The maintenance of the Indian frontier depended upon the ability of the United States to keep whites out of the Indian Country. But with Oregon and Santa Fé beyond, this could never be. The trails had already shown the fallacy of the frontier policy before it had become a fact in 1840.
[CHAPTER V]
THE OREGON TRAIL
The Santa Fé trade had just been started upon its long career when trappers discovered in the Rocky Mountains, not far from where the forty-second parallel intersects the continental divide, an easy crossing by which access might be had from the waters of the upper Platte to those of the Pacific Slope. South Pass, as this passage through the hills soon came to be called, was the gateway to Oregon. As yet the United States had not an inch of uncontested soil upon the Pacific, but in years to come a whole civilization was to pour over the upper trail to people the valley of the Columbia and claim it for new states. The Santa Fé trail was chiefly the route of commerce. The Oregon trail became the pathway of a people westward bound.
In its earliest years the Oregon trail knew only the fur traders, those nameless pioneers who possessed an accurate rule-of-thumb knowledge of every hill and valley of the mountains nearly a generation before the surveyor and his transit brought them within the circle of recorded facts. The historian of the fur trade, Major Hiram Martin Chittenden, has tracked out many of them with the same laborious industry that carried them after the beaver and the other marketable furs. When they first appeared is lost in tradition. That they were everywhere in the period between the journey of Lewis and Clark, in 1805, and the rise of Independence as an outfitting post, in 1832, is clearly manifest. That they discovered every important geographic fact of the West is quite as certain as it is that their discoveries were often barren, were generally unrecorded in a formal way, and exercised little influence upon subsequent settlement and discovery. Their place in history is similar to that of those equally nameless ship captains of the thirteenth century who knew and charted the shore of the Mediterranean at a time when scientific geographers were yet living on a flat earth and shaping cosmographies from the Old Testament. Although the fur-traders, with their great companies behind them, did less to direct the future than their knowledge of geography might have warranted, they managed to secure a foothold upon the Pacific coast early in the century. Astoria, in 1811, was only a pawn in the game between the British and American organizations, whose control over Oregon was so confusing that Great Britain and the United States, in 1818, gave up the task of drawing a boundary when they reached the Rockies, and allowed the country beyond to remain under joint occupation.
In the thirties, religious enthusiasm was added to the profits of the fur trade as an inducement to visit Oregon. By 1832 the trading prospects had incited migration outside the regular companies. Nathaniel J. Wyeth took out his first party in this year. He repeated the journey with a second party in 1834. The Methodist church sent a body of missionaries to convert the western Indians in this latter year. The American Board of Foreign Missions sent out the redoubtable Marcus Whitman in 1835. Before the thirties were over Oregon had become a household word through the combined reports of traders and missionaries. Its fertility and climate were common themes in the lyceums and on the lecture platform; while the fact that this garden might through prompt migration be wrested from the British gave an added inducement. Joint occupation was yet the rule, but the time was approaching when the treaty of 1818 might be denounced, a time when Oregon ought to become the admitted property of the United States. The thirties ended with no large migration begun. But the financial crisis of 1837, which unsettled the frontier around the Great Lakes, provided an impoverished and restless population ready to try the chance in the farthest West.
A growing public interest in Oregon roused the United States government to action in the early forties. The Indians of the Northwest were in need of an agent and sound advice. The exact location of the trail, though the trail itself was fairly well known, had not been ascertained. Into the hands of the senators from Missouri fell the task of inspiring the action and directing the result. Senator Linn was the father of bills and resolutions looking towards a territory west of the mountains; while Benton, patron of the fur trade, received for his new son-in-law, John C. Frémont, a detail in command of an exploring party to the South Pass.
The career of Frémont, the Pathfinder, covers twenty years of great publicity, beginning with his first command in 1842. On June 10, of this year, with some twenty-one guides and men, he departed from Cyprian Chouteau's place on the Kansas, ten miles above its mouth. He shortly left the Kansas, crossed country to Grand Island in the Platte, and followed the Platte and its south branch to St. Vrain's Fort in northern Colorado, where he arrived in thirty days. From St. Vrain's he skirted the foothills north to Fort Laramie. Thence, ascending the Sweetwater, he reached his destination at South Pass on August 8, just one day previous to the signing of the great English treaty at Washington. At South Pass his journey of observation was substantially over. He continued, however, for a few days along the Wind River Range, climbing a mountain peak and naming it for himself. By October he was back in St. Louis with his party.
In the spring of 1843, Frémont started upon a second and more extended governmental exploration to the Rockies. This time he followed a trail along the Kansas River and its Republican branch to St. Vrain's, whence he made a detour south to Boiling Spring and Bent's trading-post on the Arkansas River. Mules were scarce, and Colonel Bent was relied upon for a supply. Returning to the Platte, he divided his company, sending part of it over his course of 1842 to Laramie and South Pass, while he led his own detachment directly from St. Vrain's into the Medicine Bow Range, and across North Park, where rises the North Platte. Before reaching Fort Hall, where he was to reunite his party, he made another detour to Great Salt Lake, that he might feel like Balboa as he looked upon the inland sea. From Fort Hall, which he reached on September 18, he followed the emigrant route by the valley of the Snake to the Dalles of the Columbia.