Dreams of El Dorado

by H. W. Brands

  A total of thirteen people were killed by the Indians. These were Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, the two Sager boys, Andrew Rogers, L. W. Saunders and seven others associated with the mission. A fourteenth person, Peter Hall, managed to escape the initial attack but was never seen alive again.

  More than fifty women and children were held by the Indians as prisoners. They didn’t know if the killing had ended. “With hearts filled with fright, we awaited the coming of the murderers,” Catherine Sager recalled.

  25

  AMBASSADOR FROM OREGON

  IF EVER A MOMENT IN THE HISTORY OF THE OREGON country called for the strong, steady leadership John McLoughlin had exercised from Fort Vancouver for nearly a quarter century, it came in the critical hours and days after the massacre at the Whitman mission, when the lives of Catherine Sager and the other hostages hung in the balance. But McLoughlin no longer ruled the Hudson’s Bay Company post. His generosity to the American emigrants, who often arrived hungry, ragged and woefully unprepared for their first winter, had caused his masters in the Bay Company to question his loyalty to their bottom line, and in 1846 they forced him to retire. McLoughlin crossed the Columbia River and took up residence at Oregon City, a town emerging at the falls of the Willamette River, twenty-five miles above its confluence with the Columbia. His new neighbors were hardly more grateful than his old employers; they thought he should have done more to save them from their own improvidence.

  To Peter Skene Ogden, who in his days as a trapper and trader had given his name to the river later called the Humboldt, fell the task of filling McLoughlin’s shoes. But an even larger task was managing the retreat of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and of British authority in the Pacific Northwest, two hundred miles to the north. In the year Ogden took over from McLoughlin, the United States and Britain reached an agreement on the fate of Oregon. As expected, the two countries split the region, with Britain getting the northern part and America the southern. Unexpectedly, the line of division was not the Columbia River, as McLoughlin and many others had assumed it would be, but rather the 49th parallel to salt water, and then the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the Pacific. Timing and context determined this outcome. James Polk had campaigned on an all-of-Oregon platform, but the prospect of war with Mexico over Texas put him in a compromising mood. Nor did the British push hard for the Columbia River. They were in the process of repealing their Corn Laws, as they called their ban on the importation of foreign grain. American wheat was cheaper than British wheat, and its import would encourage British industrialization by freeing—or forcing—British farmers to take jobs in the cities. Yet the repealers had to promise that wheat would not be used as a weapon against Britain. To make this promise plausible, they needed to keep the Americans happy. Hence the abandonment of Fort Vancouver and the withdrawal to modern British Columbia.

  Ogden was still at Fort Vancouver when the shocking news of the Whitman massacre came down the Columbia. Humanitarianism aside, Ogden realized he had to free Catherine Sager and the other hostages lest their killing further inflame the spirit of vengeance the massacre was sure to kindle among the Americans on the Willamette. Until the retreat to the north was accomplished, the last thing Ogden wanted was a war between the Americans and the Cayuse, which might well become a war against all the Indians of Oregon, and of all the Indians against all the whites. So he packed a cargo of trade goods—the currency of ransom—into a Bay Company boat and headed upstream.

  The negotiations proved easier than he feared. The elders among the Cayuse were as appalled at the massacre as any of the whites, for they understood what it might bring down upon them. They made clear to Ogden that the killings were the work of young hotheads and not of the tribe as a whole. They accepted his offer of the trade goods for the hostages. Ogden delivered blankets, cotton shirts, guns, ammunition, flints and tobacco; they delivered Catherine Sager and the other hostages.

  THE BARGAIN DIDN’T END THE CRISIS, BUT MERELY KEPT IT from getting worse. Thirteen people were known to be dead and one presumed so; the Americans in the Willamette settlements demanded justice, if not vengeance. They demanded something else, as well, albeit of the United States government rather than of the Indians: territorial status for Oregon. Now that Oregon was definitively American, they insisted that Washington extend its protection to them.

