mination, well understood by all, that decided William Craig to quit his claim on the Clearwater, though on the best of terms with the Nez Percés. Bishop Blanchet also accompanied Ogden to the Willamette Valley, but Brouillet and Leclaire remained at the Umatilla until the 20th of February, when they too abandoned the country; and their property left among the Cayuses was destroyed.
The recipients of Ogden's favors were scarcely distributed among the homes of sympathizing friends in the Willamette Valley before the Presbyterians, with Spalding at their head, made an attack on the Hudson's Bay Company and the Catholic clergy, openly accusing them of conspiring with the Indians to destroy the Protestant missions in the interior; every act and word of either being turned into the acts and words of conspirators plotting death and ruin to Americans and Protestants. All were termed Jesuits, whether Jesuit, secular, or Oblate; and fertile imaginations, half crazed by horrors, were sown with suspicions the foulest and most unnatural. The Spectator being by its by-laws prohibited from entering into sectarian discussions, the Oregon American devoted its columns almost exclusively to the publication of the matter.[1] The results of its few weeks of existence continue to appear in the frequent assertions published and uttered even now that the fur company and the Catholic priesthood in Oregon were responsible for the tragedy of Waiilatpu, notwithstanding the facts.
The lack of motive on the part of the company,
- ↑ The Oregon American was not the only paper brought into existence about this time with the purpose of giving utterance to sentiments which were not admitted to the columns of the conservative Spectator, George L. Curry, after being dismissed from the editorial chair of that journal for reasons before mentioned, started the Oregon Free Press, a small weekly in which he printed as much truth, welcome or unwelcome to the Spectator, as pleased him. It ran only from April to December 1848. It was printed from a press made in the country, and with display type wrought out of wood by hand. Address of G. L. Curry, in Or. Pioneer Assoc., Trans., 1875, 72; S. I. News, ii. 123; Richardson's Missis., 411; Polynesian, v. 27; Portland Oregonian, April 30, 1872; Gilfry's Res. Or., MS., 25.
