He was finishing his law course when his boyhood voice changed, and instead of the round orotund of manhood came a little, high, falsetto squeak that combined with Peter’s little, fat figure and round head proved so irresistibly comical, it blasted his hopes as a pleader at the bar. John Jacob Astor was in Montreal wrangling out his quarrel over Mississippi territory with the Northwest Company. Judge Ogden was a friend of Astor’s. Peter applied to go out to Astoria on the Pacific. Astor took him as supercargo on _The Lark_; but in 1813, _The Lark_ was wrecked in a squall two hundred miles off the Sandwich Islands, and young Ogden was of those who, lashed to the spars of the drifting wreck, fell to the mercies of the Hawaiians, and finally reached Astoria only to find it captured by the Northwest Company. That was his introduction to the fur trade of Oregon, and it was typical. McLoughlin had no sooner moved headquarters from Astoria inland to Fort Vancouver, than Peter Skene was sent to the Flatheads of the West. Here, one of his servants got into a scuffle with the Indians over a horse, and Ogden was carried to the Flathead chief to be shot. “What?” he demanded of the astonished chief. “Do you think a white man is to be bullied over a horse? Do you think a white man fears to be shot? Shoot,” and he bared his breast to the pistol point. But the Flathead chief did not shoot. “He brave man,” said the chief, and he forthwith invited Ogden to remain in the tent as a friend, and proposed another way out of the quarrel that would be of mutual benefit to the Company and to the Flatheads. The Company wanted furs; the Flatheads, arms. Let Ogden marry the chief’s daughter--Julia Mary. It was not such a union as his relatives of New York would approve, or his father, the chief justice of Montreal. She was not like the young ladies he had known in the seminaries of the East, but her accomplishments were of more use to Peter Ogden. When Peter Skene walked out of the Flatheads’ tent, he had paid fifty ponies for a wife and was followed by the chief’s daughter. To what period of his life they belong, I do not know. His own journals tell nothing of them, but legends are still current in the West about this Flathead princess of the wilds; how when a spring torrent would have swept away a raft-load of furs, Julia leaped into the flood tide, roped the raft to her own waist, and towed the furs ashore; how when the American traders, who relieved Ogden of his furs, in 1825, stampeded the Hudson’s Bay horses and Julia’s horse galloped off with her first-born dangling from the saddle straps in a moss bag, she dashed into the American lines. With a bound, she was in the saddle. She had caught up the halter rope to round baby and horses back to the Hudson’s Bay camp, when a drunken Yankee trader yelled, “Shoot that d---- squaw!” But the squaw was already hidden in a whirl of dust stampeding back to the British tents.