Part II of the Research Trip

There are times when you know the day is a gift and you need to extend each moment, every turn, even the wrong turns.  That day as I left the Champoeg State Park and started driving across the French Prairie area, south of Portland, in Marion County, I was in tune with my ancestors who had walked and ridden the routes that I was now driving. If I learned anything at that morning was that they had chosen one of the most fertile areas to live in in all of the Pacific Northwest.  The landscape is dotted with a number of small communities, including; Butteville, Gervais, Saint Louis, and St. Paul.  The fields were full of young green corn shoots, dazzling golden wheat, garden market vegetables and blueberries brushes dotted the landscape.

As the day wore on and I found myself in Oregon City checking out the home of Dr. John McLoughlin, from which I was provided a map of the Mountain View Cemetery  so I could locate Peter Skene Ogden’s grave.  Even with the map I was having problems locating the grave.  It was at the moment of giving up that I felt the need to turn around to the right, and as I did so I knew without a doubt that I would be staring straight at Ogden’s headstone.  In that moment, everything clear and I understood that there was a reason why I was standing in the cemetery.  It was not for me or my ancestors, but rather to give me the permission to do what needed to be done, to write about the people of the Hudson Bay Company as real people.  People who came not to found a new world, but to do the best they could with the resources they had at hand, not to carve a home out the wilderness, or build a new world, but to build a future of promise.  Just as we need to accept the resources that we currently have and not to live beyond the means, because there is always some event to bring us back to reality, such as the flood that Donald Manson suffered at Champoeg in 1861.

It would be wrong of me to say that I stood there and had a discussion with my long dead ancestor, no, it was short and to the point.  The story is in me to tell, their tale of life, the successes as well as the hardships, but mostly to tell of the day-to-day living.  The story of generations born, that paved the way for future generations to come, my generation.  My generation has lost the rhythm of life, we have all become owned by our lifestyle.  We are no longer in touch with our true nature, mother nature, the seasons, they are an inconvenience.