The Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society (Vol. I, No. 3)

by Oregon Historical Society

From these words, and words of like tenor, it is evident that from this out an interested people and an alert congress will have part in shaping the policy of the government on the Oregon Question. It is to be noted, too, that the government of the United States did not advance its demands beyond the terms proposed at first, nor longer minimized the interest of the question to itself, and that it took a firmer stand on the boundary proposed. The Secretary of State now wrote of the line of latitude 49° as a concession on the part of his government, and boldly declared that as such it was an ultimatum.

After the renewal, in 1827, of the third article of the convention of 1818, with a provision for its indefinite continuance, or its abrogation by either power on due notice, the subject drops out of congress for a period of ten years, but only to return at the end of that time on the demand of that voice which, as we have just observed, the administration of Mr. Adams had already heard and attended to. This interval is an important period in the history of the Oregon Territory. The two governments stand stubbornly each on the boundary line of its own proposal, the United States for the line of latitude 49°, Great Britain for the line of the Columbia, seemingly making no approach to an agreement. Other influences, however, were at work preparing the way for final settlement, and determining the lines on which that settlement should be made.

The ten years between the renewal, in 1827, of the convention of 1818, and the resumption of the discussion of the subject in congress in the year 1837, present a new phase of the Oregon Question, and may be termed the period of early American settlement. In thus designating this period, the settlement of Astoria in 1811 has not been forgotten. It has already been shown that, though projected and supported by an American capitalist, and made under letters from the American government and the protection of the American flag, that settlement was scarcely entitled to be called an American settlement; that whatever of American character it had in its inception it lost two years later in its transfer to a British company and to the protection of the British flag. The settlement of Astoria, even as a British settlement, was not of a permanent character. It contributed, it is true, a few settlers to later communities as they were established, but by far its greatest contributions to the settlement of the Oregon Question was in the diplomatic transfer which it was the occasion of under the terms of the treaty of Ghent. It did serve under the provisions of that treaty to secure to the United States the valuable concession from Great Britain of their right to be in possession of this position on the south bank of the Columbia, pending the final settlement of the question of sovereignty over the territory. As a permanent American settlement, however, it has no place in the history of Oregon.

There is reason, therefore, in making the period of early American settlement begin with the period mentioned. No actual settlement, it is true, was made at the very first of this period, but about this time the question of colonizing the region of the Columbia River began to be seriously agitated in various parts of the United States. A company having this end in view was organized about this time in Boston, and another in New Orleans, while in various parts of the country the propriety of forming such organizations was seriously discussed. Every effort was made by these societies, and by individuals whose interest in the subject had been awakened, to obtain and disseminate such information as should awaken popular interest in the territory and further the ends of its colonization.

The first enterprise that followed from this agitation, was that of Nathaniel J. Wyeth, of Boston, for the establishment of a settlement for trade and agriculture on the Lower Columbia. After the failure of a first attempt in 1832, Wyeth succeeded in the year 1834 in planting a small settlement on Wapato Island, at the junction of the Willamette with the Columbia. Untoward circumstances and disaffection among his followers defeated his first attempt, and sent him back to the east, after two years of gallant struggle, feeling that his second was far from successful. His settlement, while it has had in some sense an unbroken continuity, and has contributed of its members to the subsequent settlements in Oregon, can hardly be said to have had the character of a permanent colony. The largest results of Wyeth’s enterprise are rather to be looked for in the contribution he made in various ways to the furtherance of other enterprises than his own.

Substantially the same may be said of the enterprise of Hall J. Kelley, the leading promoter of one or more of the emigration societies already mentioned. He contributed materially to the ultimate settlement of the territory by his persistent and widespread agitation in the east, and later in some measure by bringing into the Willamette Valley a small band of men, some of whose number became permanent settlers. No colony, however, was planted in this region under his leadership, and he did not himself finally make Oregon his home.

