Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

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  PACIFIC

  DESTINY

  The Three-Century Journey to the Oregon Country

  To my friend of all these years, Elroy Bode

  Westward the course of empire takes its way;

  The four first Acts already past.

  A fifth shall close the Drama of the Day;

  Time’s noblest offspring is the last.

  —Bishop George Berkeley (1685–1753)

  Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free.… I should not lay so much stress on this fact if I did not believe that something like this is the prevailing tendency of my countrymen. I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progresses from east to west.

  —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

  When God made man,

  He seemed to think it best

  To make him in the East,

  And let him travel West.

  —unknown pioneer poet

  In my book a pioneer is a man who turned all the grass upside down, strung bob-wire over the dust that was left, poisoned the water, cut down the trees, killed the Indian who owned the land, and called it progress.

  —Charles M. Russell (1864–1926)

  INTRODUCTION

  Through most of the decade of the 1840s, the Indians of the Great Plains came to the camps along the Platte River in Nebraska to witness the strange migration along what they called the White Man’s Medicine Road. They sat their ponies in the noisy dawnings, caught the scent of bacon cooking, watched and listened as the camps broke, heard gunshot signals, the clank of pots and pans, the shouts and curses of teamsters, the wails and shrieks of hungry babies and skylarking children, the babble of people scurrying to their tasks. They heard the pop of white canvas sails billowing and the crack of long bullhide whips over the backs of oxen and mules drawing the creaking prairie schooners westward.

  What the Indians saw we still see: trains of covered wagons headed west, the archetypal image of our archetypal American saga, and there can be little wonder why the story has such a grip on us. Those who made that epic journey toward the setting sun had all manner of reasons for going—cheap land, escape from debt, the lure of gold, the craving to teach Christianity to the heathens, the sheer adventure of it all—but whatever their motives, they acted out a dream common to all of us: the dream of a new beginning in a new place.

  So captivating is this epic that there is a natural tendency in books on the subject to dwell on the pioneer “experience,” to stitch together the journals and diaries of those who actually made the harrowing overland journey. For example, Merrill J. Mattes, whose The Great Platte River Road is among the undisputed classic works on the westering emigrants of the 1840s, listed over 1,000 sources for his work, and examined something like 700 eyewitness journal-diary narratives.

  But in the research and writing of Pacific Destiny I kept imagining what the Indians of the Platte must have wondered: Where were these people going, and why?, and it seemed natural to me to begin where the emigrant dream really began. In this I was influenced by the lucky circumstance of having visited the end of the trail before traveling over the beginning of it.

  During a trip to Portland a few years ago, I was able to visit the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, drive south along the Willamette River to spend a few hours in Oregon City, and even travel up the Columbia, the fabled “River of the West,” on a sternwheeler.

  Oregon history is infectious, and I bought books at world-renowned Powell’s, collected maps and pamphlets, and caught the spirit of the place—even in the space of a week.

  That trip came back to me during an October 1998 drive from Saint Louis to Fort Laramie, Wyoming, roughly following the Oregon Trail route taken by Francis Parkman in 1846.

  Parkman did not reach the end of the Oregon Trail—he traveled about 40 percent of it, to a point sixty miles west of Fort Laramie—but he saw the trail better than anybody in his time, saw it as a symbol of the westering movement and of what that movement signified for the future. “Great changes are at hand,” he wrote, “the buffalo will dwindle away, and the large wandering communities who depend on them for support must be broken and scattered. The Indians will soon be abased by whiskey and overawed by military posts; so that within a few years the traveller may pass in tolerable security through their country. Its dangers and its charms will have disappeared altogether.”

  With the benefit of 152 years of history and technology behind me, I traveled his route, passing in tolerable security through the Indians’ country, the dangers of which are restricted to flat tires or spewing radiators on lonely roads. I had two books with me: Parkman’s The Oregon Trail, and Gregory M. Franzwa’s indispensable guide for the modern traveler, The Oregon Trail Revisited. I stopped frequently to consult both, especially to examine the landmarks, sites, and swales described so meticulously by Franzwa. And I daydreamed, from the Museum of Westward Expansion at the Saint Louis Arch through a tour of the Fort Laramie National Historic Site, about the people who pointed their wagons toward the Pacific Rim and rolled free of the rude civilization of Missouri to take the first tentative steps of their 2,000-mile walk to the northwest coast of America.

  By the time I dropped away from the trail to the town of Wheatland and made my way south to Cheyenne and home, I was thinking of those who blazed that trail thirty years and more before Parkman traveled it, and the story of that Land of Giants, the Oregon Country, before the name “Oregon” was concocted (a fascinating tale by itself).

  In Pacific Destiny, by taking a somewhat chronological approach to the story, starting at trail’s end and ending with the trail’s beginning, my ambition has been to answer the questions I imagined the Platte River natives asking: Where are all these people going and why? and Why Oregon? This book seeks to tell the story of the original Oregon dreamers and pay proper homage to them: sea dogs and explorers; voyageurs, trappers, and traders; visionaries and missionaries; adventurers; misfits; opportunists—all pioneers in the purest sense of the word.