  In pursuit of justice and perhaps vengeance, the Oregonians launched the first organized war against Indians in the American West. Adapting an American tradition that ran back to the Mayflower Compact, the Willamette settlers created a provisional government, on no one’s authority but their own. The provisional government raised a militia to capture the Cayuse killers and possibly punish the rest of the tribe. More than a few of the Oregon Rifles, as they called themselves, would have been happy to wipe out the entire Cayuse tribe. Some wished to teach all the Indians of Oregon a lesson.

  They didn’t get their way. The provisional government pursued a surprisingly sophisticated policy of negotiating amid hostilities. A peace commission met with the Cayuse chiefs and demanded the delivery of the murderers, even while the militia was moving against Cayuse warriors and potential allies. As a result, the Cayuse War didn’t amount to much militarily. It was a conflict mostly of ambush and skirmish, punctuated by breaks for bad weather and furloughs for the militiamen to plant and harvest their crops. Eventually, almost three years after the slaughter at Waiilatpu, the exhausted and diminished Cayuse handed over five men for trial.

  By then the settlers had accomplished their second goal: formal territorial government under American federal law. The provisional government drafted a petition citing the Whitman killings as evidence of the need for federal governance and protection. To carry the petition to Washington, in the dead of winter, the Oregonians chose Joe Meek. People who had known Meek only from the mountains would have been surprised by his adjustment to the life in the lowlands. His taste for farming never quite matched his way with words, but the latter enabled him to launch a modest political career. He took a part in creating the provisional government, and his good humor and solid sense caused his neighbors to look to him at moments when other men grew anxious and testy. At the time of the calling of the volunteers to fight the Cayuse, Meek thought his daughter Helen was one of the captives. He was tempted to ride to her rescue. But better than most of the settlers, he understood that direct action against the Cayuse might be the death of the captives, and he was willing to leave the negotiations to Peter Ogden. When the provisional legislature wrote its petition to Congress and sought a messenger to carry the crucial document across the winter mountains to Washington, Meek seemed just the man.

  His journey east became the stuff of legend. Meek accompanied the Oregon Rifles as far as Waiilatpu. By this time he had learned that Helen was not one of the captives ransomed by Ogden; Meek assumed that Helen had died of the measles or been killed by the Cayuse. He learned that it was the former when, with the volunteers, he visited the scene of the massacre. A hasty burial given the bodies had been undone by wolves, which had devoured the flesh and scattered the bones of the corpses. Meek managed to identify Helen’s body and ascertain that she had not been the victim of violence. He nonetheless blamed the Cayuse, concluding that she would have survived under Narcissa Whitman’s care if Narcissa had not been murdered. He sorrowfully reburied his little girl in a deeper grave, beyond the reach of wild animals or any influence but passing time.

  He took a last look at the remains of Narcissa. He recalled their first meeting at the Green River rendezvous, when she had laughed at his tales of the mountains. He remembered her fair face then—and shuddered at the battered, gnawed skull that now stared back at him. The only part of her that remained recognizable was her golden hair, which had beguiled mountain men and Indians alike. One of the volunteers snipped samples of the hair to give to her friends in the Willamette Valley.

  Meek turned his face farther east. With a few other men he ascended the Blue Mountains, covered with snow in midwin
ter. He donned the red belt and distinctive Canadian cap of the Hudson’s Bay Company in order to pass himself off as a friend of the Indians and one who benefited from the company’s protection. The disguise served him well when his party encountered Bannock Indians, whose hostile first reaction softened when Meek explained that a large Bay Company trading party was following them at a day’s distance. The Bannocks, eager for the trade goods, let Meek and the others go. Meek had no difficulty persuading his companions to march nonstop for forty-eight hours lest the Bannocks, angered upon learning of his deception, give chase and kill them.

  They reached Fort Hall, where the wife of the absent director provided them a hot meal and offered warm beds. They declined the latter, choosing to resume their journey at once. In the high country above Fort Hall they ran into snowdrifts that defeated their horses. Dismounting, they made snowshoes of willow branches and, letting the horses find their way back to the fort, pressed on.

