Gabriel Jones, wife and three children;

Wm. McAllister, wife and several children, and the three young bachelors, Samuel Crockett, Reuben Crowder, and Jesse Ferguson.

Of these families, the Jones and Kindreds are now extinct, and of the original party only two sons of Col. Simmons and Sanford Bush are now living. Semis Bush, the youngest son of George Bush, was born after their arrival, in 1847, on Bush Prairie and, by the way, is perhaps the oldest living white American born in the Puget Sound basin.

The Bush party suffered the usual hardships of the overland journey but met no great disaster, and reached The Dalles late in the fall of 1844. There they camped for the winter and decided their future plans.

At that time the headquarters of the Hudson's Bay Company, the sole official representative of the British Government, was on the Columbia River with its chief settlements at Vancouver and The Dalles.

It was the policy of the company to prevent all settlement north of the Columbia River and confine its use to the fur-bearing industry and depend upon the Indians for the necessary hunting and trapping. The employes of the company consisted of the necessary factors and clerks, some English, but more Scotch, while the rest, boatmen, etc., were nearly all Canadian French.

The great chief factor for the whole west was Dr. McLoughlin, a benevolent despot, well fitted to govern his savage dominion so long as the Yankees kept away, but at the period in question he found himself in a painful conflict between the interests of humanity and the demands of his superiors.

The governing board in London was composed of members of the government and aristocracy who were extremely resentful of the demands and claims of the American politicians and gave most imperative orders to Governor McLoughlin and the other factors and agents on the Coast to discourage all settlement by the Americans north of the Columbia River and to furnish no supplies or other assistance to the American travelers or settlers. This prohibition also extended, though less rigidly, to the Oregon settlements south of the Columbia, for the company saw clearly that unless the emigration could be checked the vast profits of their fast growing trade in the west would soon be lost.

Sanford Bush, though a small boy at the time, remembers the trip well, and tells me that the main dependence of his father's party and the other early settlers was the friendliness of the French Canadians, who had much more sympathy for the poor settlers than with the English stockholders, and did not hesitate to smuggle all sorts of supplies, especially of food, from their farms into the hands of the Americans, and it was in this emergency that the former experience and intimate acquaintance of George Bush with the French and their desire to assist him turned his attention to the Puget Sound country and made it possible for him to smuggle his party up into territory that was yet claimed by the British, without its becoming officially known to the chief factor. At that time the road from the Columbia River, or rather from the landing on the Cowlitz River, to the head of the Sound was only a single trail through dense forests, and that was always more or less blocked by falling timber. No vehicle could get through and, while Sanford says that the party did get some of the twenty wagons with which they left Missouri through to The Dalles, they only reached the Sound with what they could pack on their animals or drag on rude sleds.

In this condition the little party reached the extreme head of the Sound at Tumwater early in the spring of 1845 and proceeded to take possession of such tracts of land as took their fancy, covering what is now the town of Tumwater and back along the west side of the little Des Chutes River, and out on the prairie, which begins about a mile south of the landing and extends down about three miles to a rise of ground not far from the river. Upon this commanding site George Bush pitched his last camp and there his family descendants have lived to the present time, and the prairie of some five square miles extent has always been known as Bush Prairie.