Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  Young met with Mexican officials at the tiny settlement and learned that it was illegal for foreigners to remove live cattle from the province. Three months were lost shuttling on horseback from the bay to San José, Monterey, and even as far south as Santa Barbara and north to Sonoma before the rules were slackened and Young was permitted to buy 800 head of cattle at three dollars each. The stock was anything but prime; the Mexicans fobbed off wild, skinny animals hazed out of the brush and into corrals.

  Young spent the last of his Willamette Cattle Company startup funds by buying forty horses and hiring five footloose Americans found wandering about Monterey to help the others put the cattle into a semblance of a trail herd. The drive began by skirting the animals around San Francisco Bay on the south toward the San Joaquin River. There were no cowboys in Young’s party, and no one had experience in moving cattle across land, much less water. The terrified animals, already maddened by the flies and mosquitoes infesting the river bottoms, refused to budge from the San Joaquin banks; even when calves were dragged across the river by horse and rope their mothers bawled and dug their hooves into the mud or ran off into the brush. Pens were rigged to contain them but were quickly reduced to rubble as the animals stampeded, and days were devoted to hunting them down and dragging them back to the crossing. Then, when a sizable number were cursed and goaded into the river, they ignored the far shore and swam out in all directions. Seventeen drowned in one such sortie. Finally, Young and his exhausted, exasperated drovers built rafts of bulrushes and with a rope strung across the river ferried the cattle one at a time to the opposite bank.

  Toward the end of August they reached the mountains at the head of the Sacramento valley and on September 12 arrived on the Rogue River (also called Les Coquins and sometimes the Rascal River, after the “rascally,” unpredictable Indians living on its banks) in southern Oregon. This was dangerous country. Not far to the north, on the Umpqua, Jedediah Smith’s trapping party had been attacked by a Kalawatset war party ten years past, and some of Ewing Young’s men had been in fights with Rogue River raiders and had learned to hate the sight of any Indian in the vicinity. Trouble was assured when one drover shot and wounded a native boy shortly after the herd splashed across a shallow river fording. Each day afterward, arrows flew into the cattle camp and gunshots rang out, and on September 18 there was a fleeting massed attack on the drovers that resulted in the wounding of one white man, several cows, and Young’s horse before the Indians were driven off by gunfire.

  The cattle company straggled into Jason Lee’s Willamette Mission grounds in mid-October, nine months after boarding the Loriot and having traveled 700 miles in eighteen weeks from San Francisco Bay, with 600 of the original 800 head of stock still alive, still skinny, and still wild. The drovers were paid off in cattle at the rate of twenty dollars a month, and the remaining stock was prorated among the investors.

  * * *

  William A. Slacum sailed from Alta California on February 10, 1837, arrived in New York that summer, and submitted a report to the Twenty-fifth Congress in December of the year. The document became influential for its strategic recommendations, its lengthy description of Fort Vancouver, and its condemnation of the Hudson’s Bay Company. The document also contained random remarks on the Indians and the physical features of the country; firsthand glimpses into the lives, and problems, of the missionary-settlers of the Willamette valley; and recommendations on what was being called “the Oregon Question,” the issue of extending American hegemony from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific.

  Slacum wrote of the importance of Puget Sound as a deepwater port and sea-lane into the Pacific, writing, “In a military point of view, [Puget Sound] is of the highest importance to the United States.” So important, in fact, that he urged the government to insist upon the 49th parallel as the northern boundary in any settlement with England in order to bring the sound into American control. He added the notion that a large colony of American settlers in Oregon might assist if there should be resistance in obtaining it.

  As to the state of the missionaries and other Americans already in Oregon, Slacum had brought their woes, real and imagined, home with him. “Some steps must be taken by our government,” he wrote, “to protect the settlers and traders, not from the hostility of the Indians, but from a much more formidable enemy … the Hudson’s Bay Company.”

