tember 10th, 1869, the commission awarded the two companies 1450,000 and 8200,000 respectively.[1]
Many of the old settlers in Oregon cherished a resentment against the Hudson's Bay Company for real or fancied wrongs and the thought of such immense claims being preferred by foreign corporations was exasperating. The feeling was intensified by the belief that the Hudson's Bay Company had intrigued against the interests of the United States during the joint occupation.[2] On the other hand, for one reason or another, the most of the land claims of the Protestant missions were forfeited because they were not actually occupied at the time of the passage of the land law. The title to all the stations of the American Board lapsed in this way except that to Waiilatpu, where the occupants had been massacred. In 1862 the Board put in a claim to Lapwai, Mr. Spalding's station in the Nez Percés country, but it was disallowed, and he devoted years to the effort to secure a reversal of the decision. That the mission claims should be rejected while those of the Hudson's Bay Company were recognized by the National Government seemed an outrage to Spalding.[3] To cap the climax, just about this time it came to his attention that an attack on the work of the missionaries of the American Board had been given an extensive publicity by being included in a public document.
- ↑ See J. B. Moore's International Arbitrations, I, 237-270.
- ↑ Cf . Gray's comment on the award: "A more infamous claim could not well be trumped up, and the men who awarded it should be held responsible, and handed down to posterity as unjust rewarders of unscrupulous monopolies. Not for this alone, but for paying to the parent monopoly the sum of $450,000, for their malicious misrepresentations of the country, their murders, and their perjury respecting their claims to it." Hist. of Oregon, 213.
- ↑ See his frenzied statement in some resolutions drafted by him and adopted by the Christian Church at Brownsville, Or., in 1869, and the almost equally excited preamble to another set of resolutions, in his Early Labors of Missionaries in Oregon, 56-59; see also pp. 70, and 78-80, in Senate Executive Doc. 37, 41st Cong., 3d Sess., 1871. This will be cited henceforth as "Executive Doc. 37." The claim of the American Board to 640 acres at Lapwai in the Nez Perces country under the act of Congress of Aug. 14, 1848, had been advanced in June 1862 by Cushing Eells acting as their attorney. Lapwai had been Spalding's station. See Executive Docs., 3d Sess. 37th Cong., II, 570-72.
