Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  While he wrote often of his struggles and persecutions and took credit for not only the settlement of Oregon but also of California, not all his writings were foolish. Among influential politicians who were educated by Kelley’s work were Senator Lewis Linn of Missouri, who subsequently introduced bills to extend American laws to Oregonian settlers and to give generous land grants to emigrant families; Senator Thomas Hart Benton, also of Missouri and a powerful expansionist voice in Congress; and Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, who upon reading Kelley’s Geographical Sketch of Oregon wrote the author, “I think much of your project; I will do all I can to sustain it.”

  Not long after his return to Boston, Kelley married and hoped to have a career as a respectable businessman. He enlisted some partners and built a cotton mill in Three Rivers, Massachusetts, counting on his share of the income from the business to finance his continuing Oregon work. But the mill failed and he lost what remained of his meager finances—and his sanity. Thereafter, he thought, talked, and wrote of nothing but his Oregon expedition and the oppression and inhumanity of the Hudson’s Bay Company, imagining that every annoyance of whatever kind he suffered was attributable to its “hirelings.” Bancroft wrote, “So great was his suspicion of every one, and so irritable had he become, that he drove his wife and children from him, and afterwards resided alone on a small piece of land heavily mortgaged, at Three Rivers … where he was designated as The Hermit, and from which the entreaties of his friends were unable to draw him.”

  Kelley died “of paralysis” on January 20, 1874, at the age of eighty-five.

  “To the very last he remained the warm friend of Oregon,” Bancroft said, “indignantly denying that he had ever entertained ‘extravagant notions’ of that country, which he still contended was ‘the finest on which the sun shines.’” The historian was saddened by the end of Kelley’s life, as were many of the old man’s contemporaries. “Had I been in Congress,” Bancroft said, “I would have given the old school-master something to sweeten his second childhood’s cup withal, and I would have praised and petted him somewhat in an official way, for he did more than many a well paid officer of the government.”

  13

  The Iceman

  “… A PERFECT INFIDEL.”

  1

  Among the 500 members of Hall Kelley’s American Society for Encouraging the Settlement of Oregon Territory was an outspoken Bostonian named Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth, an impressive businessman with broad shoulders, thick chest, and an open, clever face, the lower portion framed in straggly chin whiskers, the middle of it unmasked even by a mustache. He was big-nosed and large-headed, and his mouth was shaped into a perpetual grin—not a smirk or affectation but the slight smile that success, and the prospect of more of it, brings. He was dynamic, brim full of ideas, and impatient to shake Kelley from his perpetual dreams. Wyeth’s tenure as a Kelley man would be brief; after all, how much oratory, tract-writing, and planning would it take to make a start for the Columbia?

  Patience was no virtue to Nat Wyeth, nor did he profess any lofty motives in his own plans to get to the Oregon Country. No patriotic or spiritual needs haunted him; indeed, one of his religious-minded acquaintances called him “a perfect infidel.” He wanted to make a fortune in the Pacific Northwest fur trade and the fact that he knew nothing of the fur business from experience was no deterrent. He had known nothing of the ice business, either, when he got into it in his early twenties and accumulated a modest wealth from the frozen ponds around his native Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  Nat Wyeth’s love of ice had no poetry in it. He looked upon the beauty of ice with a clear commercial vision, just as John Jacob Astor looked upon the beauty of furs. Ice was seasonal, and thus not everyday common; it was free for the taking; there was an eager market for it in places where it was treated as a luxury. While working for the Frederick Tudor Ice Company in Boston, Wyeth acted on these alluring facts by inventing a horse-drawn machine that grooved pond ice so that it could be cut into huge blocks to be hoisted upon wagons and stored under mounds of sawdust in warehouses. Tudor’s ice was sold locally and shipped everywhere, including an especially lucrative market in the West Indies and eventually as far away as Calcutta.

  Wyeth saw no great leap from the ice business to the fur trade. Beaver were seasonal, free for the taking, luxury items fetching handsome profits. But he could not wait for Hall Kelley to start walking, and so, late in 1831, he launched his own Oregon-bound organization by putting up $3,000 of his own money and raising another $5,000 by mortgaging his ice patents. With this cash backing he formed the joint-stock, imposingly named Pacific Trading Company and enlisted twenty-four “industrious and temperate men” who anted up forty dollars each to join him. Among these “investors,” most of them interested in making their fortunes in Oregon in other endeavors than trapping beaver, were his brother, Jacob Wyeth, M.D., who agreed to serve as the company physician; a nineteen-year-old cousin, John B. Wyeth; a gunsmith; a blacksmith; two carpenters; two fishermen; a cooper; a founder; and an assortment of farmers and tradesmen.

