The Columbia River: Its History, Its Myths, Its Scenery, Its Commerce

by William Denison Lyman

One of these was Hall J. Kelley of Boston. He was a native of New Hampshire and a Harvard graduate. As early as 1815, when seventeen years old, he conceived the idea of the colonisation of Americans in Oregon. He was a man of high scholarship, philanthropic spirit, and patriotic purpose. He was a dreamer and idealist, planning to form a community on the Columbia, as one of the Utopias which minds of that stamp, from Plato down, have been fond of locating somewhere in the unexplored West. After making a great effort, with partial success, to enlist Congress in his schemes, he succeeded in organising a company of several hundred, and by 1828 shaped the definite plan of going to St. Louis and following the route of the fur companies across the plains to the River of Oregon. But opposition by those same fur companies, and adverse criticism by the press broke up his enterprise for that time. In 1832 he started with a small party for the land of his dreams by the route through Mexico and California. In California, he met with Ewing Young, an American of great natural abilities and some education. Young and Kelley, brainy and original men, the former from shrewd commercial instinct and the latter from philanthropic dreams, formed a little company, and proceeded overland from California to Oregon. This was in the autumn of 1834. When, after some disasters, the company of eleven reached the Columbia, Young took up a great tract of land in the Chehalem Valley, where he devoted himself to stock-raising. Kelley, having become an invalid, went in distress to Fort Vancouver, where Dr. McLoughlin treated him with kindness, though the exclusive “Britishers” would not admit him to “social equality.” The other members of the company were scattered in various directions, but some of them remained till American occupancy became an accomplished fact.

This company of 1834,—the same year that the Methodist missionaries under Jason Lee arrived—may be considered the advance guard of American immigration. Kelley, upon his return to New England by way of the Sandwich Islands, disseminated much useful information about Oregon. To him, without doubt, is to be attributed much of the subsequent wave of interest which swept on toward American immigration. As first a New England college man, educator, and social theoriser, and then a leader of the pioneer movement to Oregon, Hall J. Kelley is worthy of permanent remembrance.

Ewing Young became distinguished for leading the party which in 1837 drove a band of seven hundred cattle from California to Oregon. This even marked an epoch in preparing for immigration and subsequent American possession. One of the peculiarly noteworthy facts in connection with Young’s enterprise, is that Dr. McLoughlin, the Hudson’s Bay Company’s magnate, who had at first discountenanced Young on account of a charge of stealing brought against him from California, and who frowned upon the cattle enterprise for fear of American influence, became reconciled to both Young and the cattle, and subscribed liberally to the enterprise.

Nearly contemporary with Kelley and Young were Bonneville and Wyeth.

Bonneville was a well-educated French-American, a West Pointer, and holding the commission of captain in the United States Army. His ardent and imaginative disposition became fired with the thought of a far western expedition, and in 1832 he organised a fur-traders’ company of a hundred and ten men. Though not realising his dreams of a fortune in furs, Bonneville made many interesting and valuable observations upon the Salmon, Clearwater, Snake, and Columbia rivers. He became thoroughly imbued with the romance and scenic grandeur of the far West. Upon his return to New York, he had the good fortune to meet Washington Irving at the home of John Jacob Astor. Irving had already felt the irresistible fascination which the River of Oregon has wrought upon all poetical natures, and the result of this meeting was one of Irving’s most charming volumes, Bonneville’s Adventures, a volume which became another potent force in turning toward the Pacific slope the thoughts of the eager, restless people of the frontier.

Still another in the group of men who led the way to immigration was Nathaniel Wyeth. He was a talented, well-educated, and energetic Bostonian. So distinguished a personage as James Russell Lowell has said of him: “He was a very remarkable person, whose conversation I valued highly. A born leader of men, he was fitly called Captain Nathaniel Wyeth as long as he lived.”

Wyeth conceived the idea of a great trading company on the Columbia, whose operations would necessarily create rivalry with the British. His design was to send companies across the continent to the Columbia head-waters and to maintain also ship connection by way of Cape Horn. He believed that a ship load of salmon from the Columbia River to the Atlantic sea-board would be a paying venture. On so large a scale did he lay out his enterprise that he expected soon to have a business of two hundred thousand dollars a year. But he looked beyond the fur and salmon business to American possession and settlement, at least south of the River to the California line. He therefore embraced in his view the building of enterprises which should lead up to and then profit by American immigration. Wyeth spent five years in Oregon, having many interesting adventures, and as many business reverses. As was the case with Astor, the British fur-traders proved too powerful for the Yankee. Among other undertakings, he built a fort on Sauvie’s Island at the mouth of the Willamette, which he called Fort William. He desired to make this the basis of his trade, and he expected the Indians to go there to trade. But such was the influence of the Hudson’s Bay people and their employees with the Indians that Wyeth’s fort had no trade. It was during those years that a frightful pestilence swept the natives away like flies, and there was great fear among them that Wyeth’s fort might harbour the scourge. The period of Wyeth’s enterprise in Oregon extended from the spring of 1832 to the autumn of 1836. Though not a business success, it had a great bearing on the creation of an interest in Oregon, and on preparing for immigration a few years later. It opened the eyes of many Americans to the attractions of Oregon and to the tremendous power and profits of the Hudson’s Bay Company.

The next movement may be called a real immigration to Oregon. It consisted of a party of nineteen, commonly known as the “Peoria party,” since they went from Peoria, Ill. Jason Lee, the missionary of Chemeketa, delivered a lecture at that place in 1838, and so much interest in Oregon was aroused that in the year following, the Peoria party, the first regular party from the Mississippi Valley, set forth for the River of the West. Their leader, T. J. Farnham, christened his followers the “Oregon Dragoons” and Mrs. Farnham gave them a flag with the inscription, “Oregon or the Grave.” Farnham declared his purpose to seize Oregon for the United States.

The Peoria party had the good fortune to have two writers in the number, whose accounts possess rare interest. These writers were the leader Farnham, and Robert Shortess. The party went to pieces at Bent’s Fort on the Arkansas, but its members reached Oregon somewhat in driblets during that year, and the one following. Shortess reached the Whitman Mission at Walla Walla in the fall of 1839, and there he remained until the following spring, when he went down the River to The Dalles. From The Dalles, he made his way over the Cascade Mountains to the Willamette Valley, and there he lived many years. Farnham also finally reached Oregon, but his avowed mission was unfulfilled. Shortess says of him: “Instead of raising the American flag and turning the Hudson’s Bay Company out-of-doors, he accepted the gift of a suit of clothes and a passage to the Sandwich Islands, and took a final leave of Oregon.” But upon his return to the “States,” Farnham published a Pictorial History of Oregon and California, a book of many interesting features, and one which played a worthy part in waking the people of the Mississippi Valley to the attractions of the Pacific Coast.

Soon after the close of Wyeth’s enterprise, there were two notable government expeditions to the Columbia River. One was commanded by Sir Edward Belcher of the British Navy, and the other by Lieutenant Charles Wilkes of the American Navy. The Wilkes expedition was one of the most interesting and important ever undertaken by the United States Government. The squadron consisted of two sloops-of-war, the Peacock and the Vincennes, the store ship, Relief, the brig, Porpoise, and the schooners, Sea Gull and Flying Fish. This fine squadron took up its principal station on Puget Sound, from which extensive surveys were made, one across the mountains to Fort Okanogan; another of the Cowlitz Valley and the Columbia River as far as Wallula.