"Ne'er shall we see the fancy-haunted valley
Where twixt the dark hills, flows the pure, clear stream;
Nor ere around our Chieftain's banner rally;
Nor see the moon from loyal tombstones gleam.
"When our brave fathers, in the time long vanished,
Conquered and fortified the keep,
No seer foretold their children would be banished
That a degenerate lord might boast his sheep.
"Come foreign rage; let discord burst in slaughter!
Oh, then, for clansmen true, and broad claymores,
And hearts that would have given blood like water
That heavily beats along the Atlantic shore.
Fair these broad meads — these hoary woods are grand —
But we are exiles from our fathers' land."
Poor fools, blind to an opportunity for millions in the new country of their birth, they should have had a chief like John McLoughlin to advise them; as he did his Canadian brothers of French blood; whom as we know he both advised and assisted to take up land and settle on the south side of the Columbia, which advice and assistance made him, Dr. John McLoughlin, the nursing father of agriculture in Oregon.
Dr. McLoughlin, as time ripens the history of his life and labors in Oregon, appears in the highest sense the pioneer of its highest form of civilization. For reasons of morality he refrained from using intoxicants in trade. As manager of the trade of the Hudson's Bay Company he was compelled to wield the trade in his control so as to hold the field against rivals. But amongst them and amongst the missionaries, including all the various sects, he stands among men in the days without law in Oregon so much above the general level that the Doctor was like the Bald Eagle. This is what the Indians called him. Among wild fowl the physical image is apt; but an intimate study of his life as a man, his morals and business relations reveals him as rarely if ever descending to a lower plane. As a man I am glad to claim him as the first home builder in Oregon. With as much right to locate his home on the banks of the Willamette where and when he did and call it
