“Do you use flies or bait?” asks Gordon with a due sense of condescension for having deigned to enquire about this barbarous land’s sport at all. Finlayson must have had some trouble not to choke with laughter when my gentleman insists on fishing with flies in streams where salmon could be scooped in tubfuls. Later, he deigns to go hunting and insists that deer be run down in the open as they hunt in enclosed Scottish game preserves, not still-hunted, which is a barbarous way; with the consequence that Gordon does not get a shot. In vain Finlayson and Douglas, who comes North, try to please this mannikin in gold braid. In response to their admiration of the mighty mountains, he makes answer that goes down to history for civility--“that he would not give the bleakest knoll on the bleakest hill of Scotland for all these mountains in a heap.” Oregon’s provisional government forced the boundary dispute to an issue. It must be settled. The Hudson’s Bay Company press their case, pleading that if the American colonists are to retain all south of the Columbia, then the Company, having settlers between the Columbia and Puget Sound, should retain all between Columbia River and Puget Sound. The case hangs fire. Gordon is called in. In language which I have given in a former chapter, he declares the country is not worth keeping. Naturally, Aberdeen listens to his own brother’s opinion and Peel to his son’s. By treaty of June, 1846, England relinquishes claims to all territory south of 49°. Gradually fur trader is crowded out by settler. In 1860, Fort Vancouver is dismantled and taken over as a military station by the United States. Ermatinger, for having joined the Oregon government, is packed off to a post in Athabasca. Ogden saves himself from punishment by following McLoughlin’s example and resigning to become a settler on the Willamette. For the Puget Sound farms, the Company receives compensation of $450,000 and $200,000 from the American Government; the former amount payable to the Hudson’s Bay Company proper, the latter to the Puget Sound Company, though the shareholders were nominally the same persons. So ended the glories of the fur trade in Oregon. It still had a few years to run in British Columbia. Long ago McLoughlin had plainly seen the beginning of the end in Oregon and sent Douglas to spy out the site of a permanent fort north of 49°. * * * * * It is really one of the most interesting studies in American history to observe--if it can be done without prejudice or prepossession--how when this great Company, changing in its personnel but ever carrying down in its apostolic succession the same traditions of statecraft, of obedience, of secrecy, of diplomacy--how when this great Company had to take a kick, it took it gracefully and always made it a point of being kicked _up_, not down. This is illustrated by the Company’s policy now.