The Washington Historical Quarterly, Volume V, 1914

Volume III, pp. 198-228, recording the details of the journey of an

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expedition from Fort George on the Columbia river to the Fraser river and back in November-December, 1824, (in which he remarked among other things about the "weighty rain" common to the Coast and Puget Sound localities). Mr. Work's particular duties during January-May, 1825, we do not know; this was the period during which Governor Simpson and Chief Factor John McLoughlin selected the site for Fort Vancouver and the headquarters were removed from Fort George (Astoria) to the new location, which was on the high ground east of the present city of Vancouver, Washington, where the buildings of the Washington (State) Asylum for the Blind and Deaf now stand. Governor Simpson returned up the Columbia river in March, 1825, with the Express bound for York Factory on Hudson's Bay, but events indicate that he already had learned to place much confidence in the young clerk John Work. In June, Mr. Work finds himself assigned to duty in the interior and accompanies the "brigade" of officers and voyagers under Mr. John McLeod returning up the river with goods for the trade at the various interior forts. Mr. McLeod was then stationed at Thompson River (Kamloops) but had been given leave to return across the mountains to Hudson's Bay the following spring.

Readers of the "three synoptical writers of Astoria," as Dr. Elliott Coues designates Gabriel Franchere, Alexander Ross and Ross Cox, have had occasion perhaps to tire of the narratives of successive journeys up and down the Columbia river with the constant encounters with the Indians at the Cascades and Dalles portages. In this journal we have another account of the same journey and discover that with the education of the Indians of the Columbia to the fixed and just policy of the Northwest and Hudson's Bay Companies in their trade relations, the hatred and distrust and armed resistance of these Indians has already ceased to a great extent and that only the natural disposition to pilfer has to be taken much into account.

Between June 21st and November 1st, 1825, the period covered by part of this journal, Mr. Work journeys many miles and introduces us to the regular lines of travel of the fur traders between their forts in Washington, Northern Idaho and Montana and to some of the routine life of the forts. He visits the Nez Perces at their trading ground where the City of Lewiston, Idaho, now stands, the Flatheads at the spot where the large power plant is now being erected below Thompson Falls, Montana, and the then active Fort Okanogan, Washington, at the mouth of that river where now there is only barren waste; but his headquarters were at Spokane House, then as now the trade center for all the "Inland Empire." He also tells of the very beginning of building and planting at Kettle Falls, where the most important of the interior trading posts, Fort Colvile, was just being started. Only the first part of the entire journal is given in this issue and the remainder is to be presented in a later number of the Quarterly, and then to be followed by a second journal of the same writer.

For brief mention of Mr. Work's career the reader is referred to the earlier number of this Quarterly--already cited, and to page 464 of