Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  With uncommon alacrity, the Missionary Board chose a thirty-year-old newly ordained Methodist minister named Jason Lee as its candidate to lead the church into the wilds beyond the Rockies. He had been among the first to step forward and volunteer, and he had perfect credentials: He was a former farmer; he was a native of Stranstead, Québec, which gave him something in common with many of the Hudson’s Bay agents in Oregon, including John McLoughlin; he had an impeccable record as a church deacon and elder. Lee possessed other striking qualities as well. He looked as if he could survive any of the vicissitudes of the trail, clear a forest and build a mission house with his bare hands, and convert Indians to Christianity by the sheer strength of his character and physical bulk.

  Lee was a brawny, shambling man, six-foot-three in height, powerfully chested and shouldered, with a massively jawed face featuring a shaggy black beard, a prominent nose, and eyes described as of a “superlative, spiritualistic blue.” He carried himself awkwardly, as if his brain’s instructions took an extra millisecond to reach his faraway limbs, but still he had a certain sureness, was frank, affable, and inspired confidence. “Strong in his possession of himself,” Bancroft said, “there was nothing intrusive in his nature.… Some would have said he lacked refinement; others that his brusque straight-forwardness was but simple honesty, unalloyed with clerical cant, and stripped of university gown and sectarian straitlace.”

  Daniel Lee, who had joined his uncle Jason in volunteering for the Flathead mission, was hardly identifiable as a Lee relative. He was thin and bony, in Bancroft’s words, “a pious Pierrot, a man in stature, but a child in mind and manners,” and possessed of a face “beaming in happy, good-natured unconsciousness of his lack of knowledge, particularly of knowledge of the things of this world.”

  Two lay preachers and a schoolteacher were selected to accompany the Lees, and in October 1833 the Missionary Board came up with $3,000 to finance the expedition. The expectation was that additional funds would be raised as the men made their way to Saint Louis, there to join a fur caravan heading to Independence and the Rocky Mountains.

  By perfect happenstance, as the Lee party was preparing to leave New York news reached the city that Nathaniel Wyeth had arrived home after a journey to the Oregon Country and was preparing to return. Jason Lee hurried down to Boston to meet with the iceman. The “perfect infidel” may have cringed at the notion of shepherding Lee’s divines through the wilderness, but he needed the money to help finance his new venture and Lee needed Wyeth’s expertise to get him, his followers, and his baggage to the Columbia. By the end of their meeting, they had made a business arrangement: Lee would send his mission supplies ahead on the May Dacre, the merchant vessel Wyeth had commissioned to precede him to the Pacific, and Lee would rendezvous with Wyeth in Saint Louis in the spring.

  * * *

  The expedition got underway at the end of April 1834, with Wyeth and Milton Sublette in the lead, and 70 trappers and 250 horses loaded with the supplies Wyeth hoped to sell at the Pierre’s Hole rendezvous. Jason Lee’s party brought up the rear with their own horses and a small cattle herd.

  For Wyeth the rendezvous was a financial disaster. William Sublette had beaten him there with a pack train out of Independence and by the time the iceman arrived with his, the trappers had already purchased their winter’s supplies from Milton’s brother. Wyeth, in a fury, decided to push on to the Portneuf River and build a cottonwood-log trading post, from which he hoped to sell his surplus goods. Lee and his followers went along, and in July, as Wyeth’s men cleared some ground for building the fort, the minister held his first Sunday service. He had a strange congregation: Wyeth and his trappers (“the most profane company I think I was ever in,” Lee later said of them); a number of Hudson’s Bay fur traders and voyageurs under Thomas McKay; some Nez Percé and Flathead Indians, all of whom had drifted down to the grassy meadow along the Portneuf to investigate the goings-on at the place Wyeth was calling Fort Hall (after one of his prime backers). Bancroft painted a memorable word picture of Jason Lee’s sermon in the wildwood: “It was a grand and solemn sight, these rough and reckless children of the forest, gathered from widely remote quarters, with varied tongues and customs, here in the heart of the mighty wilderness, the eternal hills their temple-walls, and for roof the sky.” He added, “What these same devout worshippers were doing an hour afterward, drinking, trafficking, swearing, and stabbing, it is needless to detail. Man is oft an irrational animal, and we are least of all to look for reason in religion.”

