Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  Under the protection of whatever spiritual force is in charge of lunatics, Kelley was undaunted by the mutineers who fled his ship. He proceeded alone in the spring of 1833 to Vera Cruz, experiencing “incredible hardships,” he said vaguely, and overland to the Mexican capital, where he somehow gained an audience with President Antonio López de Santa Anna. At the time of Kelley’s visit, this august personage, then newly elected in the first of his five scattered administrations, was facing civil war in his country and unrest among the American settlers in Mexican Texas. While Kelley was permitted to proceed in his journey across Mexico, much of his baggage was seized. Americans were anathema in Mexico, and Kelley no doubt made of himself a particular nuisance. The baggage may have been taken as payment for having to put up with him, the permission to travel given in the belief that he would die en route to the Pacific.

  He added Mexico to his list of thwarters and set out across the country, joining a pack train part of the way, traveling alone much of the time. In a month or two (everything is vague about this journey) he struggled into San Bias near the eastern shore of the Gulf of California, presumably made his way north to the Sonoran capital of Hermosillo, thence to Puebla, a town near San Diego in Alta California. What battles he fought against the elements, fever, hunger, thirst, hostile Indians, and Yankee-suspicious Mexicans are not recorded. He may have had a rudimentary command of the Spanish language, but how this vociferous, cantankerous man got across Mexico alive is a question that Kelley, for all his voluminous writings, left unanswered.

  In the spring of 1834, in San Diego, Kelley contrived to meet with the governor of Alta California, José Figueroa, perhaps seeking permission to travel upcountry to Monterey, Yerba Buena, and on north. His eyes were trained on the Oregon Country, and he must have assured the governor that he did not intend to remain in the Mexican province. Permission was granted. He then offered his services to survey the Sacramento River valley and after this strange overture was politely declined, Kelley moved on north to the Los Angeles pueblo, and there had the first of three encounters with an American trapper named Ewing Young. This burly frontiersman had twice before ventured to Alta California on trapping expeditions and had a firsthand knowledge of the country from tramping it from San Diego to Klamath Lake on beaver hunts. At the time Kelley met the man, subsequently so troublesome not only to Kelley but to John McLoughlin and the entire Hudson’s Bay enclave at Fort Vancouver, Young was already among the most seasoned of mountain men.

  Born about 1792 in the wilderness near Jonesboro, Tennessee, he had training as a carpenter and cabinetmaker but, according to Bancroft, was “a man of fine intelligence and nerve united to a grand physique, and too restless and fond of new experience to remain beside a turning-lathe all his life.” He moved to Missouri in 1822 and accompanied one of the first American commercial caravans to reach Santa Fé, a year after Mexico’s independence from Spain and the opening of New Mexico (and Alta California) to a trickle of American traders. After this profitable enterprise, Young recruited a few partners and trapped beaver on the Pecos and San Juan Rivers, dealt in Missouri produce and Mexican mules, and survived fights with Osage, Papago, Yuma, Apache, and Mojave war parties.

  In 1829, just a year after Jedediah Smith’s adventure in California and on the Umpqua River in Oregon, Young led a trapping party (which included “Kit” Carson, a nineteen-year-old runaway from a Missouri saddle shop) out of Taos, New Mexico, to the San Gabriel River, a few miles northeast of Pueblo de los Ángeles. He returned to California in 1832 with ten trappers and again in 1834 by the Gila River route.

  In Los Angeles, Kelley collared Young and belabored him on the wonders of Oregon, among which were its beaver riches, and seems to have been lobbying for a billet in Young’s party, which was then preparing to march north to Monterey. Young was wary, Kelley overinsistent. The two proceeded separately.

  In June Kelley arrived in Monterey, the most cosmopolitan town on the Pacific Seaboard, and tarried, basking in the beauty of the place, investigating taking passage on a trader headed for the Columbia River estuary. He was in no hurry. He had survived, or so he thought, all the worst of his journey, had crossed Mexico on foot, arriving unconquered in this semblance of civilization, a mere 600 miles from the Columbia. He was practically home.

