any further real uncertainty as to
whom Oregon belonged, and the treaty of 1846 settled the question for
all time.

The new territory was soon to be the scene of a terrible tragedy. The
white man had brought new diseases into it, measles, fevers, and even,
smallpox; they spread rapidly among the Indians, aggravated by their
imprudence and ignorance of proper treatment, and many died. The Indians
became convinced that the missionaries were to blame, and it is claimed,
too, that the emissaries of the Hudson Bay Company urged them on.
However that may have been, on the twenty-ninth of November, 1847, the
Indians fell upon the missionaries and killed fifteen, of them, among
the dead being Marcus Whitman and his wife. So ended the life of the man
who saved Oregon, and of the woman who was the first of her sex to cross
the continent.

Meanwhile, far to the south, a drama scarcely less thrilling was
enacting, its chief personage being John Augustus Sutter. Sutter was a
Swiss and had received a military education and served in the Swiss
Guard before coming to America in 1834. He settled first at St. Louis
and then at Santa Fe, where he gained considerable experience as a
trader. Finally, in 1838, he decided to cross the Rockies, and after
trading for a time in a little schooner up and down the coast, was
wrecked in San Francisco Bay. He made his way inland, and founded the
first white settlement in the country on the site of what is now
Sacramento. Here, in 1841, he built a fort, having secured a large grant
of land from the Mexican Government, and set up what was really a little
empire in the wilderness, over which he reigned supreme. And here, three
years later, down from the snow-filled and tempest-swept passes of the
Rockies, came a party of starving and frost-bitten scarecrows, the
exploring expedition headed by John Charles Fremont, of whom we shall
speak presently.

The rest of Sutter's history is soon told. In 1848, when Mexico ceded
California to the United States, he was the owner of a vast domain, over
which thousands of head of cattle wandered. A few years later, he was
practically a ruined man--ruined by gold. On the eighteenth day of
January, 1848, one of his men named Marshall, brought to Sutter a lump
of yellow metal which he had uncovered while digging a mill-race. There
could be no doubt of it--it was gold! News of the great discovery soon
got about; there was a great rush for this new Eldorado; Sutter's la