  On July 30, with Wyeth and his men remaining behind to complete Fort Hall, Lee and his party pushed on to the west with McKay. After some tribulations, including the loss of much of their baggage at The Dalles rapids, Lee brought his bedraggled party into Fort Vancouver on September 16, 1834.

  John McLoughlin treated the Americans with great cordiality, opened his home to them, and even provided Lee with a temporary place to preach. His first Sunday sermon was expounded to a motley flock, stranger even than the one gathered at Fort Hall, consisting of Englishmen, Irishmen, Scotchmen, French-Canadians, Indians of several tribes, Sandwich Islanders, and three Japanese shipwreck survivors.

  McLoughlin also slyly redirected Jason Lee’s plans to erect a mission house some distance south of the Hudson’s Bay headquarters. The Flatheads, he told Lee, were not disposed to religious conversion. Their tribal lands were an exceedingly wild and dangerous country hundreds of miles to the east. They had an ancient tradition of warring against the Blackfeet. They were a nomadic people, difficult to pin down, impossible to gather up and funnel toward any mission church. He suggested that Lee settle in the nearby Willamette valley and proselytize among the natives in that region, the Calapooyas, Umpquas, Clackamas, and Tualatins, among others.

  With horses, provisions, and men provided by McLoughlin, the Lees explored the valley and fell in love with it. Along the river they found a dozen French-Canadian families. The men, retired Company fur hunters working new farms, generously welcomed the Americans to stay over. One man, Joseph Gervais, even set up a tent for the Lees in the midst of his melon and cucumber garden. Jason Lee was reminded of the passage in the first chapter of Isaiah about “a lodge in a garden of cucumbers.”

  He selected for his mission house a tract of richly grassed alluvial plain on the east side of the Willamette, sixty miles below its mouth. The site, two miles above the Gervais farm, was bordered by copses of oak, fir, cottonwood, white maple, and ash trees.

  Lee returned to Fort Vancouver full of hope and plans and ready to work. The May Dacre, Wyeth’s brig, had survived the Horn passage and South Pacific storms and arrived on the Columbia, and McLoughlin supplied boats and crews to transport the American’s mission goods ashore; horses, ox teams, and canoes to transport the supplies to the Willamette, and teamsters to drive the mission stock to their new home. By October 6, six weeks after the Lee party arrived at Fort Vancouver, they were sleeping in tents among the oaks and firs along the river. Some of the Canadians farming nearby, together with a Calapooya boy, a Kanaka volunteer, and later several of the horse-drovers who came to Fort Vancouver with Ewing Young and Hall Kelley, helped the Lees saw planks and split shingles for cabin building and stake out thirty acres of rich ground for spring planting of wheat, oats, corn, and garden vegetables.

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  In February 1835 Jason Lee wrote to his Mission Board and told of the progress he had made in the Willamette valley. He made a lengthy appeal to the board to send more men, with their families, to the Columbia. He said female schoolteachers were especially needed, and other “White females” because he had learned they “would have more influence among Indians than males,” and could relieve the menfolk who he said were “doing too much household work.”

  The mission grew in direct ratio to the number of able-bodied men and women who planted and tilled the fields; built cabins, a schoolhouse, and outbuildings; and found time to teach and proselytize among the Indians. In the latter effort they had limi
ted success. Most of the Indians in the region were reluctant to leave their children at the mission school, and those who did come were mostly orphans. The prospect of laboring in the fields while receiving religious instruction was also unappealing to the natives, who were unaccustomed to any kind of regularized labor. An attempt to locate a branch mission among the Calapooya people failed, Lee reported, because of the indolence and apathy of the natives.

