LIEUTENANT HOWISON REPORT ON OREGON, 1846 33
The Hudson's Bay Company had information of consultations held on the south side of the river, in which the agrarian prin- ciple of division of property found some advocates, and per- haps they had some grounds to apprehend that their extensive storehouses of dry goods, hardware and groceries might be invaded ; in addition, therefore, to their own means of defence, they procured from the British government the constant at- tendance at Vancouver of a sloop-of-war. This vessel an- chored there in October, 1845, and I left her there in January, 1847. She, however, I understood, was under orders to leave the river, and her commander, who had once struck on the bar, and narrowly escaped with the loss of false keel and rud- der, only awaited the good weather of spring to attempt to get out.
The company's agents expressed to me their fervent hopes that the United States would keep a vessel of war in the river, or promptly send out commissioners to define the bounds of right and property under the treaty. They have been exces- sively annoyed by some of our countrymen, who, with but little judgment and less delicacy, are in the habit of infringing upon their lands, and construing the law to bear them out in doing so. An individual, and a professor of religion, too, had been ejected by our course of law from a "claim" of the com- pany's, and costs put upon him ; but having nothing, the costs had to be paid by the plaintiffs ; which was scarcely done when the same person resumed his intrusive position ; and as he called himself now a "fresh man," the same formula of law must be gone through with to get clear of him, and so on ad infini- tum. In a case where an American was confined one night in the fort for this sort of pertinacity, and refusing to give secur- ity that he would forbear in future such forcible entry upon the land, he instituted an action for damages for false imprison- ment; but as no notice of suit had been served on the commit- ting magistrate, and as I expostulated with the man on the sub- ject, I believe he gave over the idea. These and many other similar acts arose from a belief that the Hudson's Bay Com-
