morning and evening prayers, which they sang in their own language in a low, sweet strain, which, the first time I heard it, sitting in my boat at sunset, was impressive and solemn. We went often to visit Father Ricard, who was a highly educated man, who seemed to enjoy having some one to converse with in his own language. He said the Canadians used such bad French.”
There is something haunting about the thought of the governor’s lady, a homesick New England gentlewoman, floating with her Indian paddler on the waters of Puget Sound at sunset, in the sight of the eternal snowcaps and the high densely wooded hills, listening to the Flatheads chanting the hymns of the Catholic church under the leadership of a cultivated French priest.
This mission was last used by a family of Olympia pioneers who spent a winter in the seventies within its moldering walls. The family remembered it chiefly for its gloom, the fact that the walls had few windows and those built high because of the priests’ wish not to have the Indians distracted by the outside world when at their prayers; and also to make it difficult for arrows or stray missiles to find their way inside.
HOMEMAKERS
In the 1840s emigrant wagon trains began to unfurl their white sails on the prairies of the Middle West and start their laborious creaking way westward. Occasionally descendants of these hardy folk insist that Grandma said it was all just one long picnic; but this seems a little hard to believe. A Pendleton newspaperwoman who rode in a prairie schooner from La Grande to Pendleton with a group of “pioneers” in the year 1938 assured me that the torture of the movement even on a paved road was almost more than she could bear for two days.
Getting wagons into the last reaches of this new country was an achievement, first attempted by Marcus Whitman who persisted in taking on a wagon from Fort Hall against the expert advice of fur traders. He actually succeeded in getting it as far west as Fort Boise, but he could hardly have imagined what a tide of emigration was to follow in its wake. By the time the tide was at its full Marcus Whitman was dead of an Indian tomahawk.
Through three decades and well into the fourth people crossed the plains into Oregon. The story of their travels makes an oft-repeated but still compelling saga of heroism in the face of Indian massacres, cholera epidemics, dried-up water holes, one day stopovers for women to give birth. It is not easy to determine what brought these beglamored people into the vast western unknown. Certainly there were plenty of stay-at-homes to call them insane when they did it.
But there were other men whose enthusiasm more than made up for the skepticism of their fellows. As far back as 1822 attention had been drawn to the Oregon country by John Floyd of Virginia who, in the House of Representatives, made a report on American rights in the distant lands west of the Rockies and hinted that colonization there was bound to take place. Mr. Bailies of Massachusetts envisioned a canal from the Atlantic to the Pacific which would prevent the eventual colonies in this territory from breaking away into an independent unit and setting up a government of their own. Mr. Bailies, who enjoyed a good rich phrase with the best of his contemporaries, said that he would “delight to know that in this desolate spot, where the prowling cannibal now lurks in the forest, hung round with human bones and with human scalps, the temples of justice and the temples of God were reared, and man made sensible of the beneficent intentions of his creator.”
Oregon bills kept coming up in Congress throughout the twenties while the first diplomatic dickerings over British versus American rights to the North Pacific coast began to take place in London. In 1829 Hall J. Kelley, a Harvard graduate and a writer of school books, organized the “American Society for Encouraging the Settlement of the Oregon Territory” and in 1832 set out for the western lands himself by way of New Orleans and Mexico. In California he had the misfortune to fall in with Ewing Young who in turn had the misfortune to be considered, by the mighty McLoughlin at Vancouver, a horse thief, and poor Kelley was not received as well as he had hoped to be. It was, however, Kelley who helped to influence Wyeth to outfit his remarkable, if ill-fated, expeditions, and Wyeth in turn stirred many people to interest, including the impressionable young James Russell Lowell who remembered all his life the sensations he felt when his fellow townsman set off westward on the great adventure.
In the thirties the missionaries began their slow process of colonization. Their reports helped to keep the Oregon Question alive in the minds of those “back home.” President Jackson sent Lieutenant W. A. Slacum on the first official visit to Oregon. Slacum made a thoroughgoing and favorable report to Congress in 1837, recommending that we firmly hold out against Britain and demand the land as far as the forty-ninth parallel at least, lest the States should lose the fine waterways of Puget Sound. Slacum’s report brought the matter of Oregon’s admission to the States before Congress once more, and it remained there through the next ten years.
All the Congressional agitations, the speeches and reports, the stories in newspapers, the letters home from missionaries, began their slow and powerful infiltration through the people who were to pioneer this remote section. Around middle-western fireplaces, at corn huskings and quilting bees, Oregon began to be the most exciting topic of conversation. People discussed the fertility of the Willamette Valley, the advantages of the Columbia River for commerce, the great forests and the salmon-filled streams. Times had been hard in the frontier country and people were restless. Slavery was beginning to cause agitation. Above all there was that characteristic American wish to move out into the unknown. People in the sheltered midwestern valleys caught fire from the pictures of a great poetic landscape to the west; a landscape of vast plains, high mountains, swift turbulent rivers, and, at the farthest reach, a great ocean. Some few were also undoubtedly influenced by a patriotic wish to keep Great Britain from acquiring the land and the waterways explored for the United States by Lewis and Clark and Robert Gray.
The settlers were for the most part men interested in establishing homes, clearing land, raising cattle. The emigration of 1843 is particularly memorable because from this group—along with the settlers who had come in prior to that year—was composed the membership of the famous “wolf meeting” in the Willamette Valley. This was a gathering of settlers to discuss ways of protecting their herds from predatory animals; and during the meeting a resolution was adopted “that a committee be appointed to take into consideration the propriety of taking steps for the civil and military protection of the colony.” This was followed by the Champoeg meeting of May 2, 1843, at which picturesque Joe Meek forced into the open the opposing wishes of the French-Canadian settlers—still bound by sentiment to the Hudson’s Bay Company—and the newcomers from the States. With his height, his great voice, and his commanding gestures with his coonskin cap he succeeded in getting the two extra votes needed to organize a provisional government the American way, and became a figure for murals and town park statues down the years.
Thus once again the American method of forming a “government by compact” took place: “We the people of Oregon Territory for purposes of mutual protection and to secure peace and prosperity among ourselves agree to adopt the following laws and regulations until such time as the United States of America extend their jurisdiction over us.” One cannot read the concluding words of the message of the executive committee elected in this wilderness in 1844 without being moved: . . . “and in conclusion, we desire to impress your minds that although the colony is small and its resources feeble, yet the life, rights and liberties of an individual here are of equal value to him as to one in the city of Washington or London. And it is a duty which devolves on you and on us to use as much discretion, vigilance and caution in maturing and adopting measures for promoting the interests of the little colony, as if we expected our names and acts would be enrolled in the pages of history, or inscribed on pillars of stone when our day and generation shall have passed away.”
Jesse Applegate, the “sage of Yoncalla,” drew up in 1845 a revised draft of the first governmental laws, and under this for four years the “sturdy, sober, order-loving pioneers” conducted their lives.
No American colonists went north into the state which is now called Washington until after the Oregon emigration of 1844. This emigration
