Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

From six to seven, breakfast fires were extinguished, tents struck, wagons loaded, teams yoked and brought forward to be attached to their wagons. At seven a bugler signaled the march to begin and “those unready,” Applegate said, “have to take their place at the rear of the column and eat dust.”

  He described how the wagons were divided into platoons of four abreast, each platoon moving forward at the start of each day’s march so that all took a turn in the lead. The pilot (John Gantt) and a squad of men struck out ahead of the lead wagons with picks and shovels to “prepare the trail,” filling in chuckholes and moving boulders, while a party of hunters rode out in search of game.

  Toward midday, Gantt would “measure the ground,” judge the speed of the wagons, and walk his horse along to select a “nooning” place, as close as possible to good graze and water, for the party to rest after five hours of travel.

  At one, the bugler announced the march to resume. The day wore on tediously with the wagons bumping along old buffalo paths and wallows, the oxen lamed by the needles of burned grass stubble, some wagons straggling out of the line for a brief respite from the choking dust.

  With the sun low in the west, Gantt would find a good campsite, whereupon wagons were circled, cookfires lit, and tents pitched. All adult men were formed into companies and divided into watches, with each company standing guard duty every third night.

  Applegate wrote of fiddle music and impromptu dances among “the youths and maidens” before the deepening night called the travelers to their tents and bedrolls to a bone-weary sleep after “a prosperous day” of twenty miles’ progress.

  In July they reached the Platte, always wide, generally shallow and murky, with its notorious shifting beds of quicksand, “an infernal liar,” as some Oregon Trail veteran called it, “hardly able to float a canoe.” The 1843 emigrants had heard the tales of times when eighteen yoke of oxen were required to drag a single wagon across its mud, but they were faced with a high Platte, swirling with currents, that required ferrying by bull boats made of caulked wagon boxes before they could reform and swing along its southern bank through prickly pear, yucca, prairie-dog towns, and dry grass in the hammering heat of the prairie summer.

  Ash Hollow … Courthouse Rock … Chimney Rock … Scotts Bluff … rafting across the Laramie River to the adobe fort, 640 miles out of Independence, 1,400 miles to the Columbia … the awful last fording of the Platte and the alkali plains beyond it that gave the cattle “scours” (diarrhea) until the trail broke toward the clear, cold Sweetwater.

  The days blended into one ceaseless crawl. “Groaning, they fell once more into their dusty line,” David Lavender wrote memorably of the awful daily desuetude of the Oregon Trail. “That was the heroics of the migration: not Indian scares or thrilling buffalo hunts or flooded stream crossings but rather this remorseless, unending, weather-scoured, nerve-rasping plod on and on and on and on, foot by aching foot.”

  At turtle-backed Independence Rock they climbed and painted on its granite face their names and a record of having plodded to this spot:

  The Oregon Co.

  arrived

  July 26, 1843

  The 400-foot slit in the rocks called Devil’s Gate they detoured via a trail to the south; they surveyed the Wind River Range running north beyond their eyesight, left the Sweetwater for a twenty-mile-wide sagebrush plain, crossed South Pass into Oregon Country, and reached Fort Hall on the Portneuf River of Idaho. There, the Hudson’s Bay Company trader in charge, Richard Grant, a burly six-foot-tall Canadian with thirty years’ wilderness experience, said it would be impossible for them to take their wagons on to the Columbia and urged them to turn south to Mexican California with Captain Gantt and Mr. Chiles. But the Oregon people had been hearing the wagon warning since gathering at Elm Grove and were assured, again, by Dr. Whitman that they had the muscle of hundreds of men to push the wagons on.

  At Fort Hall, John Gantt, having fulfilled his contract, and Joe Chiles collected their partners and wagons laden with grain-mill equipment and departed toward the Humboldt River, the Sierra Nevada, and California. Gantt had done good work and was much respected by his 875 wards. Nesmith spoke of him as “our respected pilot,” and Jesse Applegate wrote that the captain “has spent his life on the verge of civilization” and had been chosen to lead the 1843 caravan “from his knowledge of the savage and his experience in travel through the roadless wastes.”2

  The Oregonians took up a collection and offered Marcus Whitman $400 if he would guide them to the Columbia and to this he readily agreed, and no doubt would have done so without the welcome offer of cash. He led the train down the Snake to Salmon Falls and across the sage plains to Fort Boisé, arriving there on September 20, 1843. After a brief rest he guided the wagons on to the Grand Ronde valley on October 1, and crossed the Blue Mountains in mounting snowstorms to camp, on October 10, within three miles of Waiilatpu.