  Over two years passed before his letter home had the effect Lee hoped for, but in July 1836 the merchant brig Hamilton sailed from Boston Harbor bound for the Sandwich Islands with a “reinforcement” for the Willamette mission of thirteen Methodist men, women (three of them unmarried), and children. This small contingent arrived on the Columbia in June 1837, after a long delay in Honolulu, and within two months Jason Lee married Miss Anne Maria Pitman of New York, described as a “prepossessing woman,” in the first Methodist wedding ceremony in Oregon. Additional church people arrived on the Sumatra that fall, giving the Willamette mission a population of sixty, about half of that number native children.

  By then Lee was spending more time at his administrative duties and less at his religious ones. He had explored the whole region south of the Columbia and found no prospect of success working with or teaching, much less converting, the natives. Many of the tribes he regarded as hopelessly depraved and diseased, others—such as those of The Dalles, Umpqua, and Rogue River valleys—as unredeemable banditti. It was impossible for Lee to think the Lord intended him to minister to a handful of orphans. His personal mission had to be bigger: Perhaps it was that of a colonizer.

  * * *

  In the winter of 1837 Lee paid a visit to the handful of pioneers in the Umpqua River valley. They, like all the Americans in the Oregon Country, were eager to talk about encouraging settlers to come west. They wanted “good people”—hardworking, God-fearing folk. All were fearful of an influx of unprincipled adventurers, deserting seamen, and other flotsam washing ashore from such refuse dumps of humanity as Botany Bay.

  Lee began thinking of the Willamette valley as the perfect place to draw respectable, God-loving Americans, a colony that would enjoy the guidance of the Methodist Church and the protection of the United States government. In March 1838 he recruited a few men and started out on an overland journey home. He hoped to collect funds and enlist new settlers en route and then meet with the Missionary Board and seek its assistance to deliver a “memorial,” signed by fifty colonists, to the Congress of the United States. The petition gave the history of the Willamette settlement from 1832 to the present and stated that the American people were ignorant of the riches of the lands beyond the Rocky Mountains and its limitless potential for commerce with China, India, and the islands of the Pacific. The paper urged that the United States take immediate formal possession of the Oregon Country south of the Columbia River for the benefit of the nation at large and the protection of the settlers already there, who regarded themselves as the nucleus of a great new state of the Union.

  Faced with such mighty responsibilities, Lee could not be deterred, not even by the crushing blow he received while resting at Pawnee Mission, near Council Bluffs, Iowa. There an express rider delivered a letter sent out from Fort Vancouver by John McLoughlin notifying Lee that his wife Anne Maria had died on June 26 past, three weeks after the birth and death of their son. She had been buried near the mission house, the grave site shaded by fir tree.1

  Nothing could be gained by going back, so Lee went on and began lecturing in churches from Independence to New York, often to large audiences but more often to small ones, on the subject of Oregon, its riches and opportunities, and its certain future as a territory of the United States. He was a persuasive orator, filled with ardor and righteousness, presenting to his audiences his unromanticized views of the potential of the great land in which he had labored, experienced joys and sorrows, and had grown to love. Elijah White, a physician from Tompkins County, New York, who had been among the first reinforcements at the Willamette mission, said that Reverend Lee’s only concern was that his heated oratory might draw to Oregon an undesirable element, men “from the western frontier of the states, of a restless, aspiring disposition.”

  In New York in November 1838, Lee appeared before the Board of Managers of the Methodist Episcopal Missionary Society and was so persuasive that a “call” was published in the Christian Advocate and Journal for missionaries, church laymen, physicians, farmers, mechanics, and young women to serve as teachers. Lee’s petition was turned over to Congressman Caleb Cushing of Massachusetts and presented to the House of Representatives together with Lee’s voluminous correspondence and supporting papers from Nathaniel Wyeth, Hall Kelley, and other notable Oregon enthusiasts. One of the newest of these was a government agent named William A. Slacum who had just returned from Oregon, where he spent time with Lee at the Willamette mis-sion. His voluminous report to Congress merged perfectly with Lee’s petition.