  The capital of Alta California was situated on a commanding headland south of a magnificent bay first seen by Portuguese explorers 300 years before. Its whitewashed and red-roofed adobes were scattered between piney hills and a wide strip of white beach, the town and its setting as invigorating as the sea breezes that cooled it. In 1834, scarcely a decade before American annexation, Monterey thrummed and jostled with trade. (Alta California’s greatest export treasures were its cowhides, sought for shoemaking and other leather goods, and tallow, sold in rawhide bags, twenty-five pounds for two dollars, for soap and candles; it imported everything, including the shoes, soap, and candles made from its hides and tallow.) The waterfront swarmed with a heterogeneous collection of foreigners—mostly trade-ship captains and their crews, trappers, and hunters—and Mexican soldiery, customs officials, and clerks. Monterey Bay was forested by the masts of merchant vessels from seaports as distant as Genoa, Marseilles, Rio, and Boston, and by visiting ships-of-war, mostly British, that cruised Mexican waters from Acapulco and Mazatlán to Yerba Buena and on to the Oregon and Alaskan coasts.

  It must have been a relief for Kelley to discover that there were other “Bostons” among the brigantine and schooner crews lounging near the Customs House and wandering the dirt streets of the town. No doubt he harangued them with his grand plan to reclaim Astoria and populate the Oregon Country with righteous American emigrants. He may have paid a visit to the most eminent American residing in Monterey, Thomas O. Larkin (from Charlestown, Massachusetts), who had come to Monterey in 1832 and with a capital of $500 opened a a flour mill and a small store dealing in such things as furs, horses, and lumber. He had married a widow on shipboard en route from the Sandwich Islands, and Rachel Hobson Holmes Larkin was said to be the first American woman to reside in Mexican California and their child, Thomas, Jr., the first American baby born there. Larkin had political connections in New England and Washington and in a few years would become United States consul in Monterey.

  Kelley and Ewing Young talked again in the seacoast town. This time Young listened as Kelley extemporized. The trapper knew there was some truth in the stories of Oregon’s untapped fur riches—he had seen the potential when wandering the upper reaches of the Sacramento River in ’33—and finally agreed to take Kelley along with him.

  Young’s plan was to buy horses and mules en route north and take the herd into Oregon to sell, grubstaking himself and his sixteen men—“adventurers, deserted seamen and others,” Bancroft said of them—to a season in the beaver streams. A hundred of the animals were collected in Monterey and San José, and on the journey to Yerba Buena the party was joined by nine other men with their own herd of fifty-six horses. At least two of these suspicious newcomers were Americans. Kelley later called them “marauders” and he suspected, as did Young, that their animals had been stolen.

  In August, Young, Kelley, and the others reached the Umpqua River valley, near the site of the massacre of Jedediah Smith’s party in ’28. In camp near the river, while the other men were rounding up strayed animals, Kelley fell desperately ill with malaria and was unable to walk a step or mount a horse. While Young ministered to him as best he could, the expedition was stalled several days. Then, in a lucky circumstance, a band of Hudson’s Bay trappers, returning from Sacramento River hunting grounds, came upon Young’s camp. The leader of the party was the French-Canadian Michel Laframboise, who had been among the voyageurs who had sailed from New York to the Columbia on the Tonquin in 1810. His employment as an intrepid “utility man” in the Company, meaning that he was assigned dangerous missions to uncover new fur grounds, was accompanied by a reputation as a thief and “womanizer”—George Simpson, Hudson’s Bay governor o
f the Pacific Northwest, called him “a lying, worthless blackguard.” His checkered history notwithstanding, Laframboise saved Hall Kelley’s life by agreeing to take him on to Fort Vancouver, where he could receive medical care and assistance from Dr. John McLoughlin.