  The Applegate brothers left their cattle at Fort Walla Walla; whipsawed driftwood and timber into rafts; climbed into dugouts, canoes, and bateaux; floated to the Celilo Falls; and portaged across to The Dalles. During the harrowing trip through the rapids Jesse and Lindsey Applegate both lost ten-year-old sons to drowning, and Charles Applegate’s son was crippled when a boat overturned in the current.

  In all, of the approximately 875 men, women, and children of the Great Migration caravan headed for Oregon, sixteen died en route to the Willamette.

  3

  In 1844, three new groups of Oregon-bound emigrants formed up on the Missouri frontier, between 700 and 800 people with 150 wagons and 1,500 head of cattle; in 1845, the number westering was about 3,000, and there were fewer in 1846 because of the threats of war against both England and Mexico. The figure rose in 1847, to 4,500 emigrants.

  Among the 1845 emigrants was a high-domed, self-styled “intelligent farmer” named Joel Palmer. Born in Canada in 1810 of Quaker parents, he had lived in Pennsylvania before settling in Laurel, Indiana, where he had some success as a canal contractor and farmer. He served a term in the state legislature, but after reading up on the Oregon boundary dispute decided to try his hand at something new in a new place. He left his wife and children behind in Laurel “with a truly melancholy heart” and took a steamer to Independence “with a view of satisfying myself whether Oregon’s advantages were sufficient to make it my future home.”

  He had a magnetic personality and a politician’s polish and employed both in getting elected captain of a twenty-five-wagon train that reached Fort Laramie on June 24. There his party made a layover to mend wagons and harness, shoe animals, write letters, and replenish supplies at the outrageous prices then prevalent and going up by the day—fifteen dollars for a hundredweight of flour, a dollar for two cups of sugar or coffee beans. Palmer, a meticulous chronicler of the 1845 migration, recorded counting 145 wagons in four separate trains camped within a few miles of each other on the Platte.

  He had an interest in Indians, too, and wanted to know what they had to say of the whites coming into their country in such rising numbers. With the blessing of the people of his party and after enlisting an interpreter, he arranged a banquet for the hundred or so Oglalas camped near the fort on the bank of the Laramie River. Each emigrant family provided two dishes of food and the feast was arranged on buffalo robes at the edge of the village. The Indians seated themselves in two concentric semicircles, the pioneers making up a single one opposite. The Oglala chief was asked to speak and did so, bluntly: “This country belongs to the red man but his white brethren travels through, shooting the game and scaring it away. Thus the Indian loses all that he depends upon to support his wives and children. The children of the red man cry out for food, but there is no food.” He asked for guns to kill game like the white man since the game that survived the whites’ incursions were now too skittish for bows and arrows.

  Palmer later wrote, “As it devolved upon me to play the part of the white chief, I told my red brethren that we were journeying to the great waters of the
west. Our great father owned a large country there and we were going to settle upon it. For this purpose we brought with us our wives and little ones. We traveled as friends, not as enemies.” He said he and his companions were farmers and had no guns to trade. He urged the Oglalas to feast on the meat, rice mush, cakes, bread, and coffee spread out before them. The eating went well; Palmer’s words, which would be repeated countless times, with countless variations, in the years ahead, often with howitzer and rocket displays and peace pipe sharing, were unsatisfactory to the “red brethren.”

  On November 1, 1845, after 200 days on the Oregon Trail, the Palmer train reached Oregon City. The intelligent farmer recalled in his Journal of Travels Over the Rocky Mountains that the town had among its civilized establishments “a neat Methodist church, a splendid Catholic chapel, two grist mills, two sawmills, four stores, two taverns, one hatter, one tannery, three tailor shops, two cabinet makers, two silversmiths, one cooper, two blacksmiths, one physician, three lawyers, one printing office, and a good brick yard.”

