The Last American Frontier

by Frederic L. Paxson

Before the great migration of 1843 reached Oregon the pioneers already there had taken the law to themselves and organized a provisional government in the Willamette Valley. The situation here, under the terms of the joint occupation treaty, was one of considerable uncertainty. National interests prompted settlers to hope and work for future control by one country or the other, while advantage seemed to incline to the side of Dr. McLoughlin, the generous factor of the British fur companies. But the aggressive Americans of the early migrations were restive under British leadership. They were fearful also lest future American emigration might carry political control out of their hands into the management of newcomers. Death and inheritance among their number had pointed to a need for civil institutions. In May, 1843, with all the ease invariably shown by men of Anglo-Saxon blood when isolated together in the wilderness, they formed a voluntary association for government and adopted a code of laws.

Self-confidence, the common asset of the West, was not absent in this newest American community. "A few months since," wrote Elijah White, "at our Oregon lyceum, it was unanimously voted that the colony of Wallamette held out the most flattering encouragement to immigrants of any colony on the globe." In his same report to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, the sub-Indian agent described the course of events. "During my up-country excursion, the whites of the colony convened, and formed a code of laws to regulate intercourse between themselves during the absence of law from our mother country, adopting in almost all respects the Iowa code. In this I was consulted, and encouraged the measure, as it was so manifestly necessary for the collection of debts, securing rights in claims, and the regulation of general intercourse among the whites."

A messenger was immediately sent east to beg Congress for the extension of United States laws and jurisdiction over the territory. His journey was six months later than the winter ride of Marcus Whitman, who went to Boston to save the missions of the American Board from abandonment, and might with better justice than Whitman's be called the ride to save Oregon. But Oregon was in no danger of being lost, however dilatory Congress might be. The little illegitimate government settled down to work, its legislative committee enacted whatever laws were needed for local regulation, and a high degree of law and order prevailed.

Sometimes the action of the Americans must have been meddlesome and annoying to the English and Canadian trappers. In the free manners of the first half of the nineteenth century the use of strong drink was common throughout the country and universal along the frontier. "A family could get along very well without butter, wheat bread, sugar, or tea, but whiskey was as indispensable to housekeeping as corn-meal, bacon, coffee, tobacco, and molasses. It was always present at the house raising, harvesting, road working, shooting matches, corn husking, weddings, and dances. It was never out of order 'where two or three were gathered together.'" Yet along with this frequent intemperance, a violent abstinence movement was gaining way. Many of the Oregon pioneers came from Iowa and the new Northwest, full of the new crusade and ready to support it. Despite the lack of legal right, though with every moral justification, attempts were made to crush the liquor traffic with the Indians. White tells of a mass meeting authorizing him to take action on his own responsibility; of his enlisting a band of coadjutors; and, finally, of finding "the distillery in a deep, dense thicket, 11 miles from town, at 3 o'clock P.M. The boiler was a large size potash kettle, and all the apparatus well accorded. Two hogsheads and eight barrels of slush or beer were standing ready for distillation, with part of one barrel of molasses. No liquor was to be found, nor as yet had much been distilled. Having resolved on my course, I left no time for reflection, but at once upset the nearest cask, when my noble volunteers immediately seconded my measures, making a river of beer in a moment; nor did we stop till the kettle was raised, and elevated in triumph at the prow of our boat, and every cask, with all the distilling apparatus, was broken to pieces and utterly destroyed. We then returned, in high cheer, to the town, where our presence and report gave general joy."

The provisional government lasted for several years, with a fair degree of respect shown to it by its citizens. Like other provisional governments, it was weakest when revenue was in question, but its courts of justice met and satisfied a real need of the settlers. It was long after regular settlement began before Congress acquired sure title to the country and could pass laws for it.

The Oregon question, muttering in the thirties, thus broke out loudly in the forties. Emigrants then rushed west in the great migrations with deliberate purpose to have and to hold. Once there, they demanded, with absolute confidence, that Congress protect them in their new homes. The stories of the election of 1844, the Oregon treaty of 1846, and the erection of a territorial government in 1848 would all belong to an intimate study of the Oregon trail.

In the election of 1844 Oregon became an important question in practical politics. Well-informed historians no longer believe that the annexation of Texas was the result of nothing but a deep-laid plot of slaveholders to acquire more lands for slave states and more southern senators. All along the frontier, whether in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa, or in Arkansas, Alabama, and Mississippi, population was restive under hard times and its own congenital instinct to move west to cheaper lands. Speculation of the thirties had loaded up the eastern states with debts and taxes, from which the states could not escape with honor, but from under which their individual citizens could emigrate. Wherever farm lands were known, there went the home-seekers, and it needs no conspiracy explanation to account for the presence, in the platform, of a party that appealed to the great plain people, of planks for the reannexation of Texas and the whole of Oregon. With a Democratic party strongest in the South, the former extension was closer to the heart, but the whole West could subscribe to both.

Oregon included the whole domain west of the Rockies, between Spanish Mexico at 42° and Russian America, later known as Alaska, at 54° 40´. Its northern and southern boundaries were clearly established in British and Spanish treaties. Its eastern limit by the old treaty of 1818 was the continental divide, since the United States and Great Britain were unable either to allot or apportion it. Title which should justify a claim to it was so equally divided between the contesting countries that it would be difficult to make out a positive claim for either, while in fact a compromise based upon equal division was entirely fair. But the West wanted all of Oregon with an eagerness that saw no flaw in the United States title. That the democratic party was sincere in asking for all of it in its platform is clearer with respect to the rank and file of the organization than with the leaders of the party. Certain it is that just so soon as the execution of the Texas pledge provoked a war with Mexico, President Polk, himself both a westerner and a frontiersman, was ready to eat his words and agree with his British adversary quickly.

Congress desired, after Polk's election in 1844, to serve a year's notice on Great Britain and bring joint occupation to an end. But more pacific advices prevailed in the mouth of James Buchanan, Secretary of State, so that the United States agreed to accept an equitable division instead of the whole or none. The Senate, consulted in advance upon the change of policy, gave its approval both before and after to the treaty which, signed June 15, 1846, extended the boundary line of 49° from the Rockies to the Pacific. The settled half of Oregon and the greater part of the Columbia River thus became American territory, subject to such legislation as Congress should prescribe.

A territory of Oregon, by law of 1848, was the result of the establishment of the first clear American title on the Pacific. All that the United States had secured in the division was given the popular name. Missionary activity and the fur trade, and, above all, popular agricultural conquest, had established the first detached American colony, with the desert separating it from the mother country. The trail was already well known to thousands, and so clearly defined by wheel ruts and débris along the sides that even the blind could scarce wander from the beaten path. A temporary government, sufficient for the immediate needs of the inhabitants, had at once paved the way for the legitimate territory and revealed the high degree of law and morality prevailing in the population. Already the older settlers were prosperous, and the first chapter in the history of Oregon was over. A second great trail had still further weakened the hold of the American desert over the American mind, endangering, too, the Indian policy that was dependent upon the desert for its continuance.