  Thus assisted by representatives of the entity that topped his list of enemies in all his Oregon schemes, traveling by Hudson’s Bay mule and Hudson’s Bay canoe, Kelley saw for the first time the land of his letters, tracts, petitions, and fantasies. At the same time others who knew of his obsession saw him. In the Willamette valley, after Ewing Young and his motley group of horse herders caught up with the Laframboise party, Kelley met Québec-born Jason Lee and his nephew Daniel Lee, who had come out to do Methodist religious work among the Flathead Indians. While there is no record of their conversation, Kelley certainly took the opportunity to preach to them on his Oregon dream and his original idea of taking missionaries to this Eden. The Lees no doubt listened patiently. Daniel later recalled Kelley as “a New England man, who entertained some very extravagant notions in regard to Oregon.”

  Laframboise brought Kelley into Fort Vancouver in late October, and his party was followed a few days later by Ewing Young’s and its horse herd.

  They were not welcomed; indeed, the gates of the customarily hospitable place were closed to them.

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  Six weeks before Young and Kelley appeared in Fort Vancouver, the Hudson’s Bay schooner Cadboro returned to the Columbia from a trade voyage to Monterey and delivered to John McLoughlin an angry communique from Governor José Figueroa of Alta California. The letter denounced the two Americans as horse thieves and cautioned the factor to have nothing to do with these outlaws, least of all to buy the horses and mules stolen from Mexican ranchos.

  Confronted with the charges, both men protested their innocence. Young admitted he had allowed some suspicious characters to join him north of Yerba Buena but said he paid for every animal he had brought in. Moreover, he said the Mexicans were the real thieves, claiming that he had been “plundered” of thousands of dollars in furs by California customs authorities in payment of fines for unauthorized trapping in the province.

  McLoughlin remained dubious of this upstart American, and when Young tried to trade some beaver skins collected on the journey to Oregon the factor refused them, although he sent the supplies Young requested to his camp. This charity infuriated the trapper and he ordered the goods returned. In effect, McLoughlin was saying the furs were as tainted as the horses, to Young a choice example of hypocrisy since the Company was also poaching furs in Mexican territory. He rode to the factor’s headquarters to demand an explanation. McLoughlin listened patiently—he was never a man to be cowed by another’s anger—and invited Young to address a protest to Governor Figueroa, which would be sent to Monterey in the Cadboro, soon to depart for Mexican waters, with the factor’s own request for details and proof of the horse-thievery charges.

  Young wrote a letter but was not mollified by McLoughlin’s suggestion and left Fort Vancouver sullenly, taking his horses and mules with him. He eventually settled near Champoeg, an old Indian camp on an open, sandy peninsula on the east side of the Willamette River. He built a cabin there, hired workers to erect a sawmill, and within two years was also proprietor of a whiskey distillery—an immensely disturbing development to teetotaling McLoughlin—and a cattle company, and was claiming over fifty square miles of territory for his enterprises.

  A few months after McLoughlin received the damaging letter, Young and Kelley were exculpated of the horse-theft charges, but Young never forgave the factor for treating him as an outcast. In 1836 William A. Slacum, an American “private merchant” on a tour of Oregon, reported a conversation with Young at Champoeg in which the Tennesseean claimed that “a cloud hung over him so long through Dr. McLoughlin’s influence, that he was almost maddened by the harsh treatment of that gentleman.”

  These words might have been written by Hall Kelley; indeed, in slightly different language, were so written, countless times. While Ewing Young was taking the brunt of the punishment for the crimes alleged by the California governor, Kelley had his own stories of “maltreatment” at the hands of McLoughlin, and they dovetailed perfectly with the theories he devised before he ever set foot in Oregon: that the Hudson’s Bay Company had contrived to ruin him.

  In the beginning of his barrage of letters to newspapers back east, and in personal correspondence, Kelley wrote of arriving in Oregon “much depressed in spirits and under great bodily weakness, then recovering from a violent attack of fever and ague.” He said he was received in Fort Vancouver as “an unwelcome guest” and without being specific about the horse-thievery charges said “calumnies and slander were propagated” against him, and that “bloody men” had more than once threatened his life.

  In fact, Kelley was the author of all his problems. He had fallen in with outlaws but was as innocent of any crime as Ewing Young—and probably more innocent. But his reputation as a haranguer of the Hudson’s Bay Company had preceded him. From reports in eastern newspapers and from such Americans as Jason and Daniel Lee and Nathaniel Wyeth, who had preceded him to Oregon, McLoughlin knew of Kelley’s intemperate and irrational accusations against the Company, and his grandiose ideas of “driving the British out of Oregon.”

