There is no doubt that by forbidding the Canadian farmers to trade with Young, and himself refusing to sell to him, McLoughlin expected to drive from the country what he had been assured was a band of thieves, and so save trouble with the natives and injury to the settlers. But Young and Kelly gave to McLoughlin's conduct a different interpretation. Kelley said to Young, and all others who visited him outside the fort,[1] that it was opposition to American settlement upon political and pecuniary grounds. He so placed the matter before Jason Lee, who, he says, often clandestinely left the fort that he might converse freely with him on his plans; but Lee had obligated himself to retard immigration to the country by accepting a loan from McLoughlin for the purpose of opening a farm which should be a supply establishment for other missionary stations yet to be erected.[2]
- ↑ These were not many. Kelley dwells with proud sensitiveness upon his own countrymen's neglect of him. That Wyeth, whose name was on the catalogue of the 'American Society for Encouraging the Settlement of the Oregon Territory,' founded by Kelley, should not have bestowed some attention upon a man of his antecedents, even at the risk of opposing himself to McLoughlin, is significant. Kelley also reviles Townsend and Nuttall, who, he says, were the recipients of the company's civilities and liberal hospitality, and were receiving their 'good things,' while he was only receiving their 'evil things.' 'One of them,' he says, 'had resided in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for many years, within a mile of my place of abode, and had read my books, seen my works, and learnt more or less about the spirit which moved me. He was not ignorant of the fact that the only path leading to the country of pretty flowers west of the Rocky Mountains had been opened wholly at my expense, and his journey thither had been made easy and pleasurable through my means.' Cyrus Shepard was the only person from the fort in the habit of visiting Kelley. Kelley's Colonization of Oregon, 56, 58.
- ↑ Kelley's Settlement of Oregon, 59. While Kelley exhibits much excitement and jealousy in his remarks on Jason and Daniel Lee, we must admit that there was some foundation for the assertion that the Lees were 'opposed to persons coming to settle' in the Oregon territory, except such as should become members of the Mission, and aid in its purposes; and that his views were identical with those of McLoughlin, though their motives may have been different. Kelley blames the Lees for claiming to have begun the settlement of Oregon without respect to his previous efforts, and his simultaneous appearance in the country with a party of settlers; for their avoiding him while there; for disparaging remarks concerning him made in the east, which he construed to be an effort to deprive him of any credit as a pioneer of colonization; and for the small notice of him in Daniel Lee's book, where he is dismissed with three lines. This work, to which I must often refer as the earliest authority on this period of the history of Oregon, if the manuscripts of McLoughlin are excepted, is unfortunately divided in the authorship with a Mr Frost, who came to the country some years later than Lee, and is so arranged that without an intimate knowledge of the subject the reader is at a