  Slacum’s work was perfectly timed with that of his missionary friend Jason Lee who, within weeks of the agent’s submission to Congress, arrived in New York with his memorial, signed by fifty settlers describing themselves as the nucleus of a great new state of the Union and urging the United States to take formal possession of the lands south of the Columbia River.

  4

  A year after Slacum reached Washington, the six-ship United States Exploring Expedition sailed from Norfolk, Virginia, for the Pacific under the command of navy lieutenant Charles Wilkes, a forty-three-year-old New Yorker. With him were an impressive scientific contingent that included naturalists, botanists, mineralogists, a philologist, and even taxidermists. The expedition was to make extensive scientific, commercial, and strategic studies from the South Seas to Alta California and what his orders called “the territory of the United States on the seaboard,” the Columbia River country.

  The ships made stopovers on the South American coast, at the Paumotus, Samoa, New South Wales, the Antarctic coast, Fiji and the Sandwich Islands, and lingered several weeks in Mexican California before some of them reached the mouth of the Columbia in April 1841.

  Wilkes was an imperious naval officer with scientific pretensions (“His impudence was greater than his talents,” Bancroft said) who had inexplicably been given the command over many senior officers desiring it. He spent several months exploring the country from Puget Sound to the Willamette valley, from Fort Vancouver as far east as the Spaldings’ Lapwai Mission, and was unimpressed by the handful of American settlers he met and dismissed the missionaries as more interested in money than in converting Indians. After he lost one of his vessels, the sloop-of-war Peacock, on a sandbar at the entrance of the Columbia (its crew was rescued by Chinook Indians), he wrote, “Mere description can give little idea of the terrors of the bar of the Columbia; all who have seen it have spoken of the wildness of the scene, and the incessant roar of the waters, representing it as one of the most fearful sights that can possibly meet the eye of the sailor,” and encouraged the occupation of the coast above forty-nine degrees where safer harbors could be found.

  Of the anchorages farther north Wilkes said, “Nothing can exceed the beauty of these waters, and their safety; not a shoal exists within the Straits of Juan de Fuca, Admiralty Inlet, Puget Sound, or Hood’s Canal, that can in any way interrupt the navigation by a seventy-four-gun ship. I venture nothing in saying there is no country in the world that possesses waters equal to these.”

  Later, after he visited Alta California, Wilkes predicted that within a few years that province would probably be separated from Mexico and united with Oregon and “will perhaps form a state that is destined to control the destinies of the Pacific.” This future state, he wrote, “is admirably suited to become a powerful maritime nation, with two of the finest ports in the world—that within the Straits of Juan de Fuca and San Francisco.”

  In October 1841, about a month before he departed Oregon to sail to Japan before returning home, Wilkes met with Hudson’s Bay governor George Simpson at Fort Vancouver. Sir George (he had been knighted that year) learned from Wilkes that he intended recommending to his superiors in Washington that the United States should claim the Oregon Country to the line of 54 degrees, 40 minutes north latitude. Simpson, upon the American’s departure, wrote a memorandum to the British Foreign Office stating that the lands south of the Columbia were not worth fighting for, that the dangers of the Columbia estuary and the “unhealthfulness” of the south augured against British interests in that region. But he urged the government “not to consent to any boundary which would give the United
States any portion of the Territory north of the Columbia River.”

  * * *

  The four-year expedition resulted in an eighteen-volume Narrative under Wilkes’ name, which the North American Review described as “a work of oppressive dimensions … crushed under the weight of irrelevant matter.” Even so, as Bancroft wrote, “Meagre as was the knowledge gathered by this expedition, its influence upon the affairs of the Pacific territory of the United States in their then incipient state was important.”

  In the period of 1838—41, Slacum, Lee, and Wilkes, two spies and a missionary in John McLoughlin’s thinking, were the new reigning Oregon authorities, supplanting if not replacing such old ones as Hall Kelley, who was still writing and bemoaning his fate in Three Rivers, Massachusetts, and Nat Wyeth, still working for the Tudor Ice Company in Boston. Kelley and Wyeth shared platforms occasionally to speak on the glories of the Arcadia of the Pacific Northwest, and their orations and writings, and the work by Slacum and Wilkes, oiled the engine moving the government, and trains of certain citizens seeking a new life, to provide answers to the “Oregon Question.”

