USA > Washington > History of Washington; the rise and progress of an American state, Vol. II > Part 3
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OF AN AMERICAN STATE
by drowning, and other accidents, or were murdered by the Indians.
While thus combating disease, disaster in various forms, and disappointment in nearly all of his expectations, he was obliged to meet the sharpest possible competition, with the Hudson's Bay people, in his trade with the Indians. A trading station was opened just across the river from his fort, where goods were sold at prices which he could not well afford to meet, and the Indians, who were thoroughly under the influence of his competitors, soon ceased even to visit him, just as on the opposite side of the mountains they were refusing to visit or trade with Bonneville.
But in spite of all his disappointments and discourage- ments Wyeth did not complain. The remorseless competi- tion of the Hudson's Bay Company was accepted as a thing naturally to be expected. He says of it: "The measures of this company have been conceived with wisdom, steadily pursued, and have been well seconded by their government, and the success has been complete. . · With-
out being able to charge on them any very gross violations of the treaties, a few years will make the country west of the mountains as English as they desire. Already the Ameri- cans are unknown as a nation, and as individuals their power is despised by the natives of the land. A population is al- ready growing out of the occupancy of the country whose prejudices are not with us, and they will decide before many years to whom the country will belong."
In 1836 Wyeth gave up the contest and returned to Massa- chusetts. The remnants of his property on the Columbia he endeavored to sell in London, to the Hudson's Bay Com- pany, and finally did sell Fort Hall, which was subsequently occupied as one of its trading posts for many years.
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THE RISE AND PROGRESS
More of those who came with Wyeth to Oregon in his two expeditions remained in it than had previously come to it with all the other parties that had visited it. Chief among these were Solomon Howard Smith, Calvin Tibbets, T. J. Hubbard, and James A. O'Neal, as well as the missionary party composed of Rev. Jason Lee, Rev. Daniel Lee, and Messrs. P. S. Edwards and Cyrus Shepherd.
The next party who materially assisted in extending the Oregon trail toward the west was that led by Dr. Marcus Whitman in 1836. This was a missionary party and was composed of Dr. Whitman and wife, Rev. H. H. Spalding and wife and W. H. Gray. They left the Missouri River with two wagons early in that year, but were only able to bring one of them as far as the rendezvous, which Bonneville's train had reached four years earlier, having been com- pelled to abandon the other, with most of their goods, includ- ing Spalding's classical books and Dr. Whitman's stock of garden and other seeds on the way. The other wagon they managed to take as far as Fort Hall, under the guidance of John McLeod and Tom McKay of the Hudson's Bay Com- pany, whom they met at the rendezvous, and who gave them their protection as well as every assistance they could render them during the remainder of their journey.
By the time they had reached Fort Hall all of the party, except Dr. Whitman himself, were convinced that it was not worth while to try to take their wagon further. They had already encountered many difficulties on account of it, that they would have escaped if they had been content to pursue their journey with pack animals only, as their guides and everybody else advised them to do. The wagon had been many times overturned, and it had been got over, around or across many obstacles only by the utmost exertions of all
JOSEPH L. MEEK.
This adventurous trapper was born in Virginia, but early went to the mountains in search of adventure. He was one of a party of four who brought the first wagons from Fort Hall to the Columbia. He subse- quently settled in Oregon, and was active in the organization of its provisional government.
ALE I FEELISE AND PROGRESS
STUM The fc noTs9 ni anir nuoen odtjot Nytebuff in his two
themsung Istlerzorg ati lo droitssinhhets, T. J. Calvin
kah as well as the missionary Tahomo Loc, Rev. Daniel Lee, and ACo Shepherd.
rumruth osi ted in extending the ------- ted by Dr. Marcus missionary party and was 1 10 fe. Rev. H. H. Spalding - left the Missouri River with all & fi ras but were only able to bring fedezvous, which Bincalle's netel for jar earlier, having been com- el koska thr he, with most of their goods, includ- inn dail bodlo and Dr. Whitman's stock of way. The other wagon they . w. Fot Hall, under the guidance of IT Way of the Hudson's Bay Com- en sor o do- mendezvous, and who gave them waren assistance they could render their journey.