  Even the handful of Americans coming in and out at Fort Vancouver shunned him. Wyeth, who had been inspired to come to Oregon by Kelley’s writings and oratory, paid him only a perfunctory visit. (Kelley surmised that Wyeth had “crossed over” to the Hudson’s Bay intriguers, even to embracing their policies of discouraging emigrants.)

  McLoughlin, exasperated at having this difficult and foolish man at his fort, remained great-hearted. Kelley was shaken by fever, gaunt and weak, and “out of humanity” the factor assigned him a servant’s hut, saw to it that he was attended by the post surgeon and that food was delivered to him regularly as he recovered his strength. Kelley, while spending the winter of 1834–35 at Fort Vancouver, demonstrated his gratitude for McLoughlin’s largesse by demanding his “rights” as “an American on American soil … pursuing the avowed purpose of opening the trade of the territory to general competition.”

  One visitor to the fort who saw Kelley that winter described him as “five feet nine inches high, wearing a slouched hat, blanket capote, leather pants, with a red stripe down the seam, rather outré even for Vancouver … penniless, and ill-clad, and considered rather too rough for close companionship, and was not invited to the mess.”

  Kelley appears to have recovered enough from his debilitations that winter to write voluminous journals and make extensive notes on his surroundings. In an 1839 publication, he claimed to have surveyed the Columbia from Fort Vancouver to its Pacific estuary and provided convincing proof of his wanderings with data on the topography, climate, and soil conditions of his surroundings and observations on the Columbia bar and entrance, harbors and mountain ranges, timber and mineral potentials. He even claimed to have discovered deposits of gold, silver, copper, and coal in the vicinity of Fort Vancouver.

  But for all his activity that winter, Kelley was anxious to return home. He was without funds or friends, at the mercy of the charity of his enemy, and his health was weakened. He still believed passionately in his Oregon dream, saw all his research and sumptuous descriptions, written in the comforts of Massachusetts, beggared by the actual place. For all the despair he experienced in getting there, his meager five months at Fort Vancouver steeled him. Now he could say out of experience and observation that Oregon must be American territory; he could use the personal pronoun in the lecture hall and in his writings: I have been there and this is what I saw.

  McLoughlin, no doubt delighted to be rid of his resident ingrate, made him a gift of £7 and passage to the Sandwich Islands on the Company ship Dryad, and Kelley departed the Oregon coast in March 11, 1835, never to return. Bancroft says he remained true to his propensities to bite the hand that fed him: “The rude manners of the sail
ors with whom he was forced to associate in his feeble state of health were a sore annoyance to him, operating yet more to prejudice his diseased imagination against the company to whom he was indebted for this means of getting out of the country of his misfortunes.”

  McLoughlin wrote later that he had provided Kelley with shelter and victuals “until he left … when I gave him passage to Oahu. On his return to the states, he published a narrative of his voyage, in which, instead of being grateful for the kindness shown him, he abused me, and falsely stated I had been so alarmed with the dread that he would destroy the Hudson’s Bay Company’s trade, that I kept a constant watch over him.”

  From Oahu, Kelley was able to take passage to Boston on an American whaling vessel and arrived home early in 1836. He was then forty-six years old and had a long life yet to live. He wrote even more voluminously than before his Oregon odyssey, “planned and prayed, and blessed his friends, and cursed his enemies by the hundreds of pages,” Bancroft wrote. “Besides pamphlets and newspapers, he wrote letters literally by the bushel.” His books and treatises bore such titles as A Geographical Sketch of that Part of North America called Oregon, A General Circular to all Persons of Good Character who Wish to Emigrate to the Oregon Territory; Embracing some Account of the Character and Advantages of the Country, the Right and the Means and the Operations by which it is to be Settled; and all Necessary Directions for Becoming an Emigrant, and History of the Colonization of the Oregon Territory.