Page:The Round Hand of George B. Roberts.djvu/2



This double number of the Quarterly is a special issue of material by and related to George B. Roberts, resident of the Pacific Northwest from his shipboard arrival in 1831 as a fifteen-year-old Hudson's Bay Company apprentice. Except for time spent returning to England and bringing out his bride, Roberts lived in the Northwest from 1831 until his death in 1883. During these memorable years he participated in the British Company's success and control in the Pacific Northwest, witnessed the challenge of American trappers and traders by land and sea, the arrival of the first American missionaries and settlers in the Oregon Country, their eventual dominance and the Company's decline and departure.

Like Chief Factor John McLoughlin, Roberts was among those Hudson's Bay and Puget Sound Agricultural Company officers who became American citizens rather than leave the region which had become their home and where they had families and interests. But he was a younger man than McLoughlin when Oregon became part of the United States, not as high in Company ranks, and with less to lose. As aid, clerk, and a "general factotum" to McLoughlin and James Douglas, as well as at the Cowlitz Farm, he had experience in keeping records of Company business and in managing the assorted labor force—mainly Indians, Sandwich Islanders and French-Canadians, with a few Scotch and English. He grew into a likeable, civilized, orderly and responsible man—perhaps more of a democrat and American than he realized or could admit in the face of later events. As a Company clerk, however, Roberts' ultimate supporting authority was the formidable power of the Company exercised through the personalities of the chief officers in the Department of the Columbia. The success of work he directed depended on controls or an accepted rule of law which the Company provided for its employees. When that 'law' was destroyed, the American frontier law which replaced it had certain practical vacuums in regard to British relicts.

Roberts, like McLoughlin, had some bitter experiences