Such an estimate by American statesmen was all right to the Hudson's Bay Company. They wished such an estimate and had taken pains to foster it. But while the gullible American statesmen were thus accepting just the version which their rivals were disseminating, the hard-handed and hard-headed, though not hard-hearted frontiersmen of Missouri and Illinois and Iowa were packing their ox-teams and starting across the desert for that Sahara on the Columbia River. Also one Marcus Whitman, a missionary physician of the Walla Walla, was floundering in the snows of the Sierra Madre and crossing the Arkansas through broken ice, in order to tell the benighted statesmen what the land of the Oregon really was like. The American people were busy, and the statesmen looked askance. And so, a few here and a few there, by trail or ship, adventurers, missionaries, sailors, trappers, there was formed a gathering in the Willamette of the advance guard of American home-builders. They began to call out of the wilderness to Uncle Sam. As a result of the coming of the missionaries and of the small immigrations of the thirties and early forties, together with the settlement in the Willamette Valley of various French-Canadian employees of the Hudson's Bay Company, there was enough of a population to demand some sort of organised society. W. H. Gray made a summary of population in 1840 to consist of two hundred persons, of whom a hundred and thirty-seven were American and sixty-three Canadian. Up to 1839 the only law was the rules of the Hudson's Bay Company. In that year the Methodist missionaries suggested that two persons be named as magistrates to administer justice according to the ordinary rules of American law. This was the first move looking to American political organisation. In 1839 and 1840 memorials were presented to the Senate by Senator Linn of Missouri at the request of American settlers praying for the attention of Congress to their needs. But, not content with lifting their voices to the home land, they proceeded to organise for themselves. At that time, Champoeg, a few miles above the falls of the Willamette and located pleasantly on the west bank of that river, was the chief settlement. There, on the seventh of February, 1841, a gathering of the settlers was held "for the purpose of consulting upon steps necessary to be taken for the formation of laws, and the election of officers to execute them." Jason Lee, the Methodist missionary, was chairman of the meeting, and he outlined what he deemed the needed method of establishing a reign of law and order. The meeting proved rather a conference than an organisation and the people dispersed to meet again at the call of the chairman.