Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  The Spanish explorer Bruno de Heçeta, probably the first European to observe its fearsome estuary, named it the San Roque. Early geographers and cartographers, who knew of its existence before learning anything specific about it, called it the River of the West. And in 1778, an explorer who had come no closer to it than the headwaters of the Mississippi called it the Oregon River.

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  Jonathan Carver of Weymouth, Massachusetts, was nearly fifty years old when he had his brush with history. A shoemaker, and married, he enlisted in the British army in 1757 to fight the French, and was wounded during the siege of Fort William Henry in the foothills of the Adirondacks of New York.

  His service must have been exemplary. After nine years in the army he had risen from the ranks to a captaincy, and in 1766 he had an important rendezvous at Mackinac Island in the strait between the upper and lower peninsulas of northern Michigan. There Carver met with Major Robert Rogers, the celebrated founder of Rogers’ Rangers, the militia force he raised during the French and Indian War. Rogers had an ambition to explore. He had written a book, Concise Account of North America, and during a trip to England had submitted a proposal to King George that he would lead an expedition to find a route from the Mississippi to the Pacific. The “sanction,” or sponsorship, of the plan was denied, but Rogers was at least given a command in upper Michigan and there determined to launch the expedition himself.

  Why he chose Captain Jonathan Carver to lead it is unknown, but the two met at Mackinac, and soon thereafter Carver began what was to become the first English expedition to explore and survey the Upper Mississippi and Great Lakes region. He was specifically assigned to map the rivers of Wisconsin and Minnesota, and to determine the feasibility of an all-water passage to the Pacific.

  In the summer of 1766, Carver led a small band of frontiersmen to Green Bay, at the mouth of the Fox River in northeast Wisconsin, then followed the Fox to the Wisconsin River and down to the Mississippi. He wintered at the Falls of Saint Anthony, near Saint Paul, Minnesota, and there refined his maps and journals and anticipated continuing his journey westward.

  In this, for reasons never adequately explained, he was thwarted. During the spring thaws of 1767, Carver and his crew traveled to Grand Portage on the north shore of Lake Superior. He expected to find reinforcements and supplies awaiting him there that would enable him to push west to the Pacific, but when the manpower and materiél were not forthcoming, he disbanded his men and in 1768 returned to Boston.

  In London in 1774 Carver joined in a scheme with Richard Wentworth, a wealthy member of Parliament, to take fifty or sixty men up the Missouri River, explore the “Shining Mountains” (the Rockies), find the source of the River of the West, sail down it to its exit in the Pacific, and build a fort at its mouth. The plan appears to have had the sanction of the British colonial government but was buried by the intervention of the American Revolution.

  Carver remained in England, married again (without divorcing his first wife in America), and died in poverty in 1780. He had one success after his Mississippi expedition, the publication in 1778 of his mixture of fact and fantasy, Carver’s Travels Through the Interior Parts of North America in the years 1766, 1767, and 1768, which sustained a readership through thirty editions.

  In the book, Carver told of his explorations of the headwaters of the Mississippi, his talks with an Indian tribe he designated the Naudowessie, and his learning of the country to the west, in particular of the Shining Mountains, a range he said began in Mexico and continued northward on a line east of Spanish California. These mountains were rich in gold, he wrote; indeed, the metal was so plentiful the Indians there made their commonest utensils from it. “Probably in future ages,” he said, “they [the mountains] may be found to contain more riches in their bowels than those of Indostan and Malabar, or that are produced on the Golden Coast of Guinea; nor will I except even the Peruvian Mines.” He also learned that the natives of the Shining Mountains dressed in the soft, warm covering of beasts “which skipped upon the surface” (presumably beavers), and that these natives were white.

  From the Shining Mountains, Carver said, rivers flowed in every direction, these including the River of the West, which he said “falls into the Pacific Ocean at the straits of Anián.”

  (Of these claims H. H. Bancroft says wryly, “Brave words for one who might as well have been speaking of the Mountains of the Moon so far as actual knowledge or even probability was concerned.”)

  Carver wrote that the Indian name for the River of the West was the “Oregon,” or as he sometimes spelled it, “Origan,” and in so saying created a puzzle unsolved to this day: the source of the word Oregon.

