Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  A modern historian of the mountain men, Win Blevins, wrote of Smith’s “Love of wild places,” which “had rooted into him and become a deeper religion.” Blevins says Jed Smith’s “altar was the mountaintop, his place of meditation not the pew but the wilderness, his sacraments his mountain skills.”

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  Kelley’s Odyssey

  “… A GREAT AND CRAZY VISION.”

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  In the winter of 1820, while Stephen Harriman Long of the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers was mapping the Great American Desert and describing it as a retardant to westward migration, Congressman John Floyd, M.D., of Virginia, took up the Oregon question. He said England was stealing the Pacific Northwest from America and advocated annexation of it and filling it with settlers.

  Dr. Floyd had grown up in Kentucky, and Bancroft wrote that he “understood the character of the Western states,” where everyone was “a pioneer of the Alexandrian type, sighing for more worlds to conquer, more wilderness to redeem to civilization by the sheer strength of brawny arm and independent will.” The congressman counted among his friends several prominent Astorians and the explorer William Clark. (Floyd’s cousin, Charles Floyd, had served as a sergeant in the Lewis and Clark party and died of a ruptured appendix in August 1804, the only casualty of the expedition.) The idea of Oregon inspired the Virginian, and the British presence there as the sole occupant of the “joint occupancy” angered him. “With two oceans washing our shores,” he liked to say, presaging the tenets of Manifest Destiny, “commercial wealth is ours and imagination can hardly conceive the greatness, the grandeur, the power that await us.”

  On December 19, 1820, Dr. Floyd presented to his colleagues in the House of Representatives a petition for the appointment of a select committee to “inquire into the situation of the settlements upon the Pacific Ocean and the expediency of occupying the Columbia River.” The document was adopted and Floyd named chairman of the panel. The committee’s report, introduced on January 25, 1821, was praised by Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, one of the most influential expansionists in Washington, who said that with it “the first blow was struck; public attention was awakened, and the geographical, historical and statistical facts set forth … [the report] made a lodgment in the public mind.” But the report carried with it a bill, considered overly radical, which authorized the president to occupy “the Origon country,” extinguish whatever Indian title to the lands existed, and provide for the establishment of a government there. The measure failed but Floyd reintroduced it in 1822, revised to provide that when the settlement in the region reached a population of 2,000 it should become “the Territory of Origon,” and a possession of the United States.

  Floyd made an impassioned speech on his bill on December 17, 1822, but it aroused little interest other than a discussion of the northwest coast as a fur and whaling station, a fishery and timberland. Some congressmen dreaded the potential of war with England over the region and wondered whether such remote lands were worth such a danger.

  Still, the Virginia legislator did not yield. On January 19, 1824, he presented yet another bill—another revision of the old one—that would authorize occupation of the Columbia River by the United States, establish a military post and a territorial government there, and hold out as an enticement a section of land to each new settler.

  The War Department reported that transportation by the Missouri and Columbia Rivers of sufficient numbers of troops and horses to man a military post in the Pacific Northwest would cost $30,000, and transportation by sea of the heavy baggage, ordnance, and supplies would amount to another $14,000.

  The issue was debated and, while no questions were raised on the validity of the American claims to the region, Floyd repeatedly tried to refute claims that mountain barriers made colonization of the Oregon Country impossible, that the lands west of the mountains were “bleak and inhospitable” with “impenetrable forests” and a climate so forbidding as to “preclude cereal crops.” Some said that the Columbia was too distant to attract settlers, but Floyd reminded his fellow representatives that in 1775, Kentucky was considered “too far away to be a part of the Union.” He found supporters such as Congressman Baylies of Massachusetts (who assailed the “Gentlemen who are talking of natural boundaries” by asserting, “Sirs, the natural boundary is the Pacific Ocean”) and others among New England’s merchants. These monied men saw the potential for fishing and whaling in North Pacific waters and for a timber industry in the forests stretching from the 42nd parallel to Russian Alaska and inland from the Pacific to the Cascade Range; there were fortunes to be made in pine, spruce, hemlock, fir, and cedar.

