warehouse at Champoeg, to purchase the crops of the French Canadians. This course led to the establishment of a store at Oregon City by the Hudson's Bay Company, which was placed in charge of Frank Ermatinger; so it may be said that Pettygrove added two stores to that infant metropolis.
Mr Foster, from Maine, who also came from New York by the same ship which brought Pettygrove to the Islands, remained for a year or two at Oregon City, but finally settled sixteen miles up the Clackamas River, on the trail leading to the Dalles, his farm becoming a halting-place for the immigrants who took the Mount Hood road into the Willamette Valley.[1] Mack, who was a Massachusetts man, had been in Pacific waters for several years, trading and whaling. Being by vocation a carpenter, he found ample employment at Oregon City for three or four years, after which he settled on a farm ten miles east of that place, but finally removed to Salem.[2]
About the first of September there arrived in the
- ↑ Honolulu, S. I., Friend, Oct. 15, 1849.
- ↑ Mack's Oregon, MS., 1-3. This manuscript deals only with the author's private affairs, the substance of which here appertaining is given in the above paragraph. It confirms in some particulars Pettygrove's Oregon in 1843, MS.
Victoria, from New York, Captain John H. Spring, and from the Islands to the Columbia in the Fama, as above stated, the bark lying in the river opposite Vancouver for two weeks, and Pettygrove, who had come to Oregon prepared to find only oppression and hostility in all the acts of the fur company's officers, was compelled to remain a guest of McLoughlin and Douglas until some means offered of getting his goods conveyed to Oregon City. Having at length secured the service of the company's little schooner used for navigating the Willamette, he embarked cargo and family, and repaired to McLoughlin's office to inquire to what extent he was indebted for the favors extended to him. 'Show me your invoice,' said the doctor. I offered him a memorandum-book containing the number of packages shipped in the Fama from Honolulu. He looked it over, and remarked he could 'learn nothing from that.' I did not intend he should; and again asked for my bill of expenses. He made me a very low bow, and said: 'We are happy to receive such men as you in our midst; we charge you nothing.' I felt so humiliated by my unjust suspicions and his generous conduct, that I would gladly have dropped into the ground out of sight.' When the doctor found Pettygrove bought beaver-skins to ship to New York, he offered him all they were worth in that market, giving him a draft on Canada at 25 per cent discount, which offer was accepted. In 1846 McLoughlin asked Pettygrove to take his son David into partnership with him, to learn the American mode of business transactions, offering to furnish $20,000 capital as his portion of the partnership. This arrangement was finally made and continued for 2 years, when the firm was dissolved.
