Page:The History of Oregon Bancroft 1888.djvu/28

10 Oregon City. But it made no material progress till a conjunction of remarkable events in 1848 called it into active life and permanent prosperity. Before this happened, however, Lovejoy had sold his interest to Benjamin Stark; and Daniel Lownsdale in September of this year purchased Pettygrove's share, paying for it $5,000 worth of leather which he had made at his tannery adjoining the town-site. The two founders of Portland thus transferred their ownership, which fell at a fortunate moment into the hands of Daniel Lownsdale, Stephen Coffin, and W. W. Chapman.

In 1848 Henry Williamson, the same who claimed unsuccessfully near Fort Vancouver in 1845, employed P. W. Crawford to lay out a town on the present site of Vancouver, and about five hundred lots were surveyed, mapped, and recorded in the recorder's books at Oregon City, according to the law governing town-sites; the same survey long ruling in laying out streets, blocks, and lots. But the prospects for a city were blighted by the adverse claim of Amos Short, an immigrant of 1847, who settled first at Linnton, then removed to Sauvé Island where he was engaged in slaughtering Spanish cattle, but who finally took six hundred and forty acres below Fort Vancouver, Williamson who still claimed the land being absent at the time, having gone to Indiana for a wife. The land law of Oregon, in order to give young men this opportunity of fulfilling marriage engagements without loss, provided that by paying into the treasury of the territory the sum of five dollars a year, they could be absent from their claims for two consecutive years, or long enough to go to the States and return.

In Williamson's case the law proved ineffectual.