Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 26.djvu/208

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154
Nellie Bowden Pipes

large kitchen garden filled with fruit trees adjoins the fort, around which are sown annually six hundred hectares.[1] On the shore are the sheds and a dock yard for barges, and boats, and at some hundred steps from the fort, the cabins of the employes. There are also at a short distance a dilapidated shed used as a hospital, barns, two sheep folds, a dairy, stables, granaries and a threshing-mill.

Two kilometers[2] above the fort and on a little ever-running stream, which flows into the Columbia, there has been built a grist mill and a sawmill which can cut three thousand feet of lumber a day. This mill employes a score of workmen, all Sandwich Islanders, and a proportionate number of horses, ox-teams and carts. Not far from the houses, but on the other side of the river are thirty lodges of the Flat Head Indians, who bring to the fort the products of their fishing and hunting. The total population of Fort Van Couver is seven hundred persons, of whom twenty-five are English and one hundred French-Canadian engages with their families. These whites, who for the most part are married to Indian wives, speak only the French tongue. As to the Chinooks, whose huts are in the neighborhood of Van Couver, they use a jargon formed of Indian words mixed with French words and some English expressions. As do all the other Indians of this Territory, the Chinooks distinguish readily at first sight the different nationalities of the whites; they designate the Spaniards of California by the name of Spagnols; and the English by that of Kinjor (corruption of the words King George) as being subjects of King George; they call the Americans Boston, doubtless because almost all of them come from this city; and the French-Canadians, Fransé or Pasayouk, that is to say "white faces," the French being

  1. A hectare is 2.471 acres.
  2. A kilometer is 0.6214 miles.