  16

  Champoeg

  “… FREE CITIZENS OF OREGON.”

  1

  The annexation petition Jason Lee delivered to Washington anticipated the need for governance in the growing American colony in the Willamette and had influential support in Congress. Massachusetts Representative Caleb Cushing, perhaps inspired by the voices from the wilderness, wrote a combative, twenty-seven-page discourse on the Oregon question for the North American Review in January 1840. The congressman questioned the “blindness and supineness of the Federal Government” toward the Hudson’s Bay Company’s “monopoly of commerce of that wide-spread and noble domain of the United States situated on the Pacific Ocean.” He said that “this foul blot on our national honor” must be wiped out “if there is one spark of true patriotic feeling left in the breasts of Congress or the Federal Administration” and urged that the government would be “impelled forward by the irresistible voice of the people.”

  Senator Linn of Missouri, in 1838, 1841, and annually until his death in 1843, introduced bills to extend American laws to Oregon settlers and to give generous land grants to families who would risk the journey out there. He proposed grants of 640 acres to every male citizen over eighteen years of age, and 160 acres more for each wife and child, this in a time when a subsistence-sized patch of farmland east of the Mississippi cost $200 or more. Linn’s bills were invariably voted down or tabled as too severe an affront to the British, and while the Oregon colonists waited for congressional legislation to guide them, they banded together to make some of their own.

  The lawmaking occasion was the death of Ewing Young, that “excellent old captain” and “audacious pioneer” Bancroft admired, in early February 1841, after he fell into a delirium at his Chehalem Valley homestead. He had long suffered from some undiagnosed ailment, probably peritonitis from a stomach ulcer, and gave up at the age of forty-nine. At the fevered end of his life Young may have been dreaming of how far he had come from his native Tennessee in his allotted half century; of trapping, wandering, and fighting Indians along the Santa Fé Trail and along western rivers from the Gila to the Rogue. To the end he smarted over the accusation that he was a horse thief, still held John McLoughlin and the Hudson’s Bay Company in contempt, and remained proud of the great cattle drive he led out of Mexican California to the Willamette in ’37, his 137-head share of which had grown to 600 when he died. He was a cantankerous, lonely figure to the end, never married, and had few friends, but he managed in less than a decade in the Northwest to become wealthy, at least by Oregon standards, with land holdings, cattle, a sawmill, and a homestead.

  Since Young died intestate, with no heirs or legal claimants,1 the American settlers south of the Columbia decided to gather to liquidate his property and other assets. The process began with a series of public auctions conducted by one of Young’s few friends, Joe Meek, “his splendid figure clad in the ragged habiliments common to the improvident mountain man,” Bancroft said. The auctions netted a healthy $4,000 (Young’s prized, and pristine, two-volume set of Shakespeare, brought $3.50), but the property presented a more complex problem, and to deal with it a call was issued for all Americans in the Oregon Country, and any interested Canadians, to congregate at the Methodist mission on February 17, 1841, to serve as an ad hoc probate court.

  Beginning with the matter of Young’s estate, this meeting and the others following at Champoeg, in a grassy, timbered place on a bend of the Willamette called French Prairie, gave rise to the first series of “wolf meetings” dealing with predators—wolves, coyotes, mountain lions, even bears—killing the settlers’ stock. The attendees also formed a committee to draw up a legal code and constitution, and a miniature provisional government that would press for annexation of the Oregon Country by the United States.

  A few months into this process, Lee and others instrumental in the Champoeg meetings approached the naval explorer Charles Wilkes for advice. If the settlers hoped for his endorsement of their efforts they were sorely disappointed, for Wilkes, who had the highest regard for his own importance, worked hard to dampen their ardor. He suggested that the whole governmental scheme was unnecessary, that it was a poor and uninforceable substitute for a moral code such as that preached by the missionaries. He said it would be wise to wait and not to disturb the Hudson’s Bay people until the United States officially extended its jurisdiction over the Pacific Northwest. He assured the Americans that he intended to recommend this course in his report to his superiors in Washington.