  He claimed he heard the name from the Naudowessie Indians near the headwaters of the Mississippi. His sponsor, Robert Rogers, may have used it—as “Ouragon” and “Ourigon”—in the unpublished “memorial” he wrote to King George asking for governmental sponsorship of an exploration of the trans-Mississippi region.

  Wherever the word originated, it does not appear in any of the several dialects of the Oregon Country, and several theories on its provenance have been advanced. One of these has it that the word derives from Origanum, or sweet marjoram, a useful plant believed to have had medicinal properties. But it is not explained how Indians would know the Latin name of the plant, or indeed if they even knew of the plant to begin with. A writer in an 1871 issue of the New York Ethnological Journal proposed the more plausible idea that “Oregon” might derive from the Spanish huricán (hurricane), describing the shrieking winds of the northwest coast in certain months remarked on by all early-day explorers.

  The word does not appear in Lewis and Clark’s journals, although Jefferson used it in his instructions to the explorers. It appeared in print for the first time in Carver’s 1778 book of travels, and for the second time in the 1817 poem “Thanatopsis” by William Cullen Bryant (“Or lose thyself in the continuous woods/ Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound”). Bancroft wrote that Jefferson and Bryant had read Carver’s book and that the poet “seized upon the word that fitted best his meter, and in his ‘Thanatopsis’ made that word immortal.”

  The historian said it is doubtful that Carver understood the natives who allegedly uttered the word, but admitted, “There could have been no object, apparent to us, for him to misrepresent; he could never have dreamed that this probably meaningless sound, caught up from the wind by his too attentive ear, should ever be applied to the designation of a great, progressive state.”

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  Fourteen years after Jonathan Carver’s fanciful naming of the River of the West, a company of six Boston merchants financed a fur-trading enterprise to the northern Pacific, the first such American venture. The sponsors were apparently inspired by publication of Captain James Cook’s journals of his 1778 voyage, especially those passages dealing with the “sea beaver” furs to be found there and their worth in the China trade. They put up $50,000 to dispatch two trade vessels from Nantucket Roads in September 1787.

  In command of the expedition was the veteran privateer and trader John Kendrick of Harwich, Massachusetts, sailing on the Columbia Rediviva (“America Reborn”), a 212-ton, 83-foot merchantman with a thirty-man crew and armed with ten cannons. Kendrick’s second was a thirty-two-year-old Rhode Islander named Robert Gray, another privateer in the American Revolution and a self-styled “sea-peddler.” Gray, who commanded the Lady Washington, a ninety-ton merchant sloop, had a reputation as a rough and ruthless seaman with none of Kendrick’s diplomacy and kindliness of character.

  The ships carried a $25,000 cargo: scrap iron, 135 barrels of beef, 60 of pork, 1,500 pounds of gunpowder, 5 hogsheads of New England and West Indian rum, 2,000 bricks, tea, chocolate, copper sheets, “Barr iron,” “Iron Hoops,” “Chissells,” and gimcracks and utensils for trade with coastal natives. These included snuffboxes, jew’s harps, mirrors, buttons, cloth remnants, iron tools, cookpots, and pewter medals to be awarded to tribal dignitaries. The ships mana
ged to maintain visual contact on the voyage from Nantucket to the Cape Verde and Falkland Islands, but lost sight of each other in a Cape Horn gale. Gray sailed on and reached “New Albion,” perhaps near Cape Mendocino, on August 2, 1788. He continued upcoast to the vicinity of Tillamook Bay, above the 45th parallel, and there occurred a lamentable incident that caused Gray to call Tillamook Murderer’s Harbor.

  The Indians who greeted the Lady Washington’s shore parties were friendly and traded enthusiastically, bringing baskets of berries and crabs to Gray’s famished and scurvy-ridden crewmen, exchanging furs for iron implements, assisting in gathering wood and fresh water. On August 16, nine seamen rowed ashore to gather a load of grass and shrubs for the ship’s livestock. The trouble began when an Indian onlooker seized a cutlass that Gray’s servant, a Cape Verde Islander named Marcos López, had left stuck in the sand. López and three others pursued the thief and caught him but in the melee López was killed and the other sailors, after slashing one attacker to death with cutlasses, succeeded in getting into a boat and to the sloop offshore. Captain Gray then directed the Lady Washington’s swivel gun at the pursuing canoes and drove them back to shore.

