I will not delay you long with a story relating the beginning of the conquest of the Oregon country through American valor. The first period, that of the exploration, can be told in very few words. Robert Gray, captain of the ship "Columbia", on May 7, 1792, discovered Grays Harbor, and on May 11th, entered the mouth of a great river and named it "Columbia" after the name of his ship.
The next great event to be recorded is the time when Lewis and Clark "on the 7th of November, 1805, heard the breakers roar, and saw, spreading and rolling before them, the waves of the western ocean, 'the object of our labors, the reward of our anxieties'," as they recorded in that wonderful journal of that wonderful trip.
It is permissible to note that sixteen years before Gray sailed into the mouth of the great river, Jonathan Carver, an American explorer, on the 7th of December, 1776, sixty miles above St. Anthony Falls, from a point which we may very properly call the heart of the continent, wrote these immortal words: "The four most capital rivers on the continent of North America, viz., the St. Lawrence, the Mississippi, the River Bourbon, and the Oregon, or the River of the West, have their sources in the same neighborhood". While Carver did not explore the river, or any of its tributaries, yet with wonderful vision foretold of its existence, and gave it a name, the "Oregon", the first instance that word was written. It is beyond the wit of man to divine where the word came from other than from the imaginative brain of that noted traveler.
The second period, that of exploitation, began with the entrance of the ship "Tonquin" into the mouth of the Columbia on the 25th of March, 1811, sent out by John Jacob Astor as "planned for a brilliant trading project". The tragic fate of the ship in more northern waters is told by an Indian, of the massacre of the whole ship's crew save one who, wounded, had retreated to the hold of the ship near the magazine and blew up the ship and avenged the death of his comrades by destroying ten Indians to every white man of the crew that had been sacrificed.
Next on the scene came the Hunt party overland, to arrive at Astoria February 15, 1812. The suffering of this party, the danger incurred, with the risks taken, far and away eclipse any feat of record in exploration of the Oregon country.
Following close upon the heels of their arrival came Astor's second ship, "The Beaver", to cross the bar at the mouth of the Columbia River May 10, 1812. The American flag that had floated peacefully over the heads of the little colony at Astoria for fourteen months was doomed, a year and seven months later, to the humiliation of being hauled down to make way for the British flag, as a result of the fortunes of war, and was not restored until October 6, 1818. As a result of the joint occupancy treaty of October 20, 1818, the British continued to exploit the country and built Fort Vancouver in 1824, and remained in full control of all avenues of trade until challenged by the traders coming from the east, with St. Louis the head center.
In 1822 General William H. Ashley's company sent out "bands of trappers to form camps in the best beaver districts, and trap out the streams one after another", much like the gold seekers who would wash out the gold of the different streams in succession. One of these Ashley parties discovered the South Pass (1822) and invaded the Oregon country, and a commercial war began and continued until the final overthrow of the British twenty-four years later.
In 1830 (the year I was born) the first wagon crossed the summit of the Rocky Mountains through the South Pass, that wonderful opening in the range, easy of access from either slope, and where the way is as safe, with no more obstacles to overcome than in a drive twenty miles south of Tacoma. William L. Sublette, reported to be the first man to invade the Oregon country through the South Pass for trapping, still lives, or did a year ago, at "Elk Mountain", a small place in Wyoming, high up on the west slope of the Rocky Mountains. He must be a very old man, but I am told is yet quite active.
I followed his "cut-off" west from the Big Sandy to Bear River, in the year 1852, and can testify it was then a hard road to travel. On my recent trip (1906) I avoided this short cut and followed more nearly the trail of 1843 further south, which led to near Fort Badger, below the forty-second parallel of latitude, and then Mexican territory.
We have now arrived at a period of impending change when the eccentric Bonneville drove through the South Pass (1832), closely followed by that adventurous Bostonian, Nathaniel J. Wythe. Both lost everything they had in these ventures, but they pointed the way, followed a little later by countless thousands of home builders to the Oregon country. A part of the Wythe party remained and became the first American home builders in the Oregon country.