January, 1842, four American carpenters occupying a wooden hut left by the United States squadron near the mouth of the river, succeeded in constructing a little schooner of twenty tons, which they named the Young Oregon,[1] and with which they hoped to do some trading with California. It is doubtful if such a feeble ship can withstand the sea, and as to isolated commercial expeditions of Americans, we hesitate to believe that with their limited means they can seriously compete with the English company, whose power is strengthened by considerable capital and an excellent organization.
The American settlers are concentrated on the left bank of the Willamette near Lee's station. They constituted in the last months of 1842 a population of one hundred and fifty individuals, which, joined to those attached to the Methodists, makes a total of two hundred souls for the entire American population in the territory in dispute, while the Franco-English population subject partly to the Hudson's Bay Company increased at the same time to at least three thousand persons. Nearly all the Americans belong to the hardy class of backwoodsmen from the western United States. They arrived on the Columbia overland, having for the most part for all their goods only their rifle, and have married Indian wives. These are men courageous and patient, more skilful at hunting, wood cutting and carpentering than at agriculture. Some families, however, have come with wagons by the South Pass, and both in the territory and in the United States one may expect to see before many years a wave of immigrant population carried beyond the Rocky Mountains; but up to the present, as has been
- ↑ This must have been the schooner Star of Oregon, begun on Swan Island at the mouth of the Willamette, in 1840, finished in August, 1842; sailed for California, September 12, 1842, and there sold by the owners. The company who built it consisted of Jospeh Gale, R. L . Kilborune, Charles Marts, Pleasant Armstrong, Jacob Green, John Canan, Henry Woods, and Felix Hathaway. See Ore. Pion. Trans. 1891, p. 181; also Wilkes' Narrative, v. 4, p. 342.
