Vermont Watchman And State Journal

Extract from a letter dated at Willamette, Oregon
Territory, February 19, 1841.

Communicated for the National Intelligencer.

I will tell you something of the people of this country. There are about seventy-five or eighty French Canadians settled in this country, principally discharged from the service of the Hudson Bay Company: there are also about 50 Americans settled in and about this country: making, perhaps, one hundred and twenty-five to one hundred and thirty male inhabitants, who are married to Indian women. They raise from their farms, on an average, from three to five hundred, and some from ten to twelve hundred, bushels of wheat besides great quantities of beans, potatoes, oats, barley, corn, &c. The Hudson Bay Company have in their employ at Fort Vancouver about one hundred and twenty-five persons, and many in several other forts both sides of the Rocky Mountains. These people, as I said before, are married to Indian women, and live very much the same, in all respects, as our farmers at home, with the exception of not being obliged to labor half as much; they generally have from fifty to one hundred head of horses, half as many cows, and about the same number of hogs; these all take care of themselves. These people here cut no hay and make no pastures; they do not give their hogs any feed excepting for about a month before they kill them. There is one church here, and the people have contracted for a brick church and other buildings necessary, such as a school house for the French and one for the Americans. The French have one priest here, and one at Fort Vancouver. The Americans generally attend at the mission, and, as far as I can see, the people here are as well behaved and moral as in our town. We have now a committee at work draughting a constitution and code of laws; have in nomination a governor, an attorney general, three justices of the peace, &c.; overseers of the poor, road commissioners, &c. We have already chosen a supreme judge with probate powers, a clerk of the court and recorder, a high sheriff, and three constables; so that you see we are in a fair way of starting a rival republic on this side of the Mountains, especially as we are constantly receiving recruits—those people whose time has expired with the Hudson Bay Company, and from the Mountain hunters coming down to settle.