All that North was a land of fat and pemmican, pemmican "straight" (uncooked), and pemmican fried, pemmican flakes, pemmican soup, and pemmican spiced with berries, inviting the hungry trader to "cut and come again." On the Columbia it was salmon, fresh salmon, dried salmon, salt salmon.
"'The country must find provisions,' was Napoleon's motto; let it be ours," said Dr. McLoughlin.
He set his men to ploughing gardens. Out of the virgin mould there leaped such prodigies of grain and vegetables, such an abandon of peas and turnips and all good things, that even five hundred inmates of the fort could not consume it all. Now the first orchard blossomed on the coast, the handful of wheat had become a harvest that filled the bursting granaries, and a few cattle brought up on the schooner "Cadboro' "from California had multiplied into herds that covered the hillsides.
The question of export came up. The doctor's scheme widened.
"Why may not I supply those Russians at Sitka that send half round the world for butter, beef, and flour? "
But there was trouble with the Sitkans. A long strip of Alaska ran down the northwest coast and cut off the Hudson's Bay lands from the sea. One day Peter Skeen Ogden attempted to pass through the Russian shore-strip.
"Boom! "went the Russian gunboats that guarded the Stikine.
"I shall enter the river. I have a right to it," said the Hudson's Bay trader.
"Then I must fire upon you," came Baron Wrangell's answer.
Ogden stormed back to Fort Vancouver, and complaint was sent to England. The London papers were