My bad wade Fort Hall all of the party, were convinced that it was not is win ileir wagon further. They had Cfrulties on account of it, that been content to pursue , as theirguides and nebb ile isti - do The wagon had been
محمدـ
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OF AN AMERICAN STATE
the members of the party, including their guides. But Whitman was unwilling to abandon it, and he accordingly made a cart of the two hind wheels, on which he lashed the other two and so much of the remaining parts as could be fastened to them, one of Mrs. Whitman's trunks and a few other articles, and this was taken through, with even greater difficulty than had been previously encountered, as far as Fort Boise, a station recently established by the Hudson's Bay Company, to compete with Fort Hall. Here the wagon was abandoned, and so far as can now be ascertained, was never taken further. The remainder of the journey was accomplished on horseback, under the escort of McLeod and McKay, to Fort Walla Walla, whence the missionaries were sent to Fort Vancouver by the Hudson's Bay Company's boats.
No further effort was made to take wheeled vehicles over the remainder of the route until 1840, when Dr. Robt. Newell, Joseph L. Meek and Caleb Wilkins, all of whom were Ameri- can trappers who had been in the mountains for several years, first drove through to the Columbia River. In the preceding year a missionary party from Quincy, Ill., composed of Rev. Harvey Clarke and wife, Alvin T. Smith and P. B. Little- john and their wives, had brought two wagons as far as Fort Hall. At Green River they had fallen in with Newell, Meek, Wilkins, George W. Ebherts, William Doughty, or Doty, and William Craig, who traveled with them from the rendezvous to Fort Hall, Newell being their guide. At that point they determined to leave their wagons, and one of them, together with a set of double harness, was given to Newell in pay- ment for his services. The other seems to have been left with Ermatinger, who was then in charge of the fort, in the expectation that it would some day be reclaimed. "From
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THE RISE AND PROGRESS
this place to Fort Boise," says Mr. Clarke, "we packed our baggage and supplies, and rode on horseback ourselves. There had been no open road on the plains; but from Boise in there was a plain trail made by Indians and the fur-com- pany men."
Newell, Wilkins and Meek had been trapping for several years in the mountains, had married Indian wives, and some of them had growing families of children. They were beginning to weary of the occupations which had at first offered them so many attractions, and become anxious to make themselves permanent homes in some more agreeable country where they might find school and other advantages for their chil- dren. They had learned something of the attractions of the Willamette Valley. During the winter of 1839-40 they determined to go there, and Ermatinger, who was then in charge of Fort Hall, went with them. They all knew that it would be very difficult to get the wagons through but they had plenty of time, and thinking they could take their wives and children more conveniently that way than on horseback, they resolved to make the attempt. Years afterwards Dr. Newell, in a letter to Elwood Evans, gave this account of their experience on the journey: "At the time I took the wagons, I had no idea of undertaking to bring them into the country. I exchanged fat horses to the missionaries for their animals; and, after they had been gone a month or more for Willamette, and the American Fur Company had aban- noned the country for good, I concluded to hitch up and try the much-dreaded job of taking a wagon to Oregon. I sold one of those wagons to Mr. Ermatinger, at Fort Hall. On the 15th of August, 1840, we put out with three wagons; Joseph L. Meek drove my wagon. In a few days, we began to realize the difficult task before us, and found that the
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OF AN AMERICAN STATE
continued crashing of sage under our wagons, which was in many places higher than the mules' backs, was no joke. Seeing our animals begin to fail, we began to lighten up, fi- nally threw away our wagon beds, and were quite sorry we had undertaken the job. All the consolation we had was that we broke the first sage on the road, and were too proud to eat anything but dried salmon skins after our provisions had become exhausted. In a rather rough and reduced state, we arrived at Dr. Whitman's mission station, in the Walla Walla valley, where we were met by that hospitable man, and kindly made welcome, and feasted accordingly. On hearing me regret that I had undertaken to bring the wagons, the Doctor said: 'Oh, you will never regret it; you have broken the ice and when others see that wagons have passed, they too, will pass and in a few years the valley will be full of our people.' The Doctor shook me heartily by the hand. Mrs. Whitman, too, welcomed us; and the Indians walked around the wagons, or what they called 'horse-canoes,' and seemed to give it up. We spent a day or so with the Doctor and then went to Fort Walla Walla, where we were kindly received by Mr. P. C. Pambrun, chief trader of the Hudson's Bay Company, and superintendent of that post. On the Ist of October, we took leave of those kind people, leaving our wagons, and taking the river trail; but we proceeded slowly. Our party consisted of Joseph L. Meek and myself, also our families, and a Snake Indian, whom I brought to Oregon, where he died a year after our arrival. The party did not arrive at the Willamette Falls (Oregon City) till December, subsisting for weeks upon dried salmon, and upon several occasions were compelled to swim their stock across the Columbia and Willamette."
