Page:Portland, Oregon, its History and Builders volume 1.djvu/323



CHAPTER XIII.

1849— 1858.

The Hudson Bay Company Offers to Sell Out — Organization of Territorial Government — Lane Reaches Oregon City — The First Census of Oregon — The Territorial and State Seals — Effect of the California Gold — Cost of Goods — Character of Clothes — Territorial Progress — Discovery of Gold in Oregon — Organiza- tion of State Government — State Officials, Notices of.

Foreseeing that the aggressive Americans who had set up an independent American state in the heart of the Oregon wilderness, and surrounded on all sides by the forts of the Hudson's Bay Company, would sooner or later force the hand of the United States government and compel national suzerainty and thereby greatly depreciate, if not destroy the value of said company's possessions in Oregon, they set their agents to work to sell out to the United States. It was a cunningly devised scheme to make the Americans pay for a country they already owned. And the great wonder is, considering the disgraceful manner in which the Polk administration gave away one-half the American territory west of the Rocky mountains, that the Britishers did not get the American gold into the bargain.

At the time this proposition was broached, in 1848, the Oregon provisional government was informally represented at Washington city by Col. Joseph Meek, and J. Quinn Thornton. The bill for a territorial government had been agreed upon. And pending final action, Mr. Knox Walker, the private secretary of President Polk, brought to Mr. Thornton at his lodgings in Washington city, a Mr. George N. Saunders, introduced him, and left him with Thornton. Mr. Saunders then opened up his business proposition, which was in substance, that in view of pending legislation which might induce inharmonious relations in Oregon, the Hudson's Bay Company were willing to sell out all their possessions in Oregon for the sum of three million dollars, and depart in peace. And further- more if Mr. Thornton would favor and advocate such a composition of imaginary troubles he would be paid a fee of twenty-five thousand dollars. Thornton regard- ing this, according to his own account of it, as an attempt to bribe him to betray his country, threatened to kick Saunders down stairs ; whereupon Saunders departed without that trouble. Not content with this, Thornton wrote a vehement letter to the president, bitterly denouncing the whole business, whereupon, the president's private secretary came back and asked Thornton to withdraw his letter, which he refused to do.

That there was some foundation for this story, is presumable, from the fact that Sir George Simpson and Mr. Finlayson, representatives of the Hudson's Bay Company, visited Washington City at that time, and that on their leaving