They also have two migratory trading and trapping establishments of fifty or sixty men each. The one traps and trades in Upper California; the other in the country lying west, south, and east of Fort Hall. They also have a steam-vessel, heavily armed, which runs along the coast, and among its bays and inlets, for the twofold purpose of trading with the natives in places where they have no post, and of outbidding and outselling any American vessel that attempts to trade in those seas. They likewise have five sailing vessels, measuring from one hundred to five hundred tons {258} burthen, and armed with cannon, muskets, cutlasses, &c. These are employed a part of the year in various kinds of trade about the coast and the islands of the North Pacific, and the remainder of the time in bringing goods from London, and bearing back the furs for which they are exchanged. One of these ships arrives at Fort Vancouver in the spring of each year, laden with coarse woollens, cloths, baizes, and blankets; hardware and cutlery; cotton cloths, calicoes, and cotton handkerchiefs; tea, sugar, coffee and cocoa; rice, tobacco, soap, beads, guns, powder, lead, rum, wine, brandy, gin, and playing cards; boots, shoes, and ready-made clothing, &c.; also, every description of sea stores, canvas, cordage, paints, oils, chains and chain cables, anchors, &c. Having discharged these “supplies,” it takes a cargo of lumber to the Sandwich Islands, or of flour and goods to the Russians at Sitka or Kamskatka; returns in August; receives the furs collected at Fort Vancouver, and sails again for England. The value of peltries annually collected in Oregon, by the Hudson Bay Comp., is about £140,000 in the London or New York market. The prime cost of the goods exchanged {259} for them is about £20,000. To this must be added the per centage of the officers as governors, factors, &c. the wages and food of about four hundred men, the expense of shipping to bring supplies of goods and take back the returns of furs, and two years’ interest on the investments. The Company made arrangements in 1839 with the Russians at Sitka and at other ports, about the sea of Kamskatka, to supply them with flour and goods at fixed prices. As they are now opening large farms on the Cowelitz, the Umpqua, and in other parts of the Territory, for the production of wheat for that market; and as they can afford to sell goods purchased in England under a contract of fifty years’ standing, 20 or 30 per cent cheaper than American merchants can, there seems a certainty that the Hudson’s Bay Company will engross the entire trade of the North Pacific, as it has that of Oregon.