Two hundred miles south of the Columbia, La Framboise descended from a high ridge of mountains down to a little plantation on the banks of the Umpqua, the fortalice of old Fort Umpqua. Carronades peeped from the donjon tower. Tom McKay built it after that disaster to the American trappers sometimes they called it Fort McKay. Here a solitary white man ruled the Umpqua. Jules Gagnier was a Frenchman, the son of an honorable and wealthy family in Montreal. In vain they made efforts to reclaim him from his wanderings and his Indian wife. Hither, twice every year, La Framboise came, twenty miles off his trail, to bring Gagnier Indian goods and to carry away his beaver. Here, summer and winter, year in and year out, the jolly, genial Frenchman traded with his red friends and cultivated his little patch of garden. Such were the first white men who broke the way for pioneers on the northwest coast.
La Framboise's brigade wound along gorges and canyons, through the Rogue River valley with its orchards of sunlit manzanita and hillsides of gnarled madrono and chinquapin, into the Switzerland of America, where Mt. McLoughlin on the summit of the Cascades was the most conspicuous landmark on the southern trail. One more pull over the Siskiyous and they have crossed the Spanish border. As a rule the brigades started early, to avoid the snows of Shasta, where once they lost the whole of their furs and three hundred horses. All day long, for days and days, the triple peaks of Shasta watched them winding down the Sacramento. La Framboise set his traps. Sutter's men began to look with unfriendly eye upon the intruders from the Columbia, but the Hudson's Bay Company had a permit from the Spanish Governor Alvarado.
