Contributions
A Coast Pioneer
By BISHOP M. WRIGHT, D. D.
A few months since, on the cars, a few miles south of Rutland,
Oregon, sat before me an aged gentleman, whom, from incidental conversation, I found to be
Rev. J. S. Griffin, an old resident of the Tualatin plains, through which we were then
passing. By the conversation I learned that he came out from New England in a very early
day for the purpose of establishing a mission on Snake river. The first place selected
proved to be liable to overflow in times of high waters and was abandoned. The second site
had too much alkali in the soil to admit of successful tillage.
Another misfortune of Mr. Griffin's was to be associated with a co-worker whom he
deemed a monomaniac. To rid himself of this last named trouble, he proposed to settle this
man and his family in a settlement in French Prairie, about forty miles south of Portland.
But this proposition excited great opposition from the Hudson Bay company. Why so? Because
this was a British trading company which wished England to occupy Oregon, to which she
held a disputed claim. The company feared that permanent American settlers might prejudice
the claims of Great Britain on the coast. To favor the claims of England, they had brought
in a number of French Canadians, who married Indian squaws and settled in the very fertile
prairie to which the nationality of their descent gave name, and where many of their
descendants still live.
Henceforward, Mr. Griffin was watched by the agent of the company, and his efforts to
explore the interior (that is, the country between the Cascade range and the Rocky
mountains) was continually interfered with, and he was compelled to abandon it, because
his enemies had control of his base of supplies. He then determined to settle himself in
the beautiful and fertile Tualatin plains. This he did, in the year 1841, with his family.
He says that his wife, who deceased a year ago, was the first white woman that settled in
Washington county. Mr. Griffin is a man of very fine bearing. He has lived to see the
wilderness blossom as the rose, and cities arise, and plains teem with industry and
prosperity. May he live to see even greater advances in the Willamette valley.
|