Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  A few months after Polk’s inaugural, Richard Pakenham, the British minister in Washington, was instructed to reopen negotiations of the Oregon question. He said his government was willing to accept the 49th parallel boundary but with some modifications of the line as it reached the sea and retention of rights to navigate the Columbia.

  On September 12, 1845, Polk replied through his ineffectual secretary of state, James Buchanan (who, Bernard De Voto said, “had the greatest possible shrewdness but no backbone whatever”), proposing extending the 49th with all of Vancouver Island ceded to the British, but he refused to offer use of the Columbia.

  Polk could not resist writing into the document a statement that the United States was making the concession even though its claims to all of Oregon were patently valid.

  Pakenham rejected the offer without submitting it to his government and Polk, angered by this, broke off the talks.

  In December, in his first message to Congress, the president placed the failure of the negotiations entirely on Britain, stating that the United States had acted in “a spirit of liberal concession” and “will be relieved of all responsibilities which may follow the failure to settle the controversy.” He referred to the Monroe Doctrine, asked Congress to provide armed escorts for wagon trains heading for Oregon, and said it would be desirable to serve England a one-year notice that the joint occupancy agreement would be terminated.

  Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, the most voluble expansionist in Congress and a tireless promoter of an all-American Oregon, originally supported compromising with Britain on the boundary issue, but after the failure of the opening parley he suggested that the government muster “thirty or forty thousand American rifles beyond the Rocky Mountains that will be our effective negotiator.” And in the January 1846 issue of the news magazine Niles’ Register, the editorial titled “Are We to Have Peace or War?” had to do not with war with Mexico but war with England, which the editor believed the more likely of the two; he also thought that an Anglo-American war would be precipitated by the Oregon boundary question.

  In London the American president’s bellicose language distressed the Peel ministry, which was juggling problems ranging from the potato famine in Ireland to colonial campaigns in New Zealand and India. Peel’s foreign secretary, Lord Aberdeen, long a proponent of compromise, told the American minister in London that “the possibility of a rupture with the United States” had to be “considered.”

  On April 16, 1846, a resolution was introduced in the Senate to “abrogate the convention of 1827” and give notice to the British government that the United States would terminate the Oregon joint occupancy agreement.

  Benton of Missouri filibustered on behalf of the measure for three days; it passed both houses, the president signed it, and on April 28 he sent the notice by special packet to the sovereign of Great Britain.

  During these difficult days fortuitous news arrived in London that the Hudson’s Bay Company had moved its main depot from the Columbia to Fort Victoria on Vancouver Island. Now Lord Aberdeen and other moderates in the government were able to counter the argument among their colleagues in Parliament that the Columbia River was indispensable, not only for Hudson’s Bay trade but for the western provinces of Canada. Aberdeen quietly informed the American secretary of state that the 49th parallel was acceptable to England. The memorandum asked only that when the line reached saltwater it would swing through the main channel of the Strait of Georgia to Juan de Fuca Strait and westward to the Pacific.

  The Oregon treaty, signed by both nations on June 15, 1846, recognized the 49th parallel as the international boundary from the Rocky Mountains to the middle of the channel between Vancouver Island and the mainland, thence along a line running southward through Juan de Fuca Strait to the Pacific. Free navigation of the channel and strait by both signatories was stipulated.

  Senator Benton made a speech upon the treaty ratification, pointing out that the 49th parallel had been tendered to Britain for nearly forty years; by Jefferson in 1807, Monroe in 1818 and 1824, Adams in 1826, Tyler in 1842, and Polk in 1845.

  * * *

  When news of the settlement reached the Columbia on November 12, 1846, not all the Americans there greeted it with approval. Some expressed dismay that Washington had retreated from its “All of Oregon,” “Fifty-Four Forty or Fight!” battle stance; others pointed to the few American farms located near Hudson’s Bay posts north of Forty-nine, lands now in British control.

  To these malcontents H. H. Bancroft devoted one of his finest polemics. “Man is a preposterous pig,” he wrote, “probably the greediest animal that crawls upon this planet.” He continued:

  Here were fertile lands and temperate airs; meadows, forest, and mountains; bright rivers and broad ocean seaboard, enough of earth for half a dozen empires; and all for nothing—all stolen from the savages and never yet a struggle, never yet a dollar in return, only fevers, syphilis, and the like by way of compensation; and yet these colonial representatives of the great American nation grudge their brethren, but little later than themselves from Great Britain, a few squares of land round the posts which they had built and occupied for so long …

  Instead of falling on their knees for the blessings bestowed upon them, he said, “they fell to cursing; they cursed the British, and particularly President Polk, for failing to carry out his policy avowed before election.” They had believed in that promise, had painted “54-40” on their wagon covers, “and poverty-stricken and piggish, had wended their way to the Pacific in the faith that they were helping to accomplish this high destiny for the United States, this broad destiny for themselves.”