  The surroundings reminded Meek of his mountain days, when he had often tramped about in the middle of winter. A relic of those days appeared in the form of Peg Leg Smith, a mountain man who now herded cattle for a rancher on the upper Bear River. They swapped stories and Smith killed a cow for a feast. Meek remarked that in the old days the meat would have been buffalo, but after the meager rations he and his partners had been on since Fort Hall, the beef was plenty satisfying.

  At the headwaters of the Green River, Meek fell in with Jim Bridger. Meek had to convey the sad news that Bridger’s daughter, like his own, had died in the aftermath of the Whitman massacre. Bridger remarked that they shared a score to settle with the Cayuse. He gave Meek and the others four mules for their journey out of the mountains and down the Platte River.

  They reached Fort Laramie, where the French trader in charge warned them against the Sioux farther east. Meek’s group dodged the Sioux and reached St. Joseph, Missouri, just over two months after leaving the Willamette Valley. The Missouri River boatmen weren’t easily impressed, but Meek’s journey prompted one to christen his new vessel the Joseph L. Meek, with a sign affixed to the pilothouse that boasted “The Quickest Trip Yet.”

  ON THE MISSOURI, MEEK WAS A THROWBACK, A VESTIGE FROM the era of the fur trade; on the Mississippi and the Ohio he was a curiosity and then a celebrity. His mountain raiment grew more singular the farther from the mountains he traveled, and by the time his steamboat from St. Louis reached Wheeling, Virginia, he drew crowds in the dining parlor and on the foredeck. He played his role to the hilt, announcing that he was the ambassador from the “Republic of Oregon” to the president of the United States. To any who would treat him to refreshment he told tales of his fights with grizzly bears and savage Indians; the blanket that served as his coat and the wolf-skin cap that covered his head, together with his unshorn hair and fierce beard, lent credence and piquancy to his tales.

  At Wheeling he boarded a stage for Cumberland, where he transferred to the train for Washington. He arrived in the capital to find Congress deadlocked over the Oregon question. Meek was surprised, as were many observers better versed in the ways of the nation’s capital. Oregon had been, until very recently, an uncontroversial cause. American Protestants, who formed the great majority of the country’s population, had cheered the missionary efforts of the Whitmans and their Protestant colleagues. John Frémont had become famous on the strength of his explorations of the Oregon country, as breathlessly recounted in narratives cowritten and publicized by his indefatigable wife, Jessie Benton Frémont. It lent to Frémont’s renown that he was dashingly handsome and Jessie beautiful and politically connected. Their descriptions of the wonders of Oregon, not to mention of Frémont’s feats of daring and courage in revealing them, added to Oregon’s allure and romance at a time when it was the favored destination of westbound emigrants.

  The example of the Whitmans, the exploits of Frémont, and the enthusiasm of the emigrants appeared to vindicate the prophets of Manifest Destiny. The high priest of the tribe, and the coiner of the phrase, was a journalist named John L. O’Sullivan, who in 1845 proclaimed that the United States had shared Oregon with Britain for too long. O’Sullivan demanded that the government advance America’s claim to the whole of the Oregon country. “That claim is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.”

  Americans, like most people, are easily flattered, and Manifest Destiny was flattery in its most seductive form. It cast American self-interest as a providential imperative. To oppose the acquisition of Oregon, to resist westward expansion, was to contradict God Himself.

  Yet Manifest Destiny fell short. The United States split Oregon with Britain, and it never came close to overspreading all of North America. A principal reason for its failure was simultaneously the cause of Joe Meek’s surprise at the end of his journey from Oregon: slavery. Slavery had nothing to do with Oregon per se; not in their wildest dreams did advocates of slavery imagine chattel workers plowing the fields of the Willamette Valley. But by the late 1840s slavery had everything to do with American politics, including the politics of the Oregon question. Southern lawmakers refused to create a government for Oregon that barred slavery or let the inhabitants of the territory do so. Oregon was the first American territory beyond the bounds of the Louisiana Purchase, where the slavery question had been resolved by the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Many Southern lawmakers now regretted having signed away slavery’s rights to the northern part of the purchase, and they determined to make no such concession with Oregon. But the Oregonians didn’t want slavery, Northern members of Congress didn’t want it for them, and even the Southerners had difficulty describing a scenario under which slavery might actually take root in Oregon. Even so, as a matter of constitutional principle, the Southerners made slavery an issue, and in the spring of 1848 the Oregon question hung fire.