  In no other episode in western American history is there a more beguiling assortment of characters than those figuring in the long journey to the lands north of the 42nd parallel and west of the Shining Mountains, the people who made the Oregon Trail not only possible, but inevitable. Only history, never fiction, could give us such figures as Dr. John McLoughlin, the White Eagle laird of Fort Vancouver; Captain Jonathan Thorn, doomed skipper of the frigate Tonquin; that “fuming, vainglorious little man,” Duncan McDougall, who cowed the Indians with his “phial of wrath”; Wilson Hunt and
Robert Stuart, the original Astor overlanders; Hall J. Kelley, the half-mad dreamer who crossed Mexico to get to the Oregon Country after his followers double-crossed him; Nat Wyeth, the Cambridge iceman, and Francis Parkman, the Cambridge scholar. Not even a poet could have invented the adventures of the missionaries Jason Lee, Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, Samuel and Eliza Parker; the mountain men Jedediah Smith, Broken Hand Fitzpatrick, Ewing Young, and Joe Meek; or of such minor players as Miss Jane Barnes, the first woman to visit the Oregon coast, and Reverend Herbert Beaver (“a good name for a fur-trade station,” as Peter Skene Ogden dryly observed), who had the misfortune to say something scandalous about John McLoughlin’s wife.

  Nor is there, to my mind at least, a more compelling tale in our Western history than that of the V-shaped ripples made by certain aquatic animals, especially Lutra enhydris marina and Castor canadensis, which aimed us toward our Pacific destiny and which bound together this astonishing melange of early dreamers.

  A final note: There are necessary anachronisms in the pages that follow. Obviously there was no “Oregon” or “Oregon Country” when Ferrelo and Drake sailed up the Pacific coast of the continent in the sixteenth century; there were no Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Utah, or Nevada when the Astorians crossed the Rocky Mountains, or even during Frémont’s early expeditions and, as in the opening paragraph of this introduction, no Nebraska, at least as a state, until 1867. But for easy reader orientation in the often confusing geography of the era of western expansion, I have used out-of-time state and place names to avoid such tedious repetitions as “the future state of Washington” and “what would later become the state of Oregon.”

  Among generous friends whose assistance of various kinds made it easier to write this book, I want to thank Richard S. Wheeler of Livingston, Montana; James Crutchfield of Franklin, Tennessee; Candy Moulton of Encampment, Wyoming; George Skanse, proprietor of the incomparable Book Gallery in El Paso, Texas; and my friends at the Village Inn, where some of the book was written: Celia Davidson, Evelyn Anderson, Tony Garza, Michelle Garza, Aldo Monterrey, Lisa De Haro, Travis Doctor, Nicole Smith, Julee Morrissy, and Marie Giger.

  —DALE L. WALKER

  November 18, 1999

  PROLOGUE

  Westering, Thoreau said, “is the prevailing tendency of my countrymen,” and the movement west, inching the frontier toward that “other” great boundary, the Pacific, is as old as America. The original band of Jamestowners who reached Chesapeake Bay in the spring of 1607 were soon pulling out of Tidewater to explore and plow on the Piedmont, and within a hundred years Americans had scattered outposts along the Atlantic from Maine to Carolina.

  It took a century and a half for colonists to remove from their striking distance to the sea, but the French and Indian War, proving ground for leaders on both sides of the American Revolution, pushed the frontier to the forks of the Ohio River and began a movement down the Cumberland to the valleys of eastern Kentucky and Tennessee. The Appalachians, running from Québec to the coastal plains of Alabama, proved no obstacle, nor did the escarpments and plateaus of the Allegheny wilderness, which funneled them into Ohio and Kentucky, the Lower Mississippi, and the Old Northwest of Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan.

  In March 1803, when Ohio was admitted to the Union, there were seventeen United States, but American territory had not yet crossed the Mississippi. All that changed on October 20 of that year with the ratification of the Louisiana Purchase. Suddenly the nation’s area doubled—$15 million bought 828,000 square miles of land—and jumped its western boundary to the crest of the Rockies.

  To the south and west of those unmapped mountains lay New Spain, including its exotic outposts of New Mexico and Alta California; to the northwest, from the Rockies to the Pacific, lay the Oregon Country, strangely alluring, as all hidden places are.

  The Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery reached the sea-slashed coast of the Oregon Country in November 1805, over 250 years after the first white men saw it. Both explorers, and their sponsor, Thomas Jefferson, knew this history, knew that Spaniards, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Russians, a Dane, possibly a Greek, and certainly a handful of Americans had already been there. Fifteen years before the advent of Lewis and Clark, Spain had signed a document that recognized British rights to trade and settle along the northwest coast of America, and in 1792 the Columbia River was named for the first American vessel to anchor there. “Bostons,” the Yankee merchant captains from Massachusetts seaports, and Englishmen, and Russians, among others, had established a sea otter fur trade among the coastal Indians.