  Palmer returned to Indiana in 1846, satisfied that Oregon indeed had sufficient advantages to make a home, collected his family, and returned. Among his accomplishments as an Oregon pioneer, he became superintendent of Indian Affairs where he was directed to prevent the Cayuse and Nez Percé tribes from joining forces for hostile purposes. Bancroft said wryly that he “bent his enormous energy and personal magnetism to the difficult task of obtaining all their lands from the Indians without creating enough dissatisfaction among them to cause a war.” Even so, Palmer was genuinely sympathetic toward the Indians and respectful of their rights to the point that he came under severe censure by white Oregonians.

  He negotiated treaties with the Umpquas, Shastas, Walla Wallas, Cayuse, and Nez Percé, and is said to have diligently sought and found good reservation lands for the dispossessed tribes. Bancroft, conceding that Palmer made “some errors,” judged his efforts on the whole to be “humane and just.” His faults, the historian said, “were those of an over-sanguine man, driven somewhat by public clamor, and eager to accomplish his work in the shortest time.… He succeeded in his undertaking of removing to the border of the Willamette Valley about 4,000 Indians, [and] for his honesty and eminent services, he is entitled to the respect and gratitude of all good men.”

  Palmer was removed from office in 1857 because of white impatience with his solicitude toward his Indian charges. After his discharge, he opened a route to the British Columbia gold fields, engaged in many business enterprises, and served as a state representative and state senator. He died at Dayton, a town he founded southwest of Oregon City, in June 1881.

  21

  The Parallel

  “FIFTY-FOUR FORTY OR FIGHT!”

  1

  The man who would at last answer the Oregon question, James Knox Polk, came to the presidency by a fluke, announced early that he would serve but a single term, set forth a number of goals for his administration, and left office after accomplishing all of them, something remarked on 100 years later by Harry S. Truman: “James K. Polk, a great president; said what he intended to do and did it.”

  Born on the family farm in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, in 1795 and the eldest of ten children of a prosperous planter, Polk came to Tennessee with his family in 1806 and received a university education in classical studies—Latin, Greek, mathematics, philosophy—as well as law. He served in the Tennessee legislature, was admitted to the state bar in 1825, and began his rise in national politics that year as a congressman from Tennessee and a staunch supporter of Andrew Jackson, with whom he had a close personal friendship. Polk served as Old Hickory’s floor leader in the House of Representatives, and became Speaker in 1835, serving two years in the office before returning to Tennessee to campaign for, and win, the governorship.

  “Young Hickory,” as his adherents called him, actually had none of Jackson’s charisma, daring, physical stature, or stamina, but the two men shared other characteristics: a combative nature, a thin skin, an obduracy, and a passion for politics.

  Polk was short, slender, high-browed, and thin-lipped, with deep-set gray eyes, his unruly graying hair brushed behind his ears. He had a dignified carriage and was always scrupulously dressed. He suffered ill health most of his life, a delicacy worsened by living in Washington amid the Potomac swamps and their disease-laden miasmas, and he tired easily. He was exceedingly ambitious, and for the most part well liked, although he had few close friends and only one confidante, his wife, Sara Childress Polk, a lively and charming adjunct to her dour mate.

  Many, even Polk’s admirers, regarded him as historian Bernard De Voto did: “rigid, narrow, obstinate … pompous, suspicious, and secretive.” Abraham Lincoln, in his single term in the House of Representatives, said in 1848 that Polk “is a bewildered, confounded, and miserably perplexed man.” But others saw beneath his granitic exterior and humorlessness a thoroughly honest and incorruptible man, a better man than Jackson in many respects, and while “in no sense a man of brilliant parts,” as Woodrow Wilson would say of him, he was “a sturdy, upright, straightforward party man.”

  Polk sprang from party-workhorse obscurity to national prominence at the 1844 Democratic Party convention. What happened in the Odd Fellows’ Hall in Baltimore between May 27 and 30 that year surprised the most acute prognosticators among the party faithful.

