin says: "When Kelley arrived he was ver}'- ill, and out of humanity I placed him in a house, put a man to nurse him. the surgeon of the establishment attended him. and his victuals sent him every meal until he left in 1836." But the facts were, that Kelley while remaining at Vancouver was housed in a hut outside the fort, and treated as a mendicant or worse, and debarred the recognition of an honest man, or a gentleman, in the the country he had done so much to advertise to the world.

Kelley was undoubtedly greatly embittered against the Americans he found in Oregon, and, as he said, induced to come here by his representations of the country. He did not hesitate to charge the trader Wyeth with having gone over to the support of the Hudson Bay Company. Wyeth personally knew that Kelley was an educated man in good standing in Boston, and not to be thought of for an instant as a horse thief; and the neglect of Wyeth to assist a fellow countryman in such straits shows him to have been a coward and ingrate. And neither did the Methodist missionaries come to the rescue of the man who had so largely contributed to their undertaking their noble work in Oregon. But as McLoughlin had posted the letter of the Mexican governor up in the Willamette valley, and was all-powerful against everybody at that early day, the missionaries evidently concluded that "prudence was the better part of valor," and left their fellow christian patriot to sink or swim as best he could.

But after all his pains and heart-aches, he staggered once more to his feet, and in a most wretched, ragged and dilapidated condition, he commenced to look around in the land he had so extensively advertised as the best in the world. He had brought some surveying instruments with him, and on the peninsula between the Willamette and the Columbia rivers, where we have in our day seen but little but burnt out dead trees and stumps, with impassable scrub underbrush, Kelley walked under magnificent groves of tall firs, and made survey of the site for the great city he had proposed and which is noticed with the plat thereof on another page. This plat of Kelley's city was surveyed and located in about 1835 about where Francis I. McKenna's University Park addition is now located, and was the first surveyed location of a town north of California, west of the Rocky mountains. After surveying out his town site Kelley proceeded to make a survey of the Columbia river from Vancouver down to Astoria, and when he returned to the eastern states turned his survey over to the U. S. navy department. The Englishman, Lieut. Broughton, had made a survey of the river prior to Kelley's survey, but the Americans got no benefit of that as it was given only to the Hudson Bay Company and British war ships.