  On December 23, 1824, after four years of effort and in defiance of such influential opposition as that of Representative John Quincy Adams (who damned the proposal as a “tissue of errors; there was nothing could purify it but fire”), Floyd saw his bill for the occupation of the Columbia River and establishment of the Territory of Oregon pass the House by a vote of 113–57.

  In February 1825 the bill arose in the Senate, where it was batted down by Senator Mahlon Dickerson of New Jersey, who contended that the military occupation of Oregon would lead to war with Britain, and that it would never become a state of the Union or accrue to any advantage to the United States. He said the proposed $50,000 for implementing the bill was a bagatelle, that a sum ten times that amount would actually be needed. He ridiculed the idea of a territorial representative coming to Washington and returning to Oregon via an overland route or around Cape Horn in under a year’s travel time. Moreover, he said, in a clear echo of the Long expedition report, the region between Council Bluffs and the Rocky Mountains, which would have to be traversed by the military party and by any settlers venturing to the Oregon Country, was sterile, without wood or water, its mountains inhospitable—fit only as “a retreat for red men.”

  Floyd’s colleagues were clearly not yet ready to share his dream of a Pacific commonwealth and his bill was tabled, consigned to Congress’s paperwork perdition. In Bancroft’s words, the subject of the occupation of the Columbia “was suffered to lie perdu in the minds of the people of the United States, except as attention was called to it by the writings of Hall J. Kelley, or by some more obscure person.”

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  “In the long story of our nation’s westering there are few adventures more curious or difficult to assess,” historian David Lavender wrote of Hall J. Kelley’s half-century-long Oregon obsession.

  “He is neither a great hero nor a great rascal,” Bancroft said of Kelley. “He is great at nothing, and is remarkable rather for his lack of strength, and in staggering for fifty years under an idea too big for his brain. He was a born enthusiast and partisan, one of a class of projectors more capable of forming grand schemes than of carrying them to a successful issue.”

  Bernard De Voto said Kelley was “a man of a great and crazy vision.”

  Of his contributions to the 300-year journey to the Pacific Northwest Kelley himself said plainly, “The colonization of Oregon was both conceived and achieved by me, and all for the hope of laying a foundation for the advancement of religion and the kingdom of Christ.” And the prolix titles of the abundant books and tracts he published (works Bancroft said were “no less voluminous than peculiar”) told his faithful armchair adventurer–readers precisely whose single-handed travails and triumphs were responsible for the American presence in the North Pacific littoral. One example: A History of the Settlement of Oregon and the Interior of Upper California, and of Persecutions and Afflictions of Forty Years’ Continuance, Endured by the Author, Hall J. Kelley.

  One hundred and sixty years after he made his mad hegira to the land of his dreams, Hall Jackson Kelley remains the most vexatious character in the story of the Oregon Country. While he annoyed his contemporaries by making too much of his contributions, his contemporaries annoy us by making too little of them. In David Lavender’s memorable phrase, Kelley was “cursed with the unfortunate propens
ity for getting on the nerves of everyone with whom he came in contact”—a propensity that still lingers. He was precisely what his peers said of him: a waspish, humorless, pious, self-aggrandizing, overbearing pest, and a likely lunatic. But even his cruelest critics had to admit he saw things and did things beyond their dreams, and even beyond his own.

  Before he clasped to his heart the notion that he had been selected by God to lead a great congregation to the banks of the Columbia, Kelley had other obsessions, among them Christian religion and educating himself and others. Born in New Hampshire in 1789, his family had the resources to see that he received a fine formal education. He earned an undergraduate degree at a Middlebury, Connecticut, college, and a master’s degree at Harvard, where he is said to have ruined his eyesight by studying Virgil by moonlight in the Cambridge hills, and he became a surveyor and a proficient teacher of mathematics. Until 1824 he seems to have been content in the worthy, if mundane, life of a Massachusetts grammar-school teacher (during which tenure he may have introduced the first schoolroom slate blackboard), dedicated churchgoer (he is credited with the founding of the first Sunday school in Boston), and active and probably vociferous member of the Boston Young Men’s Education Society and the Penitent Female Refuge Society. He had a facility with the pen even in these early years, publishing in 1820 a book on elementary education titled The American Instructor.