  Jefferson’s explorers were therefore not altogether surprised, once they reached the coast and began the work on their fort, to learn that the Indians in the vicinity had already experienced a certain level of “commercial intercourse” with whites. The Clatsops and other tribes the explorers encountered had in their vocabularies a supply of common European profanities, and knew such bartering words as musket, powder, shot, and knife.

  The Corps of Discovery, stunning in its accomplishment, as “perfect” an exploration as has been recorded in history, made no claim of “discovering” Oregon, only of discovering an overland route to the Pacific, of being the first party of white men to cross the western half of North America.

  PART ONE

  SEA-LANES

  1

  The Pacific Littoral

  “… TOO MUCH CONFIDENCE AND UNARM’D.”

  1

  The first trails to Oregon were sea-lanes, the wakes left by Spanish caravels and fragatos with lateen sails bulging in ferocious winds and masts bent perilously as they blundered along the Pacific coast of North America in pursuit of obscure missions approved by the viceroy of Mexico.

  A Portuguese soldier in the service of Mexico, Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, led a two-ship expedition from the Pacific port of Natividad in June 1542, searching for fables: the “Coast of Cathay,” believed to be a large island somewhere in the north; the seaport of Quivira and its Seven Cities of Gold; and the Strait of Anián, a northwest passage across North America to the Atlantic. Cabrillo’s flagship Victoria, a stout and sizable vessel, and the smaller San Salvador, a frigate, sighted the California coast in July and in the same month sailed into a “closed and very good harbor” he named San Miguel, subsequently known as San Diego.

  The bold soldier-sailor sailed on in October, threading through the Santa Barbara Channel Islands. He avoided the terrifying seas off Big Sur and led his ships north past the Farralon Islands and past the great headlands, shrouded in fog, that hid inside them a magnificent bay, to an anchorage at 38 degrees north latitude, just above the entrance to the Golden Gate. He named this cove Los Pinos for the great green mantle of pines that surrounded it, and spent some days there before sailing a short distance north to Bodega Bay.

  Cabrillo hoped to proceed north along the coast but battering seas off Bodega forced him to direct his ships south to a winter anchorage at San Miguel Island in the Santa Barbara Channel. In January 1543 the former crossbowman in Hernán Cortés’s conquest of Mexico died after a shipboard accident, and it fell to his handpicked successor, an Italian Levantine named Bartolome Ferrelo, to continue the voyage.

  Ferrelo led the Victoria and the San Salvador past Cape Mendocino—the westernmost point on the California coast—and north at least as far as latitude 41 degrees 30 minutes off Klamath, California. He may have sighted the Oregon coast above 42 degrees before gales drove him back, to return to Natividad in April.

  Insofar as finding gold and silver, the Seven Cities, or the Strait of Anián, the expedition was a failure, but Cabrillo and Ferrelo had charted a real seacoast as fabulous as any Quivira of the imagination.

  * * *

  Francis Drake, the bold son of Devonshire and corsair of the Spanish Main, may have exceeded the Victoria and San Salvador’s northernmost mark when he brought his Golden Hind along the California coast thirty-six years after Ferrelo returned to Mexico.

  Drake sailed from Plymouth in Decem
ber 1577, with a syndicate sponsoring him as captain-general of a six-ship expedition. His backers expected him to sail through the Strait of Magellan into the Pacific and seek the Northwest Passage, the all-water route connecting the two great oceans, a lodestone that lured mariners and trade-minded politicians for more than four centuries.

  Exploration, however, was incidental to Drake’s work as a privateer, a pirate with governmental sanction, so he plundered Spanish ports at Valparaiso, Chile, and Callao, Peru, as he made his way up the Pacific coast. By his own account, the Hind approached land between 42 and 48 degrees north latitude before retreating downcoast. In Hakluyt’s Voyages, published in 1589, Drake is credited with a northern limit of 42 degrees (the latitude of the California-Oregon boundary), which he reached on June 5, 1579. Historian Hubert Howe Bancroft, who studied the sources on Drake’s voyage, concluded that the privateer “was probably, though not certainly, the first discoverer of the western coast from Cape Mendocino to the region of Cape Blanco, including fifty or sixty miles of the Oregon coast.”

  Drake spent five weeks in June and July on the western coast and, like Cabrillo, missed sighting the foggy entrance to San Francisco Bay as he proceeded to an anchorage north of the Golden Gate—Cabrillo’s Los Pinos—subsequently named Drake’s Bay.

  Somewhere, at Drake’s Bay, Bodega Bay, or farther north, perhaps near Cape Mendocino, the Hind was beached and careened, and in the process the captain-general and his men were visited by a number of Miwok Indians. The naked “sauvages” were presented with gifts of trinkets and in return brought broiled fish; a supply of a lily root they dried, ground into a meal, and ate; and such gifts as shells, sea-otter and gopher skins, and bird feathers.

  Drake named the country New Albion (Albion being the Greek name for England) after passing an area of white cliffs that reminded him of the south coast of his home country.