  The Americans had won five degrees of latitude, he said, yet, preposterous pigs that they were, wanted more.

  But since they were not to get more, the colonists of the Willamette valley turned their energies toward increasing their numbers, petitioning for territorial status and what the most ambitious thought was an eventuality: statehood.

  Increasing the population of the Oregon Country by encouraging and aiding new emigration was not a point of argument, but granting territorial status proved to be bitterly disputatious. The provisional government set up by Oregon settlers in 1843 had made a point of excluding slavery in the region, and when a similar ban was included in the Oregon territorial bill in 1846, pro-slavery forces in Congress defeated it, which they did again in 1847, despite support of the legislation by President Polk and Senator Benton.

  The idea of instant post–boundary settlement statehood was regarded as even more of a distant dream. Even had slavery not been an issue, granting statehood to an unmapped wilderness as remote from civilization as Timbuktu seemed laughable. The matter of distance had been elaborately, amusingly, and indelibly expounded upon as far back as an 1825 Senate debate in which Senator Mahlon Dickerson of New Jersey (subsequently secretary of the navy in the Jackson and Van Buren administrations) rose with some statistics he had worked out for his colleagues.

  “The whole distance from Washington to the mouth of the Columbia River is 4,650 miles,” he said. “The distance, therefore, that a member of Congress of this ‘state of Oregon’ would be obliged to travel in coming to the seat of government and returning home, would be 9,300 miles. This at a rate of eight dollars for every twenty miles, would make his traveling expenses amount to $3,720.” He said that at the rate members of Congress travel according to law, twenty miles per day, “it would require, to come to the seat of government from Oregon and return, 465 days.… But if he should travel at the rate of thirty miles per day, it would require 306 days. Allow for [rest on] Sundays it would amount to 350 days. This would allow the member a fortnight to rest himself at Washington, before he should commence his journey home.”

  The senator said, “It would be more expeditious, however, to come by water round Cape Horn, or to pass through Behring’s Strait round the north coast of this continent to Baffin’s Bay, thence through Davis’ Straits to the Atlantic, and so on to Was
hington. It is true, this passage is not yet discovered, except upon our maps; but it will be as soon as Oregon shall be a state.”

  Actually, the impatient Oregonians did not have to wait for discovery of the west-to-east Northwest Passage before their new home was declared a territory of the United States. In fact, they had less than two years to wait.

  22

  The Bostonian

  “GREAT CHANGES ARE AT HAND.…”

  1

  On June 15, 1846, the day the United States and Great Britain signed the Oregon boundary treaty, Francis Parkman rode into Fort Laramie on the North Platte below the mouth of Laramie Creek. He had departed Boston early in April on a gentlemanly “Summer’s Journey Out of Bounds” to observe the Indians of the Plains and perhaps write something about them before their way of life disappeared, a casualty of the advent of the white man. In truth, he did not know precisely what he was doing on the Oregon Trail or what he would do when he returned. He was twenty-three and Harvard educated, and had the luxury of a wealthy bachelor’s aimlessness.

  Parkman had been a familiar, respected name in Massachusetts for a century or more when Francis was born on Boston’s Beacon Hill in 1823. His grandfather had risen to become one of the city’s wealthiest merchants; his father, an 1806 Harvard graduate, served as minister of the New North Church for thirty-six years; his mother was Caroline Hall of Medford and her father owned a farm bordering 3,000 acres of timberland known as the Middlesex Fells where young “Frank” hunted, trapped, and hiked.

  At age twelve Parkman attended private school in Medford and demonstrated an aptitude for composition and literature; in 1840 he entered Harvard, earned a Phi Beta Kappa key, became a popular clubman, and fell in love with a girl from Keene, New Hampshire, who turned down his entreaties and married another.

  He tramped alone in the Berkshires and made many excursions into the mountains and forests of New England, Montreal, and Québec; became adept at woodcraft; sharpened his rifle and horsemanship skills. “I was haunted with wilderness images day and night,” he later wrote.

  During his undergraduate work at Harvard and as a law student later, his health faltered. He began having heart palpitations, migraine headaches, swellings in his joints, insomnia, weakening eyesight, and the general diagnostical grab bag labeled “nervousness.” His friends attributