and nose of the Hudson's Bay Company, who had already begun to give farms to some of its retired servants in the Garden of the West, the Wallamet Valley.
It was the policy of the Hudson's Bay Company to treat all Americans who came into their neighborhood, or demanded their hospitality, with the greatest courtesy. They only required that none of these adventurers should attempt to trade with the Indians, whom they had brought into subjection to themselves. Competition they would not have: it would ruin their business, and open the way for American settlement. But with missionaries—why, the case was different. Accustomed as the English all are to revere the Church and its ministers, the officers of the Hudson's Bay Company were prepared to receive the missionaries with even more than their accustomed hospitality and courtesy. Plain men as they were, the right hand at the Governor's elegant table, and the best of lodging, with every privilege of gentlemen, were accorded to them, and the kindest offers of assistance freely made to forward the establishment of their mission.
Fatal misapprehension! In the next ten years, in spite of the restrictions with which the Company, now alarmed, surrounded the embryo settlement, it had become a colony of actual settlers, tillers of the soil, hardy American frontiersmen, who, with the mission—now a mission only in name—for a nucleus, had already arrived at the consideration of a plan for a Provisional Government. The rapid secularization of the Methodist Mission had been an event entirely unforeseen, and the British Government was once more outwitted, or, as we contend, quietly set aside by Destiny.
But the Methodist was not the only mission with which the Hudson's Bay Company had to contend. The Presbyterian Church, moved by the same tales of Indian aspirations which had inspired the Lees to undertake their conversion, had found a small company of devoted souls willing to give their lives to the service of God in the wilderness. Of this company Dr. Marcus Whitman was the leader and governing spirit. Choosing differently from the Lees, he stationed himself east of the Cascade Range, between that and the foot of the Rocky Mountains, where he built up a mission, with several collateral ones, and faithfully taught the God-seeking savages, who brutally murdered him in return, after eleven years of labor.
Dr. Whitman, though a devoted Christian servant, was a no less ardent American. A favorite at Fort Vancouver, the head-quarters of the Hudson's Bay Company, he had many opportunities of acquainting himself with the feeling which animated its officers as subjects of Great Britain; and no one more heartily desired a rapid American settlement than he. Many were the efforts he put forth to induce immigration by making the proper representations to all who came in his way, and by means of correspondence with the East.
Nor was Congress idle at this time. Being pressed for a settlement of the boundary question, Mr. Webster and Lord Ashburton were holding long and secret negotiations, while certain Congressmen and Senators were continually "agitating" to prevent an ill-advised cession of territory, and to induce immigration to Oregon. Although little was known of what was transpiring officially, the secret rivalry ran high, and in 1842–3 the interest felt in the question of the Oregon boundary was intense. The following incident will best illustrate to what expedients British and American subjects were impelled by a desire to "come out ahead:"
In the autumn of 1842, Dr. Whitman happened to be dining at one of the Hudson's Bay Company's posts, only a few
