farm was $4,217. The total value of all farm property was $4,908,588.
The story of the expansion of agriculture in the Pacific Northwest during the sixty years from 1850 to 1910 is not a simple account of the way the original number of farms was multiplied again and again, until the present total was reached. On the contrary, it is a complex, a picturesque, and at certain points a dramatic story of the colonization and development of an imperial area, diversified in its physical characteristics, in climate, and in natural productions.
Beginning of agriculture. The earliest cultivators of the soil, after the Hudson's Bay Company, were the retired French Canadian servants of the company who squatted on the rich second bench land along the Willamette some fifty miles from the mouth of the river, A district centring upon St. Paul, the site of the old Catholic Mission, is still known as French Prairie from the early French settlers.^
The Methodist Mission, and the colony which grew up about it, occupied land further to the south, but contiguous to French Prairie.
The companies of immigrants who came in annually, beginning in 1842, took up rapidly all the choicest lands to be found in the lower or northern parts of the Willamette Valley and pushed steadily southward until by the time of the California gold rush, 1848, their remoter settlements were nearly one hundred fifty miles
^ The earliest French farmer was Etienne Lucicr, who is said to have begun raising wheat on French Prairie in 1829.
