* * * * * Jno. Stuart of New Caledonia was a cousin of Lord Strathcona and the influence that induced young Donald Smith to join the fur traders. * * * * * Mayne is responsible for the story of Douglas and the treacle. * * * * * A great many Kiplings served in the H. B. C. from 1750; all as seamen. CHAPTER XXXIII 1840-1859 THE PASSING OF THE COMPANY--THE COMING OF THE COLONISTS TO OREGON--THE FOUNDING OF VICTORIA NORTH OF THE BOUNDARY---WHY THE H. B. C. GAVE UP OREGON--MISRULE OF VANCOUVER ISLAND--MCLOUGHLIN’S RETIREMENT. Another subject had McLoughlin and Simpson laid before the Governing Board of London in that winter of 1838-39. The treaty of joint occupation continued between the United States and Great Britain; but Americans were yearly drifting into the valley of the Columbia. First came such occasional trappers as Jedediah Smith and Wyeth, retreating with loss of life at the hands of the Indians and loss of profits from the opposition of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Of the two hundred men who followed Wyeth through the mountains in the early thirties, one hundred and sixty were killed; but men like Wyeth and Kelley, of Boston, sent back word to the Eastern States of the marvelous wealth in forest and land of this Oregon empire. Then came the missionaries in 1834, the Lees, and Whitmans, and Spauldings--a story that is, in itself, a book; but it does not concern this record of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Missionaries were not in the service of the English corporation. They, too, sent word to the East of openings in the Oregon country for the American settler. To be sure, two thousand miles of waste land and mountain lay between the Eastern home seeker and this Promised Land, but was that a thing to deter frontiersmen whose ancestors had hewn their way from Virginia across the Blue Mountains to the Bloody Ground of Tennessee and Kentucky? The adventure of it but acted as a spur. Old pathfinders who had settled down as farmers on the frontier of the Missouri and Mississippi, felt again the call of the wilderness, shouldered their rifles, and with families in tented wagons set out for Oregon. Another cause stimulated the movement. In the East were hard times. The railroad had not yet reached the pioneer of the prairie. He had no way of sending his produce to market. Far off hills looked green. If he could but reach the Columbia--he thought--there was the ocean at his door as a highway for commerce.