A History of Oregon, 1792-1849: Drawn From Personal Observation and Authentic InformationGray, W. H. (William Henry)
History
A History of Oregon, 1792-1849: Drawn From Personal Observation and Authentic Information
Gray, W. H. (William Henry)
Frontier and pioneer life -- Oregon; Oregon Territory -- History
The writer has seen liquor given and sold to the Indians at every post
of the company, from the mouth of the Columbia to Fort Hall, including
Fort Colville, and by the traveling traders of the company; so that
whatever pretensions the company make to the contrary, the proof is
conclusive, that they traffic in liquors, without any restraint or
hinderance, all over the Indian countries they occupy. That they charge
this liquor traffic to renegade Americans I am fully aware; at the same
time I know they have supplied it to Indians, when there were no
Americans in the country that had any to sell or give.
In the narrative of the Rev. Mr. King, it is stated that "the agents of
the Hudson's Bay Company are not satisfied with putting so insignificant
value upon the furs, that the more active hunters only can gain a
support, which necessarily leads to the death of the more aged and
infirm by starvation and cannibalism, but they encourage the intemperate
use of ardent spirits."
Says Mr. Alexander Simpson, one of the company's own chief traders:
"That body has assumed much credit for the discontinuance of the sale of
spirituous liquors at its trading establishments, but I apprehend that
in this matter it has both claimed and received more praise than is its
due. The issue of spirits has not been discontinued by it on principle,
indeed it has not been discontinued at all when there is a possibility
of diminution of trade through the Indians having the power to resent
this deprivation of their accustomed and much-loved annual
jollification, by carrying their furs to another market."
This means simply that Mr. Greenhow and all other admirers of the
Hudson's Bay Company's manner of treating Indians have been humbugged by
their professions of "_humanity and policy_."
We are inclined to return Mr. Greenhow's compliment to the Rev. Samuel
Parker in his own language, as found on the 361st page of his work. He
says: "Mr. Samuel Parker, whose journal of his tour beyond the Rocky
Mountains, though highly interesting and instructive, would have been
much more so had he confined himself to the results of his own
experience, and not wandered into the region of history, diplomacy, and
cosmogony, in all of which he is evidently a stranger." So with Mr.
Greenhow, when he attempts to reconcile the conduct of the Hudson's Bay
Company with "_humanity_," and admires their policy, and gives them
credit for honorable treatment of "Indians, missionaries, and settlers,"
he leaves his legitimate subject of history and diplomacy, and goes into
the subject of the Hudson's Bay Company's moral _policy_, to which he
appears quite as much a "stranger" as Mr. Samuel Parker does to those
subjects in which Mr. Greenhow found him deficient.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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