194 F. G. YOUNG
leader of a band of horse thieves on the way to Oregon. The details of the rest of this story are familiar in the annals of Oregon. Not one of the narrators, however, has let his thought linger a moment on the plight of the victim of this unintended calumny.
The charge made by Governor Figueroa of California in the letter to Dr. McLoughlin was by him accepted as evidence adequate for conviction and sentence. Thus it stood for over two years. He was to be frozen out. The tactics employed meant his eventual banishment from American soil by forces lodged in a foreign monopoly that was exploiting American resources. He himself duly accredited with passports had at the head of companies of Americans for eight years been freely conducting enterprises of trade and exploitation on foreign soil. Here on American soil he was to be denied the pursuit of the means of happiness. It was too at the natural goal of all of his adventures. He could go no farther. The Oregon country was the real ultima thule. He must renounce all his hopes. But he would not have been a valiant American if he had. He naturally felt that he represented Americanism in the middle thirties in Oregon. The missionaries did not as they knuckled to the Hudson's Bay Company authorities.
Suppose we enter into the intent and course of Ewing Young as in the autumn of 1834 he approaches the Willamette valley settlement with his band of some eighty horses and mules. He was bringing to the settlers an available horse power supply for the cultivation of their fields and the transportation of their produce. He establishes his farm across the river from the mission and French Prairie settlements. His animals should not trample their grain fields or consume their pasture. The mission, the Hudson's Bay Company and its retainers on French Prairie, had need of his goods or means for production and he had need of clothes, tools, and other goods which they could spare in exchange. Surely the mutual advantage would be
