244 LOWNSDALE LETTER TO THURSTON
the arrival of Governor Lane on the 1st of March last they had continued to work their usual games of trying to get the Cath- olic Church in supremacy. This I do not object so much to, for I am always glad to see the churches keep pace with each other and thereby one keep the other in check, but whenever one gets the ascendency it then becomes dangerous to itself and the government and, in short, to religious as well as civil liberty. This makes perhaps the influence of the Hudson's Bay Com- pany at this time able to yet struggle with free principles and trade and they mutually will assist each other by degrees to overturn our government if permitted to receive the help of the United States in their designs. If they obtain what they aim for at present to receive every privilege of native born citizens and at the same time go so far as to enter a protest, as to a for- eign nation, to impressment where necessary, and to arm and mount forts with cannon avowedly to prevent the government from taking what they had a just right to have taken from them. As public supplies when they professed to be part and parcel of this government, and then share lands with us and take the first choice themselves it is preposterous. Hear what Peter S. Ogden says about the influence the Hudson's Bay Company has over the Indians among whom they planted the priests previous to Whitman's murder, when speaking of the purchase of the prisoners from the Indians, but as I have before said this has too often been manifest when among the Indians their property was safe and they (the Indians), well, all tell you that the Hudson's Bay Company had always told them that the Bostons came to steal their lands and horses and kill them and have always encouraged their robbery of the Americans, buying what they took from the Americans and thus encour- aged them to do so again, for the sake of the price of what they took. But hear what he says about the purchase of the prisoners "But the mead of praise is not due to me alone. I was only a mere acting agent of the Hudson's Bay Company, for, without its powerful aid and influence, nothing could have been effected, and to them the praise is due." (See Oregon Spectator, Vol. 3 ? No. 1.) It sickens my very heart when I think of the weak condition of Oregon at the time of the declaration of war with the Cayuses and yet they, after having encouraged all the continued robberies and finally these mur- ders, eleven in number, and they with their powerful influence used for what? for safety for Oregonian Americans? No! But to pull us down and give them a chance of a final grasp of this territory. But to continue our history at the proclama-
