"To be placed in such a position was a misfortune which only a good man could bear in patience. I was assured by Mr. Frank Ermatinger, the manager of the Company's store at Oregon City, as well as by others, that Dr. McLoughlin had sustained a heavy individual loss by his charity to the immigrants. I knew enough myself to be certain that these statements were substantially true. Yet such was the humility of the Doctor that he never, to my knowledge, mentioned or alluded to any particular act of charity performed by him. I was intimate with him, and he never mentioned them to me." Col. J. W. Nesmith,[72] from whose address in 1876 I have already quoted, in that address also said:[73] "Dr. John McLoughlin was a public benefactor, and the time will come when the people of Oregon will do themselves credit by erecting a statue to his memory.... Thus far detraction and abuse have been his principal rewards." Hon. Willard H. Rees, a pioneer of 1844, in his address before the Oregon Pioneer Association, in 1879, said:[74] "Dr. McLoughlin, as director of the affairs of the Hudson's Bay Company west of the Rocky mountains, had more power over the Indians of the whole Northwest Coast, which he judiciously exercised, than all other influences multiplied and combined. He was a great and just man, having in no instance deceived them, firm in maintaining the established rules regulating their intercourse, making their supplies, so far as the Company was concerned, strictly depend upon their own efforts and good conduct, always prompt to redress the slightest infraction of good faith. This sound undeviating policy made Dr. McLoughlin the most humane and successful manager of the native tribes this country has ever known, while the Indians both feared and respected him above all other men.... Dr. McLoughlin was no ordinary personage. Nature had written in her most legible hand preeminence in every lineament of his strong Scotch face, combining in a marked degree all the native dignity of an intellectual giant. He stood among his pioneer contemporaries like towering old [Mount] Hood amid the evergreen heights that surround his mountain home--a born leader of men. He would have achieved distinction in any of the higher pursuits of life.... His benevolent work was confined to no church, sect nor race of men, but was as broad as suffering humanity, never refusing to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and provide for the sick and toilworn immigrants and needy settlers who called for assistance at his old Vancouver home. Many were the pioneer mothers and their little ones, whose hearts were made glad through his timely assistance, while destitute strangers, whom chance or misfortune had thrown upon these, then, wild inhospitable shores, were not permitted to suffer while he had power to relieve. Yet he was persecuted by men claiming the knowledge of a Christian experience, defamed by designing politicians, knowingly misrepresented in Washington as a British