up the valley would have been preferable.[1] In October 1842, the Island Milling Company had erected a saw-mill on the island part of McLoughlin's claim, intending to follow it as early as possible with a grist-mill.[2]
McLoughlin now became satisfied that it was the intention of the missionaries to seize his land, and deprive him of his rights. Hence to save his interests he built a saw-mill on the river bank near by, and gave notice that a grist-mill would soon be added. Indignant at what they chose to term the arbitrary proceedings of the Hudson's Bay Company monopoly, a petition to congress was framed. This was done by George Abernethy, who kept the Mission store at Oregon City, and from notes furnished chiefly by Robert Shortess,[3] a convert of the Mission before Lee had turned his attention to colonization and self-aggrandizement. The memorial is known as the Shortess petition, for Abernethy was unwilling to have his own name connected with it, and to avoid this it was copied by Albert E. Wilson, employed in an American trading-house established in Oregon City in 1842.[4]
This petition was of considerable length, and set
- ↑ 'This is the best site in the country for extensive flouring or lumber mills.' Farnham's Travels, 172.
- ↑ Crawford's Missionaries, MS., 25–6; McCrackens Early Steamboating, MS., 6.
- ↑ Robert Shortess was a native of Ohio, but emigrated from Missouri. He arrived in 1839 or 1840 alone, or nearly so. I find him writing a letter to Daniel Lee in January 1841, in which he announces his conversion to God from a state of gloomy infidelity. He was a man of good attainments and extensive reading, but possessed an ascetic disposition and extreme party feelings. He immediately adopted the anti-Hudson's Bay tone, and maintained it, as it suited his temperament. He invented the phrase 'salmon-skin aristocracy,' as applied to the gentlemen of that company. Gray, who thoroughly sympathized with his anti-British spirit, says that he and many others should have a pension for maintaining the rights of Americans on the west coast. Shortess and Gray represented the extreme of American fanaticism. Shortess died in 1877 near Astoria, where he had lived as a recluse. Gray's Hist. Or., 297; Strong's Hist. Or., MS., 35; Applegate's Views, MS. 38; Ashland, Or., Tidings, Sept. 14, 1877; Crawford's Nar., MS., 135; White's Emigration to Or., MS., 5, 6.
- ↑ Such is the statement of Shortess made to Elwood Evans by letter in 1867. Abernethy was afraid that his standing with the fur company would be injured if his connection with the petition was known. Evans' Hist. Or., MS., 260.
