Page:Portland, Oregon, its History and Builders volume 1.djvu/224

162 same service for Dr. Marcus Whitman, whom he also escorted from Fort Hall to Vancouver.

On the first day of September they emerged from the Blue mountains, and before night of September 2, they reached Fort Walla Walla, a post of the Hudson's Bay Company at the mouth of the Walla Walla river, where Wallula stands today. Here Jason Lee remained a guest of the company for a few days, and seriously considered the establishment of his mission at this point. It was the most desirable for an interior mission, as there was a numerous Indian population. Whitman subsequently established his mission a few miles farther east, at the place now known as Whitman, where he was killed in the Whitman massacre. But Lee concluded to go on with the Wyeth party, and they set out in flatboats, making the journey of 200 miles to Vancouver without serious difficulty, arriving there September 17th. Mr. Townsend, Prof. Nuttall (also a naturalist) and Mr. Lee's party of missionaries came on to Vancouver in the care of Captain McKay and John McLeod, who were in the service of the Hudson's Bay Company under Dr. McLoughlin. Wyeth and his party remained at Fort Hall. The missionaries had been placed under obligations for the food they ate to Captain McKay and the Indians of the country. Lee says in his diary: "The Indian women would bring food, and putting it down return without saying a word, as they speak no language we can understand." This season of scant fare was in their passage from the great basin of the Salt lake to the Snake river valley.

That night the missionaries slept in beds, in houses, for the first time in 150 days. They were the guests of a prince among men. Dr. John McLoughlin, chief factor of the Hudson's Bay Company, master of a territory that stretched from California to the Arctic and from the Pacific to Saskatchewan.

It is proper here to give some facts and perhaps some personal opinions of the Hudson's Bay Company, and its governor, and their relations to the enterprise of which Jason Lee was the leader.

The Hudson's Bay Company had been granted its charter "to trade, hunt, and fish in the waters of Hudson's straits, and all rivers tributary, and all lands and territories not already granted to other subjects of the king, nor possessed by the subjects of any other Christian prince or state." This charter was granted by Charles II in 1670. In the long term of years succeeding there were frequent conflicts between the Hudson's Bay servants and the French of Canada in the region of the great lakes and Saskatchewan, and a bitter struggle ^as going on in the beginning of the last century between the Hudson's Bay Company and the Northwest Fur Company, a Canadian enterprise. Many pitched battles occurred between the trappers of these rival concerns, but in 182 1 their differences were accommodated and the business was merged under the old name.

Dr. John McLoughlin had been an active partisan of the Northwest Company. He came to this coast as a factor or governor for the Hudson's Bay company in 1824, and founded Fort Vancouver as his central post and headquarters the same year, but not then upon the site subsequently occupied, but north of it at a distance of nearly a mile from the river. It will be remembered that the Northwest Fur Company had bought out Astor's post at Astoria during the last war with Great Britain. Dr. McLoughlin found the post at the river's mouth too remote from interior posts, and determined upon Vancouver as the most desirable site. His selection was most prudent, and the centralization of the business of the Columbia and Willamette valleys at Portland, separated only by the Columbia from the site chosen by Dr. McLoughlin, attests the sagacity of the great factor. To Fort Vancouver the trappers of the lower and upper Columbia, Cowlltz, Nisqually, Walla Walla, Spokane and more remote points, as