Conquered and fortified the keep,
No seer foretold their children should be banished,
That a degenerate lord might boast his sheep.
Oh, then for clansmen true, and broad claymores!
And hearts that would give blood like water,
That heavily beat against the Atlantic shores.
Fair these broad meads; these hoary woods are grand,
But we are exiles from our Fatherland.
The above was revived and quoted by a Colonel Berrie, near Toronto, Canada, to fill a regiment of Highland Scots to go to India against some troublesome Sikhs about 1885, and read by a wounded piper sitting in a pass of the Himalayas playing the "Cock of the North." If this story be true, the date of its making was 1829, the date of Dr. McLoughlin's claim to the site of Oregon City.
Not a word of war spirit, but a country as large as Europe, was abandoned, so far as known, on the 4th of April, 1814. The energy and practical good sense, which men esteem, left Fort George, or Astoria, and arrived at Fort William with the Franchere party on the 14th of July, and returned to Fort George in the autumn of 1824, in the person of Dr. John McLoughlin, who left the Chief Factorship of Fort William. He had the service of Peter Skene Ogden as chief trader. The first seed came to Dr. McLoughlin from Fort York and was sown near Vancouver while the new fort was under way. The most common date agreed upon of McLoughlin's beginning to plant his ex-engagees on farms in 1825.
JOHN MINTO.