  A month after the Tillamook fight and with the help of two British traders already at anchor there, Gray brought his sloop into Nootka Sound. Within a few days Captain Kendrick arrived in the Columbia Rediviva after a rough passage around the Horn.

  The traders spent a successful winter bartering for sea otter and other skins, and in the spring of 1789 Kendrick ordered the furs loaded on the Columbia and turned the sloop over to Gray to sail to Canton. At Whampoa, the great traders’ anchorage in the Canton River, the Columbia threaded its way among East India Company merchantmen, tea boats, and sampans, and in the bustling warehouses Gray sold the furs for more than $20,000—half of which he paid out in fees, bribes, and ship repairs. He took on a cargo of 21,462 pounds of tea with the remainder of the money and sailed home to Boston. On August 10, 1790, after a three-year absence, the Columbia anchored off Nantucket, the first American ship to circumnavigate the globe.

  After less than two months ashore, Gray was rehired by the company of Boston merchants and now, as part owner of the Columbia, fitted his ship out for a return to the Pacific. In June 1791, after an uneventful voyage, Gray navigated his ship to its anchorage in Clayoquot Sound on the island above the Strait of Juan de Fuca and again began searching for Indians willing to trade sea otter pelts. And he was not alone. That year no fewer than twenty-eight vessels, flying the flags of France, Portugal, England, and the United States, visited the northwest coast, more than half of the number engaged in the fur trade.

  Little is known of Gray’s activities after he reached Clayoquot Sound except that his volcanic temper created deadly conflicts with the natives. He lost his chief mate and several seamen to Haida tribesmen in the Queen Charlotte Islands soon after he arrived, and in January 1792 one of his trading outposts ashore—its whereabouts are not precisely known—was attacked by a large force of Indians. The assault was beaten back and resulted in Gray’s seamen burning a large native village.

  In April 1792 Gray sailed the Columbia on a trade mission downcoast and in returning north on April 29 encountered the exploring ship Discovery, commanded by the English navigator George Vancouver. This brilliant young seaman had sailed from Falmouth, England, rounded the Cape of Good Hope to make the passage to Australia, then sailed across the Pacific. He had made a survey and mapping of the coast from San Diego to Alaska and would soon become the first explorer to circumnavigate the big island subsequently named for him.

  Vancouver and his officers boarded the Columbia and exchanged information with Gray. On April 27, the master mariner said he had sighted the mouth of a river but, “not considering this opening worthy of more attention,” had sailed on north. The Columbia was the first ship he had seen in eight months. Gray in turn told Vancouver that he had recently “been off the mouth of a river,” in the latitude of 46 degrees 10 minutes, “where the outset, or reflux, was so strong as to prevent my entering.” On that occasion the Columbia apparently stood out to sea and did not attempt to enter the mouth of the river first sighted by Bruno de Heçeta seventeen years before.

  On May 11, 1792, Gray brought his ship back to the estuary, braved the whipping seas, and after eleven days found a passage through, crossed the bar, and anchored ten miles within the entrance. A party of thirty men sailed a cutter thirty miles upstream, found a Chinook village, and thereafter the ship was visited by numerous Indian canoes bringing furs to trade. Bad weather prevented the Columbia from escaping the estuary until May 20, by which time Gray named the river after his ship and claimed the territory around it in the name of the United States.

  After breaking through the river’s mouth in May, he took the Columbia to Nootka Sound and continued to trade for furs so that by the time he sailed for Canton in the fall of 1792 he had 700 sea otter skins and 1,500 other furs on board, which he traded for tea, nankeens (garments made of a natural yellow cotton), sugar, and porcelain.

  George Vancouver’s expedition was no less successful. His Discovery and armed tender Chatham made eighteen anchorages on the northwest coast and named such sites as Puget Sound (for its chief explorer, Lieutenant Peter Puget), Cape Dungeness, Admiralty Inlet, Port Orchard, Port Discovery, Whidbey and Vashon Islands, Bellingham Bay, and the Gulf of Georgia.