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THE RISE AND PROGRESS
No attempt was made to take wheeled vehicles beyond Fort Walla Walla until the settlers began to come in ever in- creasing numbers, two or three years later. In 1843 the train with which Judge Burnett, J. W. Nesmith, M. M. McCarver, Jesse Applegate, and several others who afterwards became famous in the early history of Oregon, crossed the plains, after a short rest at Whitman's Mission, pushed on down the Oregon bank of the river as far as the Dalles, where, as was done for several years following, the wagons were taken apart, and with their loads transported on flatboats and other floating contrivances of many kinds down to Fort Vancouver.
Two years later S. K. Barlow, who thought "God never made a mountain without some place for a man to go over or under it," determined to go over the range near Mount Hood if he could not go around it. Accordingly, with eighteen men and women, some children, thirteen wagons, sixteen yoke of oxen and seven horses, he set out upon this seemingly impossible undertaking. It proved to be more nearly impossible than even he had supposed, and anyone with less courage and resolution than he possessed would have given it up long before the summit of the great flank of the moun- tain, over which they finally made their way, was reached.
But Barlow was not the kind of man to turn back, or even to look back once he had put his hand to the plow. Born in Kentucky, the son of a slaveholding father, he had early left home, because he hated the institution of slavery. He long believed that his father would disinherit him because of his opinions on the slavery question, but he had not given them up on that account. Going first to Indiana and then to Illinois to make himself a home in a free State, he finally determined to remove to Oregon, joined the emigration of 1845, and was made captain of the train with which he came.
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Arriving at the Dalles and finding it difficult to find boats to transport their wagons and goods, and almost as difficult to obtain material to make rafts, he announced his deter- mination to find or force a way over the mountains, and called for volunteers to accompany him. Eighteen men and women, as above mentioned, finally declared themselves willing to make the attempt, and all of them would have turned back and abandoned it many times if they had not been held together by Barlow's unyielding determination. They left the Dalles early in October and did not reach the Willamette until Christmas day, having been nearly three months in making a distance of not more than eighty miles. During the toilsome journey most of their animals died, or were killed for food. At one time their provisions were so nearly exhausted, and starvation seemed so imminent, that the women began to contemplate the necessity of eating the only dog they had left, old Bruno, who had been much petted by the whole party, and was still tolerably fat. They were, however, relieved from the necessity of making an experi- ment with a kind of food which Lewis and Clark had so highly recommended, and which in this case would have seemed something akin to cannibalism, by sending a relief party forward to procure provisions. They were compelled to leave their wagons at the summit, and to complete their journey on foot, or on the backs of such of their animals as remained alive and able to carry them, but all got through in safety.
In the following years the road was opened, and so far improved as to be passable for teams with considerable loads. Toll was charged and collected from all who could pay, until Barlow had partly reimbursed himself for the labor and money expended, but for many years it presented a very
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RISE AND PROGRESS OF AN AMERICAN STATE
uninviting prospect to the emigrants, and many, if not most of them preferred the river route, in spite of its cost, its dan- gers and its inconveniences, to the rugged trail which led them so far above the clouds.
In this way, and by these means, and with all these attempts and failures, trials and embarrassments, was the way made passable for wheels from the Missouri to the · Willamette.
