The Governor and the directors of the Hudson's Bay Company apparently neither understood nor appreciated the conditions in Oregon in 1843, and in the immediate succeeding years, or Dr. McLoughlin's motives and humanity in assisting the immigrants. While the Governor in Chief and these directors were probably men of high character, and, individually, men of humanity, as representatives of this great trading company, they seemed to have considered Dr. McLoughlin's actions in assisting the American immigrants to settle in parts of the disputed Oregon Country by relieving their distresses, and saving them from suffering and starvation, as amounting almost to treason to his Country and as being untrue and false to the Hudson's Bay Company and its interests. They believed that he had failed to carry out its policies, if not its express instructions, which they felt he should have followed, as the chief of its enterprises west of the Rocky Mountains, no matter what the circumstances were or what the consequences might be. They did not seem to understand that, if the early immigrants had not been assisted, helped, and rescued, as they were, by Dr. McLoughlin, it might have been fatal to Fort Vancouver and precipitated a war between the United States and Great Britain. As has been already said the Hudson's Bay Company, under royal grant, had an absolute monopoly in trading with the Indians in what was called British America, that is, northward and westward of the United States, excepting the British Provinces and also excepting the Oregon Country. In the latter the Company had the exclusive right, under said grant, to trade with the Indians, but on the condition that it should not be to the prejudice nor exclusion of citizens of the United States, who had the right to be in the Oregon Country under the convention of joint-occupancy.[28] Undoubtedly the Governor in Chief and directors of the Hudson's Bay Company had a feeling that the Company and its trade should not be interfered with in the Oregon Country. For more than thirty years it and the Northwest Company, with which it had coalesced in 1821, had had almost absolute control of trade with the Indians in nearly all of the Oregon Country. Its practical monopoly there had been almost as complete as its actual monopoly in British America. The exercise of absolute power usually begets a feeling of a right to continue the exercise of such power. The head-officers of the Company resented the actions of Dr. McLoughlin which tended to weaken the power of the Hudson's Bay Company and to interfere with its control of the fur trade in the Oregon Country.