This Red River colony was a part of the company's scheme to control and outnumber the American settlement of Oregon; it being connected with the Puget Sound concern, and under the control of the Hudson's Bay Company,--which, by the decision of the commissioners, has won the company $200,000 from our national treasury. A more infamous claim could not well be trumped up, and the men who awarded it should be held responsible, and handed down to posterity as unjust rewarders of unscrupulous monopolies. Not for this alone, but for paying to the parent monopoly the sum of $450,000, for their malicious misrepresentations of the country, their murders, and their perjury respecting their claims to it. As soon as the Red River colony reached the country, they found that the Hudson's Bay Company on the west side of the Rocky Mountains was a different institution from that of the Selkirk settlement; consequently a large number of the more intelligent among them refused to remain in the Puget Sound district, and found their way into the Wallamet and Tualatin districts, and were received and treated as Oregonians, or citizens of the provisional government. This had the effect to embitter the feelings of the ruling spirits of the company, and caused them to change their policy. They commenced fortifying Fort Vancouver, and had a war-ship, the _Modeste_, stationed in the Columbia River, while the fort was being prepared for defensive or offensive measures. This only increased the anxiety and hastened the effort to organize for self-defense on the part of the American settlers. In the mean time, Hon. Caleb Cushing, of Newburyport, Massachusetts, had sent to the country a ship with supplies. A. E. Wilson had established himself, or was about to, at Wallamet Falls as a trader, and some families were on their way by water from the States,--F. W. Pettygrove, Peter Foster, and Peter H. Hatch. Pettygrove arrived with a small stock of goods. The same ship brought a supply for the Methodist Mission. The settlers were not dependent upon the Hudson's Bay Company for supplies as much as has been asserted. I am certain that many of them never received a dollar's worth of the company's goods, except it might have been through the stores of Pettygrove, Wilson, or Abernethy. I know many of them were willing and did pay higher prices to their American merchants than they could get the same article for from the company's store, which was about this time established at Oregon City. Soon after, a trading-post and warehouse were established at Champoeg, and Mr. Roberts sent up with orders to _kick, change, and beat the half-bushel with a club_ in order to get more wheat at sixty cents per imperial bushel in payment for all debts due the company for the goods furnished to them at one hundred per cent. or more on London prices.