  Wyeth planned as carefully as his chronic impatience permitted. His was to be an overland expedition, not across Mexico in the Kelley mode but a plunge from the Missouri frontier across the Rocky Mountains to the Columbia. Faced with a 2,000-mile journey, most of it on foot, some of it on horseback, and some by boat crossings of rivers, he determined that his company would travel light, buying the necessary provisions, horses, and mules en route. He bought space on the merchant brig Sultana, which was sailing from Boston early in 1832 for the Pacific, and loaded the hold with foodstuffs, traps and supplies, and a consignment of goods from Boston merchants to be used in trading with Indians for furs. The ship would rendezvous at the Columbia bar with Wyeth’s overland party.

  Some of his ideas were more imaginative than practical. He outfitted his recruits in spiffy uniforms—woolen jackets, canvas-like pantaloons, striped cotton shirts, brogans—and armed them with muskets, bayonets, knives, and axes. He hired a bugler to call the men to parades and mess, and to blow tattoo and reveille. He upset his own “travel light” plans by buying heavy, cumbersome tents. He devised and had constructed a thirteen-foot-long “amphibious machine” consisting of three small wagons in tandem, their gondola-like boxes to serve both for mule-drawn cargo and as boats to cross any waterways on the trail west. This contraption was dubbed the “Nat-wyethium” by Cambridge wags who saw it, and much else in the iceman’s preparations, as “extremely notional.”

  On March 11, 1832, at a time when Hall Kelley was under arrest as a debtor, Wyeth got his two-dozen-man “Band of Oregon Adventurers,” as the local press called them, aboard a merchant steamer, each man paying his own way, and out of Boston Harbor for the passage to Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and Saint Louis.

  In the Mississippi metropolis, old trailsmen told Wyeth that the boat-wagon was too flimsy and awkward to portage across the Rockies, that in any event it wouldn’t work even on the Platte, the least problematical of the rivers he would be crossing, much less on the Sweetwater, the savage Snake, and the Columbia. He considered this advice and got rid of the Nat-wyethium, finding a buyer interested in trying it out and who paid half of what it cost to construct.

  A much more serious disappointment was the defection of six of his company, men who decided they had more of the pioneer-adventurer in them in the planning than in the actuality. They apparently found, after taking in a day or two of the riotous, stinking, mud-filthy Saint Louis waterfront, that their Cambridge comforts beckoned them too strongly to resist. Wyeth bid them farewell and good riddance and trooped the others aboard the steamer Otter for the 300-mile drift up the serpentine Missouri to Independence. This settlement, scattered across high ground in rocky, well-timbered country about three miles from the boat landing, lay only a few miles inside settled territory. In 1832, five years after its founding, it was a ramshackle congeries of log huts, tent-taverns, and outfitting shops, but for all its forlorn appearance
was already a principal staging area for trade caravans outward bound to Mexican lands on the Santa Fé Trail, and for fur traders provisioning for the summer rendezvous in the Rockies.

  Wyeth and his company spent ten days in Independence. He bought three horses for each of his men, fifteen sheep, two yoke of oxen, and reached an agreement with Kentuckians William and Milton Sublette, who had been among Ashley’s original “enterprising young men” of the 1823 expedition up the Missouri. The Sublettes were partners with Jim Bridger, Tom Fitzpatrick, and others in the Rocky Mountain Fur Company and were taking a sixty-two-man fur brigade to the trappers’ rendezvous at Pierre’s Hole in eastern Idaho. The brothers permitted Wyeth to attach his Oregon Adventurers to their company.

