174 F. G. YOUNG
They were, all told, cultivating some 550 acres and had raised over 7,000 bushels of wheat the preceding season and kept 154 horses and 400 hogs. These settlers, "although freemen in every sense of the word [were considered] still subject to the protection and authority, otherwise thraldom of the Hudson Bay Company it being only necessary for the authorities at Vancouver to say, 'if you disobey my orders, your supplies shall be cut off," Mr. Slacum goes on to say, "and the settler knows at once that his few comforts, nay, necessaries of life, are stopped, rendering him more miserable than the savage that lurks around his dwelling." At the mission station the four men had 150 acres enclosed and had during the preceding sea- son harvested some 600 bushels of grain, 200 bushels of peas and 320 of potatoes. These missionaries were as much be- holden to and dependent upon the graciousness of Dr. Mc- Loughlin as were the ex-servants. Scattered in different direc- tions in this general region were some 20 independent Ameri- cans, some half a dozen of whom had separated themselves from the Wyeth expeditions of 1832 and 1834, nine or ten had come up from California with Ewing Young in 1834. The farm establishments of these excepting Young's do not seem to have impressed Slacum if he saw them.
Although Slacum does not mention the wreckage of an establishment at what had been Fort William on Sauvie's Island at the mouth of the Willamette, the vestiges of Nath- aniel J. Wyeth's two efforts to get a foothold in Oregon, the forces operating in the Oregon country to produce such results, this inspector did detect. For he says "some steps must be taken by our Government to protect the settlers and the trader, not from the hostility of the Indians, but from a much more formidable enemy, that any American trading house establish- ing itself on the Wilhamet or the Columbia would have to en- counter, in the Hudson Bay Company." On the other hand he admits "Mr. Lee acknowledges the kindest assistance from Dr. McLoughlin, of Fort Vancouver, who gave him the use of horses, oxen, and milch cows and furnished him with all his
