George K. Gay

George Kirby Gay (August 15, 1810 – October 7, 1882) was an English sailor and later settler in the Oregon Country. He was a member of the Willamette Cattle Company that brought livestock to Oregon and built the first brick house in the United States west of the Rocky Mountains. Gay also participated in the Champoeg Meetings that created a provisional government in what would become the U.S. state of Oregon.

Early years George Gay was born in Gloucestershire, England, on August 15, 1810. He became an apprentice sailor at the age of eleven and traveled much of the world and came to the United States. As a sailor, his last trip was aboard the whaleship Kitty, which he left at Monterey, California, in 1833 where he joined up with fur trapper Ewing Young. Gay and the others, led by Young, traveled to California by boat to purchase cattle and then overland back to the Willamette Valley. This party included William J. Bailey and Philip Leget Edwards, a teacher whose diary of the expedition was later published.

In his diary, Edwards wrote that Gay and Bailey both shot at a friendly Indigenous man, who was killed by one or both of their shots. Edwards recorded the shooting in mid-September of 1837, soon after the party crossed the Shasta River on their way back to Oregon. He wrote that the murdered man was accompanied by an Indigenous boy of about ten years old, who fled after the man was shot. Edwards stated that members of the group called "Shoot the boy! Shoot the boy!" but that the child escaped. Edwards wrote that he, Young, and one other man spoke against the murder, while the rest of the party either stayed silent or defended the murder as revenge for previous attacks on settlers by Indigenous people. They had nine children: Mary Ann, Joseph Witcum, John Kirby, Alfred, Paul George, William Edouard, Adaline Bellay, Louisa and Henri St. Clair. The 52-50 vote established the Provisional Government of Oregon that would last until the Oregon Territory's government superseded it in 1849. Gay’s home would serve as one of the markers of the boundaries within the government.

Later years

After the death of his wife Louisa in 1861, Gay remarried three more times to Mary Manson, Mary Condon and Mary Ann Rubidow.

Gay married Mary Manson in 1864. She was the daughter of Scottish-Canadian fur trader Donald Manson and the granddaughter of French-Canadian settler Étienne Lucier.

Gay married Mary Ann Rubidow in 1867. Rubidow was born Marie Anne Toupin in 1826 and was the daughter of Marie Aioe Dorion.

George Kirby Gay lost his fortune and died poor on October 7, 1882, at the age of 72 and was buried on his property near Wheatland, Oregon. A granite and bronze marker placed by the Daughters of the American Revolution on the Yamhill-Polk County line on Oregon Route 221 commemorates the location of Gay's home and gravesite and his involvement in the Champoeg Meetings.