Page:History of Oregon volume 1.djvu/128

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HAUXHURST, WINSLOW, AND McKAY.
77

of education, but had spent many years in the mountains with the fur companies. He settled in Oregon, and took active part in affairs until the American element acquired ascendency. He farmed, went to California as master of the first vessel built in Oregon by American settlers, mined in California, returned to Oregon, and subsequently settled east of the Cascade Mountains, first in the Walla Walla Valley, and afterward in Eagle Creek Valley, on the eastern confines of the state of Oregon, where he died December 23, 1881 aged 92 years. Fond of exploring, he joined several expeditions in search of new mines during the excitement of 1862–7, but finally engaged in farming. A few months before his death he sold $2,000 worth of produce raised on sixteen acres of ground on Eagle Creek. Through all his life in Oregon he enjoyed the respect of his neighbors.

Hauxhurst, a native of Long Island, also stood well in the territory, especially with the missionaries, by whom he was converted in 1837. He built the first grist-mill in the Willamette Valley. McCarty and Carmichael were strongly opposed to the Hudson's Bay Company. None of the others appear to have been conspicuous in any direction, except George Winslow, the negro, who took an Indian wife and settled with her in a cabin on Clackamas Prairie, six miles below Oregon City, and raised a family of black red-skins. George assumed to be a doctor, and complained to subsequent emigrants to Oregon that the advent of Doctor Barclay of the Hudson's Bay Company had 'bust out' his business. He also sometimes repudiated his antecedents, and related how he came to Oregon in 1811 as cook to John Jacob Astor! Moss' Pioneer Times, MS., 13–16. Truth was never a conspicuous ingredient of his character, and in his large stories he sometimes seemed almost to forget his name; as ten years after his arrival in Oregon I find a negro calling himself Winslow Anderson living near Oregon City, and having some trouble with the Indians. Jean Baptiste Deportes McKay came with Astor's company, and settled at Champoeg in 1831.