  Vancouver’s report to the Admiralty was lavish in its description of the lands he visited or saw through his spyglass. He wrote, “The serenity of the climate, the innumerable pleasing landscapes, and the abundant fertility that unassisted nature puts forth, require only to be enriched by the industry of man with villages, mansions, cottages, and other buildings, to render it the most lovely country that can be imagined.”

  On June 4, 1792, the birthday of George III, Vancouver took possession of the land from Puget Sound to 50 degrees north and named it New Georgia.

  * * *

  After Gray’s departure, his commander John Kendrick took the Lady Washington to the Sandwich Islands, where he dreamed of developing a trade in sandalwood and pearls, then continued on to China, remaining there fourteen months. He returned to the Pacific coast in 1791, visiting Japan en route, Lady Washington being the first American ship to drop anchor in the waters of that forbidden land.

  In December 1794 Kendrick was killed in a bizarre accident as his ship lay at anchor off Honolulu. The British trader Jackal, anchored adjacent to the American vessel, fired its saluting cannon to honor Kendrick, but the gun had been inadvertently “shotted”—loaded with round- and grapeshot—which pierced the side of the Washington and decapitated Kendrick as he sat at a mess table.

  Robert Gray died of yellow fever during a voyage along the Atlantic coast in 1806. Of his accomplishments, historian Samuel Eliot Morison wrote: “On her first voyage, the Columbia solved the riddle of the China trade. On her second, empire followed in her wake.”

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  Alexander Mackenzie of Lewis Island, the northernmost point of the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, has the distinction of being the first European to reach the Pacific Northwest coast from the interior of the continent, preceding Meriwether Lewis and William Clark by twelve years.

  He seems to have had the heart of an explorer from the onset of his career when in 1779, at age fifteen, he became a clerk in a fur-trading company in Montreal. Possessed of “a vigorous mind and a fine physique,” as Bancroft put it, he devoted all his free time to poring over the primitive maps of North America available to him, made a trip to London to study astronomy and navigation, and read assiduously the literature of New World explorations, including Jonathan Carver’s book, and particularly the journals of Captain Cook’s third voyage in 1778.

  Mackenzie was also greatly influenced by the American-born North West Company fur trader Peter Pond, a former soldier and seaman whose adventures had taken him from fights at Fort Ticonderoga and the siege of Montreal to the West Indies; who had fought at least one duel (and
killed his opponent), explored the Upper Mississippi country, and had traded among the Yankton Sioux and the Lake Superior Ojibway. Pond spent two years as a trader in Saskatchewan and was credited with the 1780 discovery of the Peace River, one of the chief headstreams of what was to become the Mackenzie River.

  Pond and Mackenzie seem to have met at Fort Chipewyan on Lake Athabaska in northern Alberta in 1787, and there Mackenzie saw a map Pond had drawn, based on his own explorations and from what he had learned from Indian friends. The map depicted a river flowing out of Lake Athabaska to Great Slave Lake, 250 miles to the northwest. Pond believed this river flowed on to the Pacific and that its mouth was an inlet on the Alaskan coast described in Cook’s journals.

  In 1788 Pond quit the fur trade, sold his interest in the North West Company for £800, and returned to his home in Connecticut. Mackenzie, adopting Pond’s river theory, set out from Fort Chipewyan on June 3, 1789, to prove it.

  With a party of four voyageurs, a German friend, and an Indian named English Chief serving as hunter and interpreter, Mackenzie reached Great Slave Lake and made swift progress down the river Pond had described. The Scotchman soon realized that the river, which turned out to be 1,120 miles in length, would not reach the Pacific, but instead flowed northwest and debouched into the Arctic Ocean. He reached its mouth on the Beaufort Sea and, after chasing whales and paddling among the icebergs “under the starless summer sky and never setting summer sun of the hyperborean sea,” he returned by the same route, investigating along the way any tributary that might take him west to the Pacific. He arrived at Fort Chipewyan on September 12, after 102 days on the river that would henceforth bear his name.