engaged in building a fort and trading post on Wapato Island, which he called Fort William. With him came others, of whom I shall have occasion to speak in another place. While the work was being advanced, the men in Wyeth's service were living in temporary huts; pigs, chickens, goats, and sheep were running about in the vicinity; the May Dacre was moored to the bank, and a prospective rival of Fort Vancouver was already well under way. Mr Wyeth's adventures are given at length in The Northwest Coast, this volume beginning with an account of settlers from the United States promising permanence.
Nor was Fort William the only settlement in Oregon exclusive of the Hudson's Bay Company's forts. Thomas McKay, one of the race of Alexander McKay of the Astor expedition, and one of the company's most celebrated leaders, occupied a farm on the Multnomah opposite the lower end of Wapato Island. And there were other farms from fifty to a hundred miles south of this. The servants of the company were hired for a term of years, and were free at its expiration. But as they had been obliged to receive their pay in kind, for which they had not always use, and had seldom saved their earnings, if they wished to retire they must live not far from Fort Vancouver, and continue as the company's dependents, raising wheat, in exchange for which they received such indispensable articles as their condition of life demanded.
There were of this class, commonly called the French Canadians, a dozen or more families, most of them settled on a beautiful and fertile prairie about forty miles south of the Columbia, in the Valley Willamette. They lived in log houses, with large fireplaces, after the manner of pioneers of other countries; had considerable land under cultivation; owned horses of the native stock, not remarkable for beauty, but tough and fleet; and had the use of such cattle as the
