Hall Jackson Kelley 47
Kelley supplied the answer, which to his mind at least was convincing. "Its interest conflicted with those of certain fur companies, British and American, and of persons concerned in the commerce of the N. Pacific."*' Then there was "the hire- ling press."
"It was represented in the leading newspapers and periodi- cals that Kelley was deceiving the people — ^his plans were chimerical — was an idle schemer — a mad man; that hardship and privations would attend at every step the expedition; and that perpetual suffering would be the lot of young and old through the first generation. By such falsehoods and calumnies as these, I was made the object of scorn and con- tempt of persons of every age and rank — ^the derision of youth whose fathers I would have 'disdained to have sit with the dogs of my flocks.' "*•
This abuse was not confined to the ephemeral newspapers. It extended even to the dignified New England Magazine, which in February and April, 1832, published two articles*^ from the pen of a writer who chose to hide behind the initials "W. J. S." To find the equal of this writer in bitter denuncia- tion coupled with smug confidence in his own point of view, we must go back to JeflFrey and the Edinburgh Review. In one particular, however, the caustic Scot differed from his Yankee contemporary; he had vision. To the mind of our new-world tory, civilization had arrived at its apogee about 1832. It remained for all comfortable New Englanders to be content with their lot, and for all others to rest assured that whatever they might lack at home among their own people, they were unlikely to find elsewhere. There have been such
I $ Petition, 1866: a. '*Tb« literary bureau of the Hudson's Bay Company, moreover, took especial pains to collect and i-epublith everything derogatory to Oregon which was said on either side of the Atlantic, but parncularly on the American side. From 1800 to 1846 it pursued the same policy in Oregon which it had practiced in Canada for two centuries. For the protection of the beaver it used all its power to keep settlers out'* — Harvey, On the Road to Oregon, Atlantic Monthly, C V, 634.
16 Kelley, Hist, of the Colonisation of Oregon, 20; Wyeth, \2.
17 Kelley also referred to an article published in February. 1831. — Settlement of Oregon, 24. But the first number of the magatine was not ittiied until July, it3«.
