Columbia, particularly if the primary object was to curb the pretensions of the Puget Sound Agricultural Company.
A comfortable log house was ready for the reception of Richmond's family, and a tract of land was claimed on the creek between the fort and the sound. The place had many attractions, lying on the borders of a beautiful prairie skirted with flowering wild shrubbery, and divided from the sound by a belt of magnificent timber. In the vicinity was a picturesque lake where Wilkes celebrated the Fourth of July in 1841, and gave it the name of American Lake, which it still bears.[1]
The neighborhood of the fort, and of the large Steilacoom farm, held for sheep-raising by an Englishman named Heath, under a lease from the Hudson's Bay Company, redeemed the spot from the loneliness and savagery which made the Clatsop plains at first such an uninviting field. But for agricultural purposes the plain on which the mission was situated was almost worthless, being a bed of gravel covered with a light soil, soon exhausted, and requiring more rain to bring a crop to maturity than fell there during the summer.
It was not the want of success in farming which caused Richmond to ask for his discharge at the end of two years; but because the prospect of usefulness among the natives would not warrant his remaining as a missionary,[2] and he had not enlisted to spend his time and talents as a farmer. His family had suffered from the acclimatizing process, aggravated by the inconveniences of their rude manner of living; and on the 1st of September, 1842, he left for home in the American vessel Chenamas, bound for Newburyport, and the Nisqually mission was not long afterward
- ↑ The lake was never formally named; but on account of the American celebration and the residence of the missionaries, was called American Lake, and sometimes Richmond Lake, by the settlers of the Puget Sound Company. The prairie was also called the American Plains; and by the natives, 'Boston Illehee.' Evans' Puyallup Address, in New Tacoma Ledger, July 9, 1880.
- ↑ Lee and Frost's Or., 323.