The American settlements in Oregon that have thus far been mentioned, were organized primarily for the purpose of trade, and that, too, trade of a character that was not likely to bring into the country and permanently establish there colonists that should become rooted to the soil. Traders and trappers might in time abandon their pursuits as such, and, attaching themselves as individuals to a settled community, become useful members of that community, as more than one such did in the early history of Oregon, but no aggregation of such men, brought together for their own peculiar purposes, was likely to become an organic society, with powers of life and growth.

The American settlements in Oregon thus far lacked the first essential to the planting even of the germs of a state. In no one of them was there so much as one American home, nor were there the elements of one. An American white woman had not yet set foot on Oregon soil, nor any woman, save the native and her offspring. It was now more than a score of years since that first settlement at Astoria, but Oregon still waited the coming of that institution that lies at the foundation of every American state, the American family.

About the time of Wyeth’s first expedition, there appeared in Saint Louis what had somewhat of the character of a delegation from the native tribes west of the Rocky Mountains. It consisted, as the story runs, of four or five men from the Nez Perce tribe, who, having heard of the White Man’s God and his Book, were come to ask that men be sent to teach their people of these. The story of this strange and interesting mission was taken up by the press and spread throughout the country. It gave a new impulse and a new direction to the efforts of missionary societies for the evangelization of the native tribes. One of the first fruits of this new interest in missions was the organization by the Mission Board of the Methodist Episcopal Church of a mission to the Oregon Indians. This mission, as finally constituted, consisted of the Reverend Jason Lee, as leader, and his nephew, Daniel Lee, and three lay members, Cyrus Shepard, Philipp L. Edwards, and Courtney M. Walker, five in all, a mission of men only. Sending their goods and supplies by sea to the Columbia, they joined Wyeth in the spring of 1834, and traveled with him overland, reaching Vancouver about the middle of September of that year. After personal examination of the field by the leader, it was determined that the mission should settle in the Willamette Valley, and a spot was fixed upon not far from the site of the present town of Salem, and within easy reach of a settlement already made by some retired employees of the Hudson’s Bay Company. The object of the mission was the evangelization of the Indian tribes of the valley, seemingly with little thought at first of contributing to the colonization of the country. This mission, indeed, the first among the Oregon Indians, like the trading settlements that preceded it, lacked as first constituted one essential to permanence. It did not include the family. The mistake was doubtless early seen by the missionaries themselves, but was not remedied until the arrival of the first reinforcement to the mission, more than two years later. From the coming of the first reinforcement in the spring of 1837, and the constitution thereupon of several families, the mission began to take on somewhat of the character of a permanent settlement, and with still further reinforcements a year or two later, became the nucleus of the first permanent American colony in the Willamette Valley.

In the meantime a second mission had been established east of the Cascade Mountains. In the summer of 1836, Dr. Marcus Whitman and Mrs. Whitman, the Rev. Henry H. Spaulding and Mrs. Spaulding, and William H. Gray, under commission from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, crossed the Rocky Mountains, and settled among the native tribes of the Upper Columbia. The primary object of this mission, as was that of the mission to the tribes of the Willamette Valley, was the evangelization of the Indians. But this mission, unlike that, was based from the first on the family, and thus brought with it this first condition of permanence. Within its limited number were the two first American white families to settle in Oregon, and were included for a period of six months or more the only American white women dwelling west of the Rocky Mountains. From its original number, and more largely from its later reinforcements, the mission made valuable contributions to the body of permanent settlers, but perhaps its greatest contribution to the history of Oregon was one incidental to its primary work as a mission, in its showing to America and the world by its own first treading of the same, that there was an open pathway for American families through the Rocky Mountains into the valley of the Columbia. This mission thus demonstrated for the first the practical contiguity of the Oregon Territory to the United States. It was this contiguity as it was subsequently made patent that was, almost more than all else, to influence the Oregon Question to an issue favorable to the United States. Whitman seems to have seen this from the first. The settlement of the Oregon Question came to appear to him simply a matter of prior settlement of the territory from contiguous states, and such prior settlement was a question only of an open pathway through the intervening mountains. To his mind, therefore, the first duty of the American government was not in military occupation of the region in question, nor in the extension over it of civil jurisdiction, but in making the pathway thither already pointed out, a plain and safe highway for American settlers. This done, the people would do the rest.