  The trail to the rendezvous was a trial, with a signal error of Wyeth’s authorship. Under the Sublette brothers’ steady and knowledgeable guidance, the brigade, with the tenderfoot component bringing up the rear, made good progress, averaging twenty-five miles a day, to the Platte River, conduit to the fur country. There the trappers set about fashioning bull boats of buffalo hides sewn over willow frames and caulked with a mixture of elk tallow and campfire ashes, to ferry men and supplies across the shallow but swift river. Wyeth observed this activity, and Bill Sublette urged him to get his men busy building their own boats but, as one of the Cambridge tenderfeet observed, “Captain Wyeth was not a man easily diverted by the advice of others.” This stubbornness proved costly: Wyeth and his party built a raft, and as it was being poled across the Platte’s unpredictable current, valuable stores, the blacksmith’s equipment, and several kegs of gunpowder were washed overboard and lost.

  One incident scarier even than the Platte crossing was a night raid on the brigade’s horse-string by a Blackfeet band. Five horses were lost but no human casualties resulted.

  The only other memorable experience en route to the rendezvous occurred near South Pass when the Sublette party encountered twenty wagons loaded with trade items, the train led by Benjamin Louis Eulalie Bonneville, a Paris-born army captain on leave to trap and explore the Rockies and the Oregon Country. Bonneville’s wagons were making history as the first to cross the Continental Divide and to reach the Green River valley. Later the captain would give serious thought to an American occupation of Oregon, and in a letter to Army Adjutant General Roger Jones on July 29, 1833, he wrote, “The information I have already obtained authorizes me to say that if the Government ever intend taking possession of Oregon the sooner it shall be done, the better.” He said the Hudson’s Bay Company “are too much exposed by their numerous small posts even to offer the least violence to the smallest force.”

  The brigade reached Pierre’s Hole on July 8, and within a few days Wyeth lost another seven men, including his physician brother Jacob and nephew John. All had experienced quite enough of the wilderness and arranged to turn back to Independence with Bill Sublette, who was returning to Missouri with pack animals loaded with beaver plews. Nat Wyeth, now with eleven men remaining in his company, joined with Milton, who was preparing to move on into the Snake River country. On July 18, a short distance west of the rendezvous, Wyeth and his remnant found themselves on the fringe of a bitter fight against a Gros Ventre war party. The New Englander and his men suffered no casualties but five white trappers were killed in the battle.

  By contrast at least, the rest of the journey was uneventful. Wyeth and his men were able to do some amateur beaver trapping, and on October 29, 1832, eight months after departing Boston, he brought his tenderfeet into Fort Vancouver, making them the first westbound party of Americans to travel along what came to be called the Oregon Trail. But Wyeth was not a man looking at the historical record; bringing the first emigrants overland to Oregon was incidental to his real mission—to make a fortune in the fur trade—and in this, struggling with his forlorn and foreshortened party into Fort Vancouver that fall day, he had failed. The crowning blow was the news trickling into the fort of the fate of the Sultana, the merchant vessel he had commissioned to precede his overland party and carry his traps, trade goods, and equipment for his Columbia River scheme. The ship, he learned, had sunk in a gale after striking a reef east of Tahiti. The ship’s captain and most of its crew had survived, making a miraculous sixty-eight-day voyage in a launch to Valparaiso.

  As would be the case with Hall Kelley two years hence, Wyeth and his men had to depend upon the generosity of John McLoughlin to survive the winter.

  Being beholden to the man representing the company he intended to compete with was not what Wyeth had in mind. Nor were those who came with him overjoyed at their prospects for the future: In the spring, eight of them, with McLoughlin’s assistance, found passage to return to Boston. Of the three who remained to become among the first Americans to settle in the Oregon Country, one became a teacher to the Indian wives and half-breed children of the French-Canadian trappers at the fort, and two took up farming in the Willamette valley, where a small vanguard of retired Hudson’s Bay men and their families were clearing land and planting crops.

  * * *

  Wyeth returned to the Rockies in March 1833, traveling with a Company pack train to the Portneuf River in southeastern Idaho, where he retrieved a cache of furs left there the previous summer. His mind boiled with ideas for a second expedition to the Oregon Country to reverse the bad luck that dogged him. He proposed to McLoughlin a plan whereby the Company would outfit him and a party of trappers to hunt beaver south of the Columbia, in exchange for which he would sell his furs exclusively to the factor at Fort Vancouver. He sought out Benjamin Bonneville for a partnership. And before returning home he made arrangements with Milton Sublette and Tom Fitzpatrick to supply their Rocky Mountain Fur Company with $3,000 in trade goods from Boston at less cost than they would pay for them in Saint Louis. He also harbored an idea of shipping kegged salmon from the Columbia to Boston at a handsome profit, and proposed to build a trading post on the Portneuf that would become the center of an American fur monopoly in the northern Rockies.