  The arrival of Joe Meek transformed the situation. Meek’s rustic appearance riveted the lawmakers, while the horrific news he brought of the Whitman massacre compelled them to put aside sectional rivalries and tend to the business of protecting American citizens in America’s westernmost possession. Meek delivered the petition the provisional legislature in Oregon had composed, and he arranged a meeting with President Polk, who turned out to be a distant cousin.

  Thomas Benton led the pro-Oregon forces in Congress. Benton had warned of the dangers of leaving Oregon without a government, and the recent events had, lamentably, proved his prescience. The Oregonians cried out for the protection of the government, he told the Senate. “In the depth of winter they send to us a special messenger who makes his way across the Rocky Mountains at a time when almost every living thing perished in the snow, when the snow was at such a depth that nothing could penetrate to the bottom of it.” If Joe Meek could risk his life on behalf of his compatriots in Oregon, Congress could at least act on their petition. “They are in a suffering condition. Not a moment of time is to be lost.”

  Benton’s argument carried the day, but not before Benton nearly came to blows on the Senate floor with Andrew Butler of South Carolina, who defended slavery and its asserted prerogatives to the last. Meanwhile Joe Meek caroused with Kit Carson, a mountain comrade—and a scout for John Frémont—who happened to be in Washington. And he regaled the women of the capital as he had regaled Narcissa Whitman at the Green River rendezvous. One of the ladies, taken by Meek’s rugged good looks, inquired whether he was married.

  “Yes, indeed,” he answered. “I have a wife and several children.”

  “Oh, dear! I should think your wife would be so afraid of the Indians!”

  “Afraid of the Indians?” rejoined Meek. “Why, madam, she is an Indian herself.”

  The woman nearly swooned.

  JAMES POLK WAS SUFFICIENTLY IMPRESSED BY MEEK THAT when the Oregon bill passed, he appointed him to be the first United States marshal in the new Oreg
on Territory. In this capacity Meek returned to Oregon, reaching Oregon City, the capital of the territory, in time for the trial of the five Cayuse charged with the murder of the Whitmans and their associates. The trial proceeded swiftly, and the five were convicted and sentenced to hang. Yet they protested their innocence, and a vocal minority of the Oregonians believed them. The believers said the five were scapegoats given up by the tribe so that the Cayuse people as a whole would not be obliterated. A petition was raised to stay the execution. But the territorial governor was not in Oregon City, and his lieutenant declined to take responsibility for halting the execution.

  At the appointed hour, the five were escorted to the scaffold. Joe Meek, doubtless thinking of Helen, swung a hatchet that cut the rope and sent the men to their deaths.

  V

  THE WORLD IN A NUGGET OF GOLD

  26

  THE SECRET OF THE SIERRA NEVADA

  NEITHER JOE MEEK NOR ANY OF THE OTHER AMERICANS who made their way up and down the Columbia River, and not John McLoughlin or Peter Ogden or any of the British, could have said how the rapids and falls of the Columbia River had come to be. The state of geological knowledge left such things a mystery. The Indians who lived near the river had a story that made as much sense as anything the outsiders could propose. Two great chiefs—Wy’east, who lived south of the river, and Klickitat, on the north—had fallen in love with the same beautiful maiden, Loo-wit. Wy’east and Klickitat fought over the girl, who tended a sacred fire on an ancient stone bridge that spanned the Columbia. The chiefs enlisted their tribes, and war ensued. The Great Spirit grew angry over what his people had done, and he turned the chiefs and the woman into mountains. Wy’east became what the whites called Mount Hood, Klickitat Mount Adams, and Loo-wit Mount St. Helens. Yet the battle continued, with Wy’east and Klickitat hurling boulders and spewing flames and ash at each other until they shook down the stone bridge, which fell into the river.