176 F. G. YOUNG
SLACUM'S MEDIATION REMOVES THE Two IMPEDIMENTS TO PROGRESS IN THE WILLAMETTE VALLEY
The situation was decidedly feudal so far as the Canadian settlers and the missionaries were concerned and them it did not chafe. Ewing Young would have none of it. No con- descension or patronage for him. He had been accustomed to association on a democratic basis. In a fair free-for-all allotment of roles he had regularly been accorded leadership. He naturally could not brook authority although exercised in as kindly and just a spirit as was Dr. McLoughlin's that had its source in a charter from the hand of the divine-right Stew- art as king of England.
Slacum found two related and yet somewhat distinct diffi- culties that called for adjustment if peace, progress and hap- piness were to dwell on the Willamette. One of these has been pointed out. Ewing Young provoked by the mistaken indictment continued against him had challenged autocracy with its presumptions that involved personal and social in- justice. The other factor in the situation calling for adjust- ment was a repressive economic policy enforced against all alike. The significance of the refusal of the Hudson's Bay Company to sell a head of cattle to any settler on the Wil- lamette can probably be best illustrated through reference to the niggardliness of nature to the aboriginal human species on the western continent. She failed to develop among its fauna any species of animals comparable to the wild horse, or the wild ox that could on domestication be made the burden bearer, the source of power for the cultivation of the soil and the source of nourishing milk for the young. (The bison or buffalo had spread over the northern half of the continent in very recent centuries.) It was mainly because of this disparity in the provisions for man on the two continents that had enabled the white man to distance in his progress in civiliza- tion the red man by half a millenium at the time of their meet- ing through the discovery of America by Columbus. 4
4 Payne, History of America, v. i, pp. 316-31.