CHAPTER XIX. DIPLOMACY.
T HE first attempt to fix the boundary between the Columbia River country and that claimed by Great Britain on the north was made in 1804, when it was found desirable to determine more definitely than had yet been done the line separating the Louisiana territory from the country lying north of it. Louisi- ana had been ceded by France to Spain in 1762, retroceded by Spain to France in 1800, and by France sold to the United States in 1803, without any definite description as to its boundaries, either on its northern or western sides. Spain retroceded it to France "with the same extent which it now has, and which it had when France possessed it," and Napoleon almost immediately transferred it to the United States, in the name of the French Republic, "with all its rights and appurtenances, as fully, and in the same manner, as they have been acquired by the French Republic." In each case it was transferred as it had been received, the grantor in neither guaranteeing anything as to its northern or western limits.
In the negotiation with Great Britain, had in 1804, the United States claimed the forty-ninth parallel as the boun- dary, on the ground that it had been adopted and definitely settled, by commissaries appointed agreeably to the tenth article of the treaty of Utrecht, in 1713, as the dividing line between the French possessions of western Canada and Louisiana on the south, and the British territories of Hud- son's Bay on the north. But it was not possible to show that this had actually been done.
It was shown to be probable that commissaries had been appointed, as provided by the treaty, but no evidence that could be relied upon or admitted, could be found to establish the fact beyond dispute, that the forty-ninth parallel, or any
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THE RISE AND PROGRESS
other line, had been adopted, or even proposed by them or by either government.
As the negotiators could not agree that a boundary had been regularly fixed, it was necessary for them to fix upon one themselves, if they could do so, and accordingly, after fully considering the matter, the forty-ninth parallel from the Lake of the Woods westward to the Stony Mountains was agreed to.
In this connection the first attempt was made to fix the boundary between the territories claimed by the United States and Great Britain on the Pacific Coast, but the nego- tiators could not agree. They, however, added this proviso to their description of that part of the boundary about which they had agreed : "that nothing in the present article shall be construed to extend to the northwest coast of America, or to the territories belonging to or claimed by either party on the continent of America, to the westward of the Stony Mountains." This article was approved by both governments, though President Jefferson wished that the proviso in regard to the boundary west of the mountains might be omitted, as it "could have little other effect than as an offensive intimation to Spain that the claims of the United States extended to the Pacific Ocean."
Always distrustful of Great Britain, he suspected that her negotiators had a cunning purpose in this proviso, "to strengthen Spanish jealousies of the United States," and therefore, however reasonable our claims on the Pacific might be, he thought it impolitic thus to assert them. He did not send the treaty as thus amended to the Senate for confirma- tion, and the boundary question therefore remained unsettled, and was not again discussed between the two nations until 1814.
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The attention of the authorities in Washington to our interests on the northwest coast was next demanded by Russia. Diplomatic relations between that country and the United States were first established in 1808, and in the fol- lowing year complaint was made to our government that certain American traders were supplying the natives on the North Pacific Coast with firearms and ammunition, to the prejudice of the interest of the emperor and his people in that region, and a desire was expressed that Congress would do something, or that some convention might be concluded between the two nations, by which this "illicit trade" might be stopped. But neither Congress nor Mr. Madison's administration manifested any disposition to do either of the things thus suggested, at the time, and the Russian minis- ter of foreign affairs then proposed to Mr. John Quincy Adams, our minister at St. Petersburg, an arrangement by which American ships should supply the Russian settlements on the American side of Bering's Sea, with provisions and trading goods, and transport their furs to the Chinese mar- kets, on condition that they would refrain from doing the things that had been complained of while enjoying this trade. Mr. Adams replied, pointing out several reasons why our government could not, with propriety, undertake to do what was proposed, and then inquired "within what limits it was expected that the restrictions should be observed." This inquiry seems to have embarrassed the Russian minister, who did not reply for a considerable time, finding it difficult no doubt, in the light of such facts as were then known about the coast, to propose a limit that he would be willing to be bound by, and that would at the same time not seem ridiculous. In time, however, he replied that "the Russian American Company claimed the whole coast of
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THE RISE AND PROGRESS
America on the Pacific, and the adjacent islands, from Bering's Strait southward to and beyond the mouth of the Columbia River." The correspondence here terminated, and no further reference to the matter was made by either nation for several years.