  The frontrunner nominee of the Democrats was Martin Van Buren of Kinderhook, New York, who had served as Jackson’s secretary of state and vice president and had succeeded Old Hickory as president in 1836, serving one term. As expected, he won a majority in the first ballot voting in Baltimore. But he failed to win the necessary two-thirds majority of the delegate votes for the nomination, and after the first ballot other party hopefuls—Lewis Cass of Michigan, Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky, and James Buchanan of Pennsylvania—eroded the Van Buren margin. The former president’s cause was doomed by his opposition to one of the party platform’s strongest planks, the annexation of Texas, at a time when the American people (or so said their representatives in Washington) were ardently “expansionist,” lusting after Texas, California, Oregon, and whatever else was occupied by foreigners west of the Mississippi. Van Buren had opposed Texas annexation, over the slavery issue, when he was president, alienating southern Democrats, the heart of Jackson’s party, and continued to oppose the proposition in 1844 just as the southerners continued to oppose him.

  Polk stayed home in Nashville during the Baltimore convention. He had been mentioned as potential vice presidential timber for whoever was selected to head the ticket, but he had no inkling that he might be placed in nomination. His name appeared on the eighth ballot and he won the nomination, with 233 votes, on the ninth, becoming the first “dark horse” in American political history.

  He accepted by letter, thanking Jackson for his endorsement and the convention delegates for their confidence in him. He pledged a one-term presidency (which he believed was implicit in Jacksonian ideology, although Jackson served two terms) and set out to win the general election.

  Polk’s Whig opponent, Henry Clay of Kentucky, who had thrice before been a presidential candidate and had been thrice rejected, now had to endure a final, failed, hurrah. He sought to appease all factions of his party by equivocating on the Texas and Oregon questions while Polk advocated both the annexation of Texas and the assertion of American “rights” to the “whole of Oregon,” from the 42nd parallel, the border with Mexican California, and the 54th, considerably north of Edmonton, Canada, and taking in all of Vancouver Island.

  Polk narrowly won the election, becoming the eleventh, and at age forty-nine, the youngest, president, carrying fifteen states to Clay’s eleven (including Polk and Jackson’s Tennessee), and the popular vote by 37,000 votes out of the 1.7 million cast.

  He had a remarkably clear and deceptively simple vision of what he wanted to accomplish as president: revision of the protective tariff, acquisition of California, and settling the Oregon ques
tion. In foreign affairs he hoped to avoid war, but in his inaugural address on March 4, 1845, he pugnaciously embraced the Monroe Doctrine: “The people of this continent alone have the right to decide their own destiny.… No future European colony or dominion shall with our consent be planted or established on any part of the North American continent.” And he reasserted American rights to Oregon in his first annual message to Congress the following December, when he recommended that measures be taken to protect American claims to the “whole of Oregon” and proposed abrogation of the joint occupation agreement.

  Polk’s enduring distrust of the British he confided in his diary in this period: “The only way to treat John Bull,” he wrote, “was to look him straight in the eye.”

  2

  Before 1845, Americans had no name for the precept they believed was inscribed on some heavenly scroll: that the United States (twenty-six of them in Polk’s era)—that is the white portion of its population of 20 million—was destined by God’s decree to occupy the continent.

  The idea, an article of faith dating from the dawn of civilization when one state desired the territory of another and found a providential inspiration in taking it, received a memorable designation four months after James K. Polk took office.

  In the July–August 1845 issue of the New York–based United States Magazine and Democratic Review, lawyer-editor John Louis O’Sullivan wrote a lengthy editorial favoring the annexation of Texas. This joining to the Union, he wrote, would serve as a warning against foreign interference and would have the effect of “checking the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”

  What the editor wrote of Texas and California applied to Oregon as well: “The Anglo-Saxon foot is already on its borders. Already the advance guard of the irresistible army of the Anglo-Saxon emigration has begun to pour down upon it, armed with the plough and the rifle,” and this admirably matched the new president’s pronouncement that “our title to the whole of Oregon is clear and unquestionable.”