  Wyeth had never experienced failure and had no space in his mind for such a concept. He was certain something in his grab bag of ideas to conquer the Oregon Country would succeed. He had monied friends in the East who would help finance such costly matters as hiring cargo space on another merchant ship bound for the North Pacific; buying trade goods to be shipped to Saint Louis and Independence; hiring trappers, teamsters, laborers, fishermen, and stevedores; and financing construction of a fort. He had his own resources to draw on, such as his ice-cutting and storage patents, which he leased to his employers. He had his reputation as a sound man of commerce and, unlike some Oregon boomers, he had been there; he knew the country and its resources.

  2

  In 1832, the precise date unknown, four native chiefs from the Oregon Country appeared in Saint Louis with a fur caravan and found their way to the home of General William Clark, superintendent of Indian Affairs for the city. The chiefs, Spokanes, Nez Percé, Flatheads—it is not clear—explained that their fathers had told them of Clark’s visit to their nation a quarter century past with Mr. Lewis and a great party of other whites. From travelers and trappers they had learned of the white man’s God and holy book, and they had a hunger to know more about this “Great Spirit.” They had journeyed 2,000 miles to ask the White Chief Clark to send religious men to their country to point the way to Heaven.

  There are various accounts of the fates of these Indian emissaries. Two are said to have sickened and died in Saint Louis soon after their meeting with Clark, one may have died on returning to his tribe, and one is said to have reached home and spread the news that white men of God were coming. Clark appears to have summoned three Methodist elders to his home and reported on the Indians’ visit. According to John W. York, one of those present, Clark explained that while he was a Roman Catholic, “Methodist traveling preachers were the most indefatigable laborers, and made the greatest sacrifices of any men in the world” and that while “Catholic priests could teach the mysteries
of religion … Methodist ministers taught practical piety and husbandry, and the two united would be the best arrangement he could think of.” The elders agreed and promised, if possible, to send a missionary to Oregon.

  To the Indians, it did not matter whether the missionaries were Protestant or Catholic, since they probably did not know the difference. They had learned about the “black robes”—Jesuit priests—from French-Canadian trappers and from Catholic Iroquois who worked for the North West Company and taught some of the Flatheads and Nez Percé about prayer.

  The Indians who visited Clark may have represented a very practical idea among their people: “To the Indian mind it was quite clear that the white man’s guns, knives, cloth, burning glasses, and talking paper were the product of extra powerful medicine,” David Lavender wrote. “Mastering the white man’s medicine, it followed, would lead to mastery of the white man’s power.”

  Of course, no such speculation was made when a highly wrought version of the Clark visitation story appeared in a letter published in the March 1, 1833, issue of the New York–based Christian Advocate and Journal. The Methodist convert who wrote the letter described the Indians as “three Nez Perces and one Flathead” and said that no sooner had they arrived at General Clark’s doorstep than two of them dropped dead from exhaustion and privation, the first martyrs to the cause of spreading the Word of God to the heathens of the Pacific Northwest. The letter was accompanied by a drawing by an educated Wyandot Indian named William Walker showing the manner in which Flatheads deformed the shape of their children’s heads in infancy by lashing them to a cradle-board. (Actually none of the Indians visiting Clark had this deformity; nor, for that matter, did the Nez Percé have pierced noses. The name came from a clumsy French translation of Indian sign language.)

  The inspiring letter and the editorial peroration in the same issue of the Christian Advocate (“Let the Church awake from her slumbers and go forth in her strength to the salvation of these wandering sons of our native forests”) created a small sensation among churchly New Englanders. The Missionary Board of the Methodist Episcopal Church was galvanized to call for a mission “among the Flatheads,” and the celebrated Oregon fanatic Hall J. Kelley, then still stumping around New England trying to get a start toward his imagined Eden, was aided by the clarion call. “His schemes multiplied,” Bancroft wrote, “his pen worked with new vigor; he urged the preachers of the Word not to confine their efforts to the mountains, but to descend the broad River of the West to the Canaan there awaiting them, and unite earthly empire with heavenly enlightenment.”