Oregon a company of twenty-three families, or about sixty persons, from the Red River settlement, brought out under the auspices of the Hudson's Bay Company to settle on the lands of the Puget Sound Agricultural Company. They had left Red River about the first of June with carts, of which each family had two, and with bands of cattle, horses, and dogs. The men and boys rode on horseback, and the women and children were conveyed in the carts with the household goods. The whole formed a procession of more than a mile in length. They started twenty-eight days in advance of Simpson, who passed them at Fort Carlton, on the Saskatchewan, and they arrived about the middle of October at Nisqually,[1] where it was designed they should settle. But soon discovering the inferior quality of the soil in that region, they nearly all removed to the Willamette Valley, to the great disappointment of McLoughlin and other members of the Puget Sound Company.[2]
The failure of the Red River settlers to remain on the lands of the Puget Sound Company defeated whatever political design the formation of that organization favored, and during the year after their arrival added a considerable number to the Willamette settlements.
- ↑ Gray, in Hist. Or., 288, places the arrival of the Red River immigrants at Fort Colville in September 1842, one year after they passed that place. George T. Allan, a clerk of the company at Vancouver, who accompanied Simpson to the Sandwich Islands, went to Colville to meet them before Sir George returned from Stikeen. Roberts' Recollections, MS., 70; Tolmie's Puget Sound, MS., 24; Evans' Puyallup Address, in New Tacoma Ledger, July 9, 1880. Simpson speaks of treating their guide, a Cree, to a short trip on the steamer Beaver, on the sound, while he was at Nisqually in Oct. 1841. Nar., i. 241.
- ↑ Fitzgerald, one of the party, says that 'the treatment they received from Dr McLoughlin was such that after having been nearly starved under the paternal care of that gentleman, they all went over to the American settlement of the Willamette Valley.' Hudson's Bay Company, 14. This is more than even Gray can indorse, who says that to his certain knowledge McLoughlin extended to the Red River settlers every facility within his power; but that other leading members of the company were domineering and tyrannical, which was the cause of their leaving the supposed English portion of the territory. Hist. Or., 30. Applegate, in his marginal notes on Gray's history, says: 'The Red River settlers made no complaint of ill treatment, but removed from the sound to the Willamette because of the superiority of the soil and climate. Lee and Frost give the same reason. Or., 216.