  The precise moment Kelley caught the Oregon fever is not known, but he caught it early, before most people had heard of the place, even before the name “Oregon” caught on. As had Jedediah Smith, Kelley became mesmerized by the Lewis and Clark journals. He studied accounts of Astor’s failed venture on the Columbia, collected clippings on the renewal of the joint occupancy agreement with England, and seems to have followed assiduously the debates in Congress over Congressman Floyd’s bill. Bancroft states that by 1824, Kelley had given himself over to study of the Columbia River country: “Nor did he cease writing and raving, until at the ripe age of eighty-five he was transferred from his New England hermitage, where after his fruitless excursions he had retired to brood in poverty over the wrongs inflicted by a soulless corporation and an ungrateful republic.”

  He devoured exploration journals, tracts, pamphlets, newspaper stories, and congressional publications, and pored over the pathetic maps then existing of the lands beyond the Rocky Mountains, most drawn by cartographers who had never been close to them. Slowly accreting in his brain, a plan took shape, “the first thin strands of Manifest Destiny did twine together in his frantic, half-crazed hands,” as Lavender wrote. This scheme, devised by a man who never led anybody anywhere, who had traveled out of New England no farther than Washington, was curiously premonitory. He threw himself fanatically into the idea of American settlement of the Oregon Country, envisioning the formation of an emigration society and taking 3,000 New England farmers to the banks of the Columbia River.

  After throwing over his teaching duties, Kelley began the work God had assigned him by composing broadsides and making speeches to anyone willing to listen. Churchgoers were inspired by his ardor, as he put it, to “promote the propagation of Christianity in the dark and cruel places about the shores of the Pacific,” and it was impossible not to be impressed with his encyclopedic knowledge of these places he had never seen. He made a good appearance: He was handsome, with a squarish, clean-shaven face, high forehead, dark hair cropped short and brushed forward in Napoleonic style, and expressive eyes; he was dignified and well dressed. His screeds and tracts, his voluminous letters to Boston newspapers, and his impassioned speeches gave the impression that he had tramped over all of the dark and cruel places and the sun-dappled and friendly ones of the Oregon Country. He dwelled on the positive, wrote and spoke of the land out there as an Eden, a pristine, fecund region of farmlands so rich they would require “but little labor” to raise grain, vegetables, and cattle; a place teeming with beaver and other precious fur-bearing animals and game of every known species and many unrecorded ones; and a trove of fish and timber beyond mortal calculation. As for getting there, he said, warming to the real heart of his plan, the journey would not be taxing: People would ride comfortably in wagons, and the materials needed to set up a colony would precede them in ships sailing out of Boston Harbor and following the Cape Horn route to the Pacific. Congress would underwrite most of the expenses. Each emigrant might need as little as fifty dollars for incidental expenses on the trail, and perhaps five dollars for each accompanying child.

  He gathered money in small donations wherever he spoke and, like citizens of the late twentieth century signing on to colonize a space station, his listeners placed their names on his petitions as they dreamed of a place as remote then as the moon, the Eden awaiting them on the lush and friendly banks of the Columbia.

  In 1828, Kelley began petitioning Congress, each paper submitted carrying new numbers, longer and more ambitious blueprints for his settlement, and new proposals and budgetary requests to carry them out. The original document he drafted outlined the general Kelley plan and stated that the undersigned and 3,000 others were prepared to start west on short notice. A year later, he refined his congressional request, asking that a modest twenty-five square miles of the Columbia valley be granted him for colonization. He listed 500 members of his American Society for Encouraging the Settlement of Oregon Territory, and in 1831 incorporated the group under the laws of Massachusetts. Among his original members were some influential citizens, such as the impatient Cambridge ice merchant, Nathaniel Wyeth, but, as Bancroft summed up the matter, “This society was Hall J. Kelley. He was the body and brains, the fingers and tongue of it.”