  The settlers pressed on, regardless of Wilkes’ admonitions, and created their constitution, calling it their “First Organic Laws” of the “free citizens of Oregon.” The document contained a religious freedom article; others on habeas corpus, the right of trial by jury; and a prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment and against slavery. A “voluntary subscription” of funds was to take the place of taxation. As to the natives of the country, the signers pledged that the “utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians. Their lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent.” Voting rights were granted to those age twenty-one and older (males only), and those eligible to vote were also eligible for public office. Provisions were made for a legislative body, a supreme court, a treasurer and “recorder”—a clerk to make records of governmental proceedings. Rights of marriage were reserved to male persons age sixteen and older and females fourteen years and older.

  The preamble of the constitution employed the name “Oregon Territory” to describe the lands south of the Columbia even though, when it was signed and adopted by the American enclave on July 5, 1843, there would be a five-year wait before territorial status became federal law. In the meantime, two years after its creation, John McLoughlin, acting on behalf of the Hudson’s Bay Company, recognized the Americans’ provisional government “for the security of the Company’s property and the protection of its rights.”

  2

  In March 1841, a month after Ewing Young died in Oregon, William Henry Harrison became the ninth president of the United States. He was a frail sixty-eight—the last president to have been born before the Revolution. He rode horseback to his inauguration without a coat or hat in cold and stormy weather, spent an hour and forty-five minutes reading his 8,500-word address, and, a month later, at thirty minutes after midnight on Sunday, April 4, died, of “pleurisy fever”—pneumonia—in the White House.

  During the administration of John Tyler, Harrison’s vice president and fellow Virginian, the United States and Great Britain signed a boundary agreement. It fixed the border between Maine and Canadian New Brunswick, added 7,000 miles of disputed land to the United States, and made minor adjustments to the U.S.–Canadian boundary from the Atlantic to the Rocky Mountains. This “settlement” seemed an excellent opportunity to reconcile the Oregon boundary matter, but neither nation was as yet
ready for anything so radical, and left the question unresolved.

  In 1841 the American nation of 17 million citizens was still reeling from the effects of the financial collapse of ’37, the greatest economic depression ever experienced, that followed the end of the Jackson administration. Bad banking policies and feverish speculation in public lands during the Jacksonian era lay at the root of the disaster, but among the hardest hit were those who had no money in banks nor any interest in land other than what they could grow on it. Farmers, who had to scrabble hard to eke out a living in the best of times, were devastated by falling prices for their agricultural products and the surpluses clogging the marketplace. Farms were foreclosed and families rendered homeless and impoverished as surely, and in some instances as fatally, as the cholera epidemic that was creeping westward.

  The anthem of the dispossessed—“There has to be something better out there”—in many cases referred to free land. All the best farmlands east of the Mississippi had been claimed; even in Missouri, with its 400,000 settlers in 1841, an acre of mediocre land was selling at a dollar and a quarter, and a foreclosed dirt-farm family couldn’t afford a tract big enough to subsist on.

  The far West propagandists made an impression on such desperate people in the first half of the decade of the forties, the tub-thumpers ranging from those who had been to the Pacific—trappers, traders, travelers, government agents—to those like Linn of Missouri and Cushing of Massachusetts who had not seen, nor would ever see, the places west of Independence about which they wrote and orated.

  They all talked about free land—that they had in common, and there was no greater lure for westering than free land—and most spoke of a second chance, a new life for those willing to work for it. They also extolled the salubriousness of the climate, the pure air and freedom from the epidemics of typhoid, dysentery, tuberculosis, scarlet fever, yellow fever, malaria, and particularly Asiatic cholera, which in the two decades to follow would kill 30,000 Americans.