farms on French Prairie, some fifty miles up the Willamette Valley. They were still debtors to the Company and were in a quasi-dependent relation as the result of this and former conditions. There were about fifty of these Canadian settlers, thirty of them having families.[1] In close proximity there was a Methodist Mission station, connected with which there were some seventy-five people. There were about a score of independent missionaries in the valley. Scattered through the lower valley in possession of the more eligible sites for settlement were some forty-five men, three-fourths of them with Indian wives and half-breed children. Americans of roaming antecedents these were—remnants of the Astor and the Wyeth expeditions, and independent Rocky Mountain trappers and stranded seamen and explorers in whom the attractions of this far Western valley had awakened the spirit of settlement and the desire for a home.[2]
There were thus three rather sharply defined groups on the field when the first occasion for civil organization arose. In a community composed of such contrasted population elements organization would not be spontaneous. Some situation must be developed strongly constraining the establishment of a common authority over them, and its powers would be limited to just what the occasion required. This is what happened in 1841. However, the annual influx of home-seeking pioneers coming across the plains directly from the States soon submerged the earlier unassimilable groups. The first annual wave of this on-coming flood arrived in the fall of 1842 and brought an increase of one hundred and thirty-seven. The next year, 1843, eight hundred and seventy-five came. This was the "great migration," in that it settled definitely the political destiny of the country. The census of 1845 gives a population of 2,110 south of the
