Fur Company of Canada had already planted posts in Old Oregon as early as 1807 and explored the western territory; and there was also John Jacob Astor’s ill-starred, romantic attempt in 1811 to found a great fur company at the mouth of the Columbia.
The Astor ship Tonquin under a choleric captain named Jonathan Thorn had a dark history. Many of the crew were lost when the stubborn officer tried to launch boats on the treacherous Columbia bar. Later, farther to the north, the ship’s decks were the scene of the bloody massacre of all the crew by angry Indians who did not care for the captain’s high-handed manners. In the end the ship itself was blown to bits, whether by accident, by the Indians, or by a wounded member of the crew who perished at the scene of his revenge, no one can say for sure.
The Astor land expedition was no better favored by fortune. Members of this group under Wilson Price Hunt endured hardships which become fearsomely credible when one looks into the yawning vast maw of the Snake River, down which they attempted to come by canoe, or when one rides through that beautiful and formidable landscape through which they afterwards passed without food or guides. Particularly when one journeys among the strange formations of the John Day country—still bearing the name of a member of the expedition—does one understand how poor John Day himself went mad from his experiences.
The Astor enterprise which gave Washington Irving material for his book Astoria had three articulate clerks who have left us some important sources of Northwest history: Alexander Ross, Fur Hunters of the Far West; Gabriel Franchère, Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America; and Ross Cox, Adventures on the Columbia River. Ross Cox immortalized himself by taking a noonday nap from which he awoke to find his companions gone. He was lost thirteen days in the Spokane country, and survived to tell the tale, which pretty well established a record for that country at that time. The Dorion Woman, sometimes represented in Pendleton Round-up pageantry, was an Indian woman who as a member of the Astor Overland party deserves to rank near Sacajawea for her bravery and endurance. When all the men of the group with whom she was traveling were killed—including her husband, the interpreter—she led her two children on horseback nine days through deep snow, found a lonely spot in the Blue Mountains, and made a camp where she spent two winter months. She killed the horse and the three of them lived on that in a hut of branches and moss packed with snow. She got out in the spring after a fifteen day walk, carrying the children most of the way, with little to eat for a week and nothing for the last two days.
All the ambitious plans of Astor and the hardships and endurance of the men who undertook to bring his plans to materialization came to an end in 1812 when America and England went to war, and the Astor partners sold out to the North-West Company. In turn the North-West Company amalgamated with the Hudson’s Bay Company, and thus this latter name is inseparably connected with early Oregon history.
FAITHS
In reading any Northwest history it is impossible to escape the story of the delegation of Flatheads and Nez Percés who heard of Christianity through the words of a wandering missionary group of Iroquois and set out in 1831 to St. Louis in search of “Black Robes” to teach them the elements of a new religion, or as the Protestants asserted, seeking the “Book of Heaven.” Although these Indians were said to be looking for Catholic fathers, the first specific answer to their call came from the Methodists who sent Jason Lee to Oregon in 1834 with the expedition of an ill-fated Boston merchant named Nathaniel Wyeth.
Everyone went to Vancouver in those days, since the Hudson’s Bay Post was the one great supply center, and Lee was no exception. McLoughlin, looking favorably on missionary enterprise, persuaded Lee to remain on the western side of the Cascades. It was not long before Lee envisioned the future of this fertile untouched land, and saw the need for American settlers. Indeed, the early missionary nucleus has been accused of emphasizing the earthly promise of the new territory rather than the celestial promise which they were supposed to hold out to the Indians.
McLoughlin encouraged the American missionaries presumably because they were allies, standing also firmly for law and order, discipline, and obedience among the Indians. England sent out a Reverend Herbert Beaver (“very appropriate name for the fur trade,” as Peter Skene Ogden remarked) to the Vancouver settlement, but he and McLoughlin never got on well. The Reverend Beaver could not bring himself to accept the marriage of white men and Indian women; wrote tattletale letters to the Aborigines Protection Society of London; and in general made himself such a nuisance to McLoughlin that the chief factor gave him a spontaneous caning in the courtyard one day. The caning was the impulsive result of the Reverend Beaver’s reply to the doctor’s question as to why he was sending such unflattering reports to London: “Sir, if you wish to know why a cow’s tail grows downward I cannot tell you; I can only cite the fact.”
While the Methodist mission was beginning to flourish in the Willamette Valley, the Presbyterians sent one Dr. Samuel Parker to study the spiritual needs of the American Indian. With him came a religious-minded young physician, Dr. Marcus Whitman, a name destined to dominate in human interest all other names in the field of pioneer missionaries due to the tragedy which overtook this young man and his beautiful wife. They were killed by the Indians, along with a number of children, invalids, workers, and settlers near the mission they had established at Waiilatpu.
The dramatic episode of their death is not wholly accountable for the exalted status of the Whitmans in the Northwest pioneer pantheon. Many disputants have argued about the aims and importance of Whitman’s famous “ride” to the East coast in the winter of 1842 and ’43. Some say the trip was made only because he wished to save his mission from the threat of discontinuance. Others argue that he “saved Oregon” by going to Washington to see President Tyler and Secretary of State Daniel Webster and persuading them of this outpost’s eventual importance to the union. It is certain that he did outline a plan for establishing supply stations along the emigrant trail and submit it to the War Department where it was discovered in the files some forty years later.
In spite of the overwriting and the bitter arguments of which they have been the subject, the Whitmans still have a heart-touching appeal: the delicately nurtured Narcissa, dying so terribly in the wilderness; the impulsive and perhaps even foolhardy but certainly conscientious Marcus, bringing on himself and his wife and companions an ill-merited dark fate. Everything conspired against these good people. An epidemic of measles killed off many of the Indians, who laid the blame at the doctor’s door. The effects of a simple purgative inserted in watermelons to prevent stealing were of no help either. Moreover the Indians did not care for the untheatric ritual of the Presbyterians and longed to have the more colorful rites of the Catholic Church. Even after the massacre such a homely incident as an Indian’s overeating of dried peach pie in the mission kitchen among the survivors, almost occasioned fresh tragedy; the acute nature of the stomachache leading the greedy red man to conclude that he had been poisoned.
A moving account has survived of those last dark days at the mission at Waiilatpu, told by Catherine Sager who was thirteen at the time, a cripple who had fallen under a wagon wheel while crossing the plains. After months of physical agony and tragedy—both her parents died on the journey—she had been adopted into the Whitman home along with her six brothers and sisters. This eyewitness has told how Whitman was tomahawked from behind as he sat in the kitchen; how Mrs. Whitman, already wounded, was carried out of the house on a settee, only to be shot to death in the yard.
Mrs. Whitman, warned by her husband of the seriousness of the situation, leaving her supper untouched the night before the massacre, and going away by herself to weep where no one could see her, becomes to the reader a prototype of all pioneer women in hostile country accepting their fate with resignation. One thinks of the words she wrote as a bride on the way out to Oregon, when they came to the beautiful Grande Ronde country: “This morning lingered with Husband on the top of the hill that overlooks Grand Round for berries—always enjoy riding alone with him especially when we talk about home friends. It is then the tedious hours are sweetly decoyed away.” And again when they are debating the possibility of taking the seven
