CORRESPONDENCE 297
is the way, walk ye in it." We are all as Baptist ministers driven to the necessity of going to secular pursuits to give our families food, and but very insufficient raiment.
As a people, we are a colony removed far from all civiliza- tion and commerce, except what the small surplus products of our country attract. The consequence is a monopoly in commerce, very oppressive to the community. Our settlers are generally industrious, and should the Government grant them 'their lands, they are laying the foundation for wealth despite the temporary monoply in trade with which they are op- pressed. 112 As before stated, we have very few Baptist brethren who have been accustomed to see a minister sustained by the church, and those few are scattered so as to prevent anything like a systematic effort to aid in the support of the ministry. They love the gospel sound and delight in its ordinances ; but ministers must travel far from settlement to settlement to preach. This creates a large tax on the time of the man who must leave the word of God and serve tables. Added to this, the rainy season five or six months in the year renders the roads in this new country very difficult to travel, and when we travel by water we have to go in open boats and sleep in the open air, perhaps in wet blankets after rowing all day in the rains. These difficulties might and would be overcome were our hands liberated and our family cares abated. With the improvement of the country, the difficulties of travelling will soon be overcome, and are now probably as few as might reasonably be expected . . . Our white American popu- lation now numbers nine or ten thousand sottis scattered over a territory more than two hundred miles from Pugets Sound and this place to the headwaters of the Willamette, and is aided in science, religion and morals by only one printing press, and that issues a semi-monthly half sheet. 113 Its proprietors
112 Probably a reference to the Hudson Bay Company, which did most of the shipping at this time. Geo. H. Himes.
113 This was the Oregon Spectator which first appeared Feb. *, 1846 under the editorship of W. G. T' Vault. H. S. Lyman, Hist, of Ore. IV:2 79 . The spelling book was published Feb. i, 1847. There were 800 copies, none of which are known to be extant in their complete form. The book was an abridgement of Webster's Elementary Spelling Book, about two-thirds the size of the original. Geo H Himes Hist, of the Press in Oregon, in Ore. Hist. Soc. Quar. 111:347.