It seems probable that Mr. Astor may have gained some hint from Washington, or elsewhere, in regard to the sugges- tion thus made by the Russian minister, and that it may have led him to entertain hopes for a larger trade with the Russian settlements, in connection with his Astoria enterprise, than he would otherwise have looked for. We have seen that he had some correspondence with members of Mr. Jefferson's cabinet, in regard to this undertaking, and Mr. Gallatin says "it met with full approbation, and best wishes for its success," in that quarter. Mr. Astor afterwards claimed that it met with something more, and that he was given assur- ances that he never realized, but in those times it was not possible for the government to do much in regions so far away, and moreover it was not then supposed to be one of the functions of government to be very helpful to anybody or anything.
After this incident the Columbia River country received no further attention, and demanded none from diplomats until the close of the war of 1812.
When our five plenipotentiaries were sent abroad in 1814 to negotiate the treaty by which that war was brought to a close, it was not known in Washington that Astoria had been formally taken possesson of by the commander of a British war ship, who had been sent there to capture it, and that the flag of the United States had been hauled down and the British flag raised in its stead. But Mr. Monroe, then secretary of state, had, in his instructions to
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the plenipotentiaries, charged them to have in mind, "that the United States had in their possession, at the commence- ment of the war, a post at the mouth of the river Columbia, which commanded the river, and which ought to be com- prised in the stipulations, should its possession have been wrested from us during the war." Agreeable to this in- struction our negotiators insisted upon, and procured the insertion of, this clause in the treaty: "that all territory, places and possessions, whatsoever, taken by either party from the other during the war, or which may be taken after the signing of this treaty, excepting the islands hereinafter mentioned" (which are in the Bay of Fundy), "shall be restored without delay."
Mr. Clay, who was one of the negotiators on the part of the United States, subsequently claimed, in a speech in the Senate, that he had procured the insertion of the word " pos- sessions" in this agreement for mutual surrender, for the express purpose of compelling the restoration of Astoria, if it should turn out that it had been captured.
Within a year after the treaty of Ghent, containing this provision, had been signed, Mr. Monroe notified the repre- sentative of Great Britain in Washington that the president intended to reoccupy the post at the mouth of the Columbia immediately. This notice was given in July, but it was not until September that Captain Biddle, commanding the sloop of war Ontario, and Mr. J. B. Prevost were commissioned to proceed in that ship to the mouth of the Columbia, and there " assert the claim of the United States to the sovereignty of the adjacent country in a friendly and peaceable manner and without the employment of force." A long correspon- dence with the British foreign office followed this action. It was claimed, on the part of England, that Astoria had not
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THE RISE AND PROGRESS
been captured, but had been bought by the Northwest Company, and further that all the territory in its neighbor- hood had been early taken possession of in the king's name, and "had since been considered as forming part of his Majesty's dominions." But it was finally admitted that we might rightfully claim restoration, and instructions were issued for carrying it into effect. Mr. Prevost, who by this time was in Chile, was given passage to the Columbia in a British frigate, and upon his arrival early in October 1818, the restoration was formally made.
This restoration was a mere ceremony and nothing more. Written instruments were exchanged, in one of which, signed by Captain Hickey of his Majesty's ship Blossom, and J. Keith of the Northwest Company, they asserted that, in obedience to the commands they had received from certain named authorities, representing his Royal Highness the Prince Regent, and in conformity with the first article of the treaty of Ghent, they restored "to the government of the United States, through its agent Mr. J. B. Prevost, Esq., the settle- ment known as Fort George on the Columbia River" and Mr. Prevost certified that he had received possession of the "settlement designated above." The British flag at the fort was then lowered, and that of the United States raised in its place, and duly saluted by the guns of the Blossom. Mr. Prevost then left the country, and the Northwest Com- pany remained in it, in the full enjoyment of all the rights and privileges it had ever exercised there.
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