  While awaiting favorable response from Washington, Kelley and his society members met in Boston churches and lecture halls, debated, drew up bylaws, recruited new members, collected funds, and scrapped over the details of founding a town in Oregon, to be built in New England style, which would “repeat, with appropriate variations, the history of the Puritan Colony of Massachusettes Bay.”

  The thrill of all the meeting, debating, planning, and petitioning waned early, and Kelley was faced with the inevitable duty of setting a date when the vanguard of the society membership would actually start west. He had no congressional commitment but he had some funds, a host of anxious emigrants-to-be, and a handful of associates willing to join him in taking the first real steps toward the Pacific.

  He appears to have traveled to Saint Louis in 1828, perhaps alone, or more likely with a few close society advisers, to investigate an overland route to the Columbia. In this mission he failed and returned angrily to Boston with vague threats against the minions of the Hudson’s Bay Company and certain American fur traders, who he said had thwarted him. By now he was confident that powerful enemies were arrayed against him, some of them identifiable, others unseen but no less mighty, and all devoted to causing him to fail.

  He took comfort in pinning his reverses on them.

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  For another four years there were fits and starts—mostly fits—while Kelley proceeded to make maps, write his copious and strident letters to newspapers, hold society meetings, cadge donations, and besiege the Jacksonian-era Congress for land allotments and official sanction for his scheme. Kelley’s plans for an emigrant invasion of the Oregon Country were ever-changing. He seems to have realized that an overland trek to the Columbia River would probably be taxing after all, especially for a Boston congregation for whom a trip to Cape Cod or Poughkeepsie was a long haul, and that the answer was to travel by merchant ship along with the cargo necessary for setting up the colony. Astor had set up his Columbia River enterprise by sending his first agents out there by sea, and American traders had been sailing out of Massachusetts Bay for the Pacific for fifty years. To be sure, the voyage would be tedious, and even occasionally uncomfortable—Cape Horn and all that—but these were minor considerations.

  In 1832, by now the nation’s chief Oregon boomer, Kelley made a frenetic effort to get his expedition underway. He
increased the tempo of his fund-raising—adding to his familiar appeal the idea of taking missionaries with him to work among the Oregon “savages”—and actually chartered a ship as proof that his was no armchair dreamer’s scheme, something a good many of his supporters had begun to suspect. But he was arrested that summer, probably for nonpayment of debts, before he and a handful of his faithful could sail. He used the occasion of his brief tussle with the law to rail at his “wicked adversaries,” notably the Hudson’s Bay Company and Astor’s American Fur Company, whose hirelings “watched every movement of mine, pursuing me from city to city, laying every plan to vex and worry me.” The falsehoods, calumnies, and “vile sayings” of these shadowy nemeses “panic-struck my followers and turned them back,” he said.

  The arrest, and the furor he made of it, seems to have revived Kelley’s faltering campaign. In some miraculous way he paid his debts and in the winter of 1832 made his way out of Boston to New York. There he found new converts waiting and obtained contributions of cash and credit sufficient to engage a merchant vessel to carry himself and a few of the society elite to New Orleans—where they promptly deserted him.

  There are many possible motives behind the exodus of Kelley’s people. Thrust in with him in a confined space, they must have grown weary of his nagging, irascible self-absorption. In New Orleans they must have realized at last that only a shore-to-ship gangway separated them from the start of a crack-brained undertaking from which there might be no return. Perhaps the passage to the mouth of the Mississippi wrung from them in its first installment the dream of a pioneering adventure. Very likely, the idea of continuing on, six weeks or more to Rio de Janeiro, another two months via the Horn to Valparaiso, untold months crawling northward along the Pacific coasts of South America and Mexico, Baja and Alta California, in a stinking, wallowing, merchant sailing ship chased them back to their New England comforts.