spatches from Admiral Seymour. It was rumored in Habana that the whole English squadron was making sail for the Columbia River; but the rumor did not, apparently, originate with Lieutenant Peel.[1]
Before one pair of spies quitted Vancouver another arrived. On the 28th of August appeared, unannounced, at the headquarters of the fur company, Lieutenant Henry Warre of the 54th, and Lieutenant Vavasour of the royal engineers, who had left England April 5th, and crossed the continent by way of Red River, Fort Pitt, and Fort Colville. They spent their time in apparent half idleness at Vancouver, surveying a little about the mouth of the Columbia, but in reality gathering information relative to the position of affairs between the British subjects and American citizens in Oregon. That which they learned was not at all satisfactory, as it afterward appeared; and their report, though doubtless tending, like that of Peel, to influence the English government in resigning its pretensions to the territory south of the 49th parallel, was damaging in its accusations against McLoughlin, as a British subject, if not as the head of the corporation he represented in Oregon.
It was charged, mainly, that the policy pursued by the Hudson's Bay Company at the different posts in the Oregon Territory had tended to the introduction of American settlers into the country until they outnumbered the British.[2] And to prove this position, they instanced the assistance rendered the different immigrations, one of which was arriving while they were at Vancouver. They had, it was said, sold
- ↑ Roberts describes Peel as a 'fine young fellow well bronzed, rather taller, but reminding me of young Dana, geologist of the U. S. exploring expedition. Peel died in India, in command of the Shannon.' Park, he says, was a 'well-knit man, capable of unlimited service, who probably had charge of Peel.' Neither was an officer of the America. Recollections, MS., 5.
- ↑ McLoughlin, in answer to this particular charge, says that ever since 1826, when Smith, Sublette, and Jackson led their trapping parties west of the Rocky Mountains, the Americans had outnumbered the British in Oregon. This would have been a point on the side of the American plenipotentiary had he known it.
