First, "The great white-haired Chief," Dr. McLoughlin, was sacrificed because he was a friend of Whitman and the Missionaries. There was no other reason. If Dr. McLoughlin could have been induced to treat the Protestant Missionaries as he treated the American fur traders, his English Company would have been delighted to have retained him as Chief Factor for life. But with them it was a crime to show kindness to a Protestant Missionary, and thus foster American interests. If McLoughlin had not resigned and got out of the way, he would doubtless have lost his life by the hands of an assassin. The Treaty was signed and proclaimed August 6th, 1846, and the massacre did not occur until the 29th of November, 1847. In those days the news moved slowly and the results, and the knowledge that England and the Hudson Bay Company had lost all, did not reach the outposts along the Columbia until late in the Spring of 1847. If the English and Hudson Bay Company had nothing to do in fanning the flame of Indian anger, it was because they had changed and reformed their methods. How much or how little they worked through the cunning and duplicity of Jesuit priests has never been demonstrated. After the Revolutionary War, England never lost an opportunity to incite the Indians upon our Northern frontier to make savage assaults. Her humane statesmen denounced her work as uncivilized and unchristian. General Washington, in a published letter to John Jay, in 1794, said: "There does not remain a doubt in the mind of any well-informed person in this country, not shut against conviction, that all the difficulties we encounter with the Indians, their hostilities, the murders of helpless women and children along our frontiers, result from the conduct of the agents of Great Britain in this country." At no time then had the English as much reason for anger at American success and prosperity as in the case of Oregon, where a great organization, which has been for well-nigh half a century in supreme control, was now compelled to move on. To have shown no resentment would have been unlike the representatives of England in the days of Washington. Undoubtedly the sickness of the Indians, that year, and the charge that the Americans had introduced the disease to kill the Indians off and get their land, was a powerful agent in winning over to the murderers many who were still friendly to the Missionaries. The Indians had fallen from their high mark of honesty of which Mrs. Whitman in her diary, years before, boasted, and had invaded the melon patch and stolen melons, so that the Indians who ate them were temporarily made sick. With their superstitious ideas they called it "conjuring the melon," and the incident was used effectually to excite hostilities.