Page:Portland, Oregon, its History and Builders volume 1.djvu/269

Rh fide assignees, accurate descriptions of these claims, which were in due course confirmed by government patents. The first settlers in Oregon, both British and American, were doing precisely the same thing to secure their homes and farms; and it was one of the objects of forming the provisional government to provide for the recording of all these claims to the end that strife and litigation might be prevented. The provisional government had already before Overton set up a verbal claim to the land provided for this registry of claims. Overton had not compiled with that law, but gave Lovejoy half of his inchoate right, whatever it might be, to go ahead and comply with the law, and which Lovejoy did. Lovejoy is then in truth and fact the founder of Portland, Oregon, for it was he who secured the title to the land for a townsite, and originated the townsite proposition.

Amos L. Lovejoy was a native of Groton, Mass., a graduate of Amherst College, a relative of the prominent Lawrence family of the old bay state, studied law, read Hall Kelley's descriptions of Oregon, and started west. Making a halt in Missouri, he commenced the practice of law in that state. But falling in with Dr. Elijah White, who had been appointed some kind of an Indian agent for Oregon, Lovejoy crossed the plains and came to Oregon in 1842, with the party of Dr. White, and in which party he acted as one of the three scientific men to record all cheir experiences and discoveries on their journey through the wilderness. On reaching Oregon, Lovejoy fell in with the missionary, Dr. Marcus Whitman. And here we must record one of the most remarkable episodes in the pioneer settlement of this state. For no sooner had Lovejoy reached the Walla Walla valley than Whitman besought him to return to the states with him (Whitman) as a companion. Not one man in ten thousand, for love or money, would have undertaken that trip in the approaching winter, after just finishing a like trip from Missouri to Oregon. But he yielded to Whitman's entreaties, starting to the states in the month of November, and reaching Missouri in February, by the southern route through Santa Fe, Mexico, and suffering every imaginable trial, privation, danger and distress while living on dog meat, hedge-hogs, or anything else of animal life that would sustain their own lives. In May following his return to Missouri, Mr. Lovejoy joined the emigrant train of 1843, and again returned to Oregon, arriving at Fort Vancouver in October. He had thus made three trips across the western two-thirds of the continent, over six thousand miles in travel, on horseback altogether, suffering all the trials and dangers of the plains, being once taken prisoner by the Sioux Indians, and breaking all records in overland Oregon trail travel, in the space of seventeen months. And such was the courageous and determined character that founded Portland, Oregon.

In organizing and maintaining the provisional government, Mr. Lovejoy took a leading, useful and honorable part. He occupied first and last nearly every office in the government, and was elected supreme judge by the people, and was exercising the duties of that office when the United States finally extended its authority over the territory in 1849.

Francis W. Pettygrove, who joined Mr. Lovejoy in developing the Portland townsite, was born in Calais, Maine, in 1812; received a common school education in his native town, and engaged in business on his own account at an early age. At the age of thirty years, he accepted an ofifer to bring to Oregon, for an eastern mercantile house, a stock of general merchandise, suitable for this new country. Shipping the merchandise and accompanying the venture with his family on the bark Victoria, he reached the Columbia river by the way of the Sandwich Islands, transferring his merchandise at Honolulu from the Victoria to the bark Fama. This vessel discharged cargo at Vancouver, and Pettygrove had to employ a little schooner owned by the Hudson's Bay Company to carry the goods from Vancouver to Oregon City. After selling out this stock of merchandise, Pettygrove engaged in the fur trade, erected a warehouse