included remarks hostile to the PSA Company.[1] His resignation from the PSA Company became effective some time in September, 1851 and Henry Peers took charge of the Cowlitz Farm.[2] In October Roberts attended the Monticello Convention and signed the second memorial sent to Congress which requested the formation of a new territory north of the Columbia River.[3]
Leaving the Cowlitz Farm in October 1851, Roberts moved to his donation claim on the Newaukum, about seven miles away, where he lived until May, 1859. Here he farmed, as he says, without notable success—perhaps because no local market was available and transportation of his crops to distant markets was expensive, a problem common to most Oregon and Washington farmers. In 1853 with Seth Catlin, John R. Jackson, Fred A. Clarke, Henry N. Peers and Richard White, Roberts unsuccessfully asked the Oregon legislature to incorporate the Cowlitz Steamboat Company.[4] When the initial session of the Washington Territorial legislature met in 1854, however, it granted Catlin, Jackson, Clarke, Peers and Roberts the first charter for a steamboat company on the Cowlitz River. Unfortunately the incorporators were never able to put a steamboat on the river, probably for the same reasons as their immediate successors.[5]
- ↑ See introduction to his letters to Mrs. Victor, third paragraph. He was still a P.S.A. Company employee in August. Hostility toward Roberts, presumably in his position on the company farm at Cowlitz, was expressed at a Steilacoom meeting earlier that summer. Jos. S. Broshears (who attended the Cowlitz Convention) and W. P. Daugherty signed the proceedings of the 'meeting' which stated that "Tholmie" at Nisqually, agent of the P.S.A. Company, was holding that land for John McLoughlin and George Roberts, both American citizens. Oregon Statesman, June 6, 1851, 3:1, and Oregon Spectator, June 5, 1851, 2:4.
- ↑ Nisqually Journal, September 12, 1851: "Mr. Douglas & Mr. & Mrs. Peers set off for Cowlitz this Morning. Mr. Peers is to remain at Cowlitz in place of Mr. Roberts who has resigned." WHQ, XIII:293.
- ↑ Oregon Statesman, January 1, 1853, 2:2.
- ↑ The bill was indefinitely postponed, January 31, 1853. Papers of the Oregon Provisional and Territorial Governments, No. 4471.
- ↑ H. H. Bancroft, History of Washington, Idaho and Montana (San Francisco, 1890), 269n. The first steamboats on the river were those of the Monticello and Cowlitz Landing Steamboat Company and the Oregon Steam Navigation Company in 1864, Bancroft says. But the boats
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