Fur Brigade to the Bonaventura
John Work's California Expedition of 1832-33 for the Hudson's Bay Company
Edited by Alice Bay Maloney
THE ORIGINAL manuscript of John Work's California expedition of 1832-33 for the Hudson's Bay Company is deposited in the Archives of British Columbia at Victoria, Vancouver Island. It is contained in two large notebooks and is carefully written and legible save for a few places made undecipherable by blots of ink. The books are probably copies of roughly kept notes from a smaller volume, since they show no evidence of the rough journey of fifteen months by canoe and horseback, and the handwriting is fairly uniform.
A grandson of John Work, the late Henry Huggins of Marshfield, Oregon, first called the attention of the writer to this diary. He had seen it at his grandmother's house when as a boy he was sent from his home at Fort Nisqually to school in Victoria. Investigation revealed that a transcript of a portion of the journal was in the Public Archives of Canada, at Ottawa. Photostats and permission to publish were generously furnished through Dr. Gustav Lanctot, Deputy Minister and Archivist. The original journals were later traced to Victoria, and through British Columbia Archivist W. Kaye Lamb (now librarian of the University of British Columbia) photostats of the remainder were secured and the transcript of the first part checked.
For assistance and information the writer is indebted to many scholars and institutions, government, state and county officials and to local historians in regions traveled by John Work on his long trail. His Honour, Judge F. W. Howay of New Westminster, British Columbia, cleared the pathway for generous cooperation accorded by the Canadian Archives, the Archives of British Columbia, The Provincial Library and the Historical Society of British Columbia. Other sources drawn upon for material were the Oregon Historical Society, the Washington Historical Society, the Bancroft Library at the University of California, the Huntington Library, San Marino, California, the California State Library, The Royal Canadian Museum, Toronto, Canada, The Hudson's Bay Record Society, the U. S. Forest Service, the National Park Service, the California State Highway Department, the Shasta County Historical Society, and the Franciscan Fathers of Old Mission, Santa Barbara, California.
Botanical notes were made by Miss Alice Eastwood, curator emeritus of
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