nine French settlers, signers of this petition, are the oldest and richest, and it does not seem unlikely that their example may lead others to free themselves from English authority and the monopoly of the Company. It must be said also that most of the settlers at the Willamette have trapped beaver a long time in California, in the Sacramento valley and San Francisco Bay; they all know that that country is preferable to this on account of its fertility, and its freedom from malarial fevers, which sometimes decimate the population of the Willamette, and the greater part of them would ask nothing better than to go there and stay if they were sure of finding there efficient protection.
CHAPTER VIII.
The Americans, as well as the English, early appreciated the expediency of founding establishments on the Northwest coast; and before going into the diplomatic question we will describe rapidly their possessions in these parts, and give a history of them.
For a long time the problem of communication between the two coasts of America had occupied our governors of New France and the Mississippi. In 1674, Count Frontenac, thinking that the Mississippi emptied into the Gulf of California, had ordered Joliet to explore it. It was the realization of this same idea that dictated the voyages of Father Hennepin and of Lassalle [La Salle]. In one of his journeys to Hudson's Bay, about 1699, d'Iberville finding himself at Fort Bourbon and thinking that by traveling westward he would be able to gain the Western ocean, for this purpose sent one of his