  All the submissions were published as a Report of the Twenty-Fifth Congress in a printing of 10,000 copies and were widely distributed.

  In all, thirty-six adults and sixteen children sailed from New York for the Oregon coast on the Lausanne, a ship chartered by the society and carrying $42,000 in supplies and equipment. Lee, who had by now remarried, joined the contingent with his new wife, and they all reached the Columbia in May 1840. The new colonizers, called the Great Reinforcement, firmly established the permanent American presence in the Oregon Country.

  Over the next five years, Lee continued his labors for federal recognition of the Methodist settlement in the Willamette. In that time he also weathered the repeated frustrations of ministering to the Indians, the peak moment of which was a camp meeting in 1841 where he reported 130 baptisms. But, he admitted, most of the conversions to Christianity would likely not be permanent. He said many of the Indians asked to be paid for attending services.

  In 1844 he returned to New York to visit the missionary board and to work on soliciting funds. Two months before his forty-second birthday he died, on March 2, 1845, at Lake Memphremagog in the province of Lower Canada. His remains were reinterred in Salem in 1906.

  Lee had lived to see the first stirrings of an American colonial government in Oregon and the first organized emigrant wagon trains reach the Willamette valley. He died in the month and year of the inauguration of President James K. Polk and the push to settle the Oregon boundary question.

  “He certainly saw how grand a work it was to lay the foundation of a new empire on the shores of the Pacific,” Bancroft wrote of Lee, “and how discouraging the prospect of raising a doomed race to a momentary recognition of its lost condition, which was all that ever could be hoped for the Indians of western Oregon. There is much credit to be imputed to him as the man who carried to successful completion the dream of Hall J. Kelley and the purpose of Ewing Young.”

  * * *

  Except for guiding Lee’s party to the gateway to the Oregon Country, Nat Wyeth’s second Oregon expedition failed miserably; his confidence, fall-back schemes, and superhuman efforts arrived at nothing but frustration. The arrangement he had proposed to McLoughlin, for the Hudson’s Bay Company to outfit him and his trappers in exchange for exclusive rights to all the furs he brought in, was turned down by Governor George Simpson. The partnership he suggested to Captain Benjamin Bonneville did not advance beyond the discussion stage. By the time Wyeth arrived at the summer 1834 rendezvous, the Rocky Mountain Fur Company had gone under. Worse, Bill Sublette had beaten him to Pierre’s Hole with a pack train of supplies, and those Wyeth brought so laboriously from Boston to sell to the Rocky Mountain outfit were no longer wanted. He wrestled them by pack train to his Fort Hall site but was able to collect only $500 for them, a small fraction of their cost.

  The salmon scheme proved to be an even greater financial disaster, and the crowning blow came when he was forced to sell Fort Hall to the Hudson’s Bay Company, again at a huge loss.

  Wyeth returned to Boston in th
e fall of 1836, having devoted five years of his life and $20,000 of his own money (a substantial fortune in the era) to his Oregon labors. He had no regrets; he let others blame the Hudson’s Bay people for thwarting his designs on the Oregon Country. (One of his prolix contemporaries wrote that the Company “preceded him, followed him, surrounded him everywhere and cut the throat of his prosperity with such kindness and politeness that Wyeth was induced to sell his whole interest, existent and prospective, in Oregon, to his generous, but too indefatigable, skillful and powerful antagonist.”)

  Wyeth returned to the Tudor Company at triple his former salary and patented new devices for ice gathering, and when he struck out on his own in 1840 he made a new fortune shipping refrigerated fruit and vegetables to the tropics.

  His beloved Oregon remained in his thoughts. For congressional reports he wrote accounts of his Northwest ventures, provided his observations on the potential for commerce there, and urged governmental support of American efforts to settle the Pacific Northwest. Like Jason Lee, Wyeth lived to witness the emigrant migrations to the Oregon Country, but he also lived to see it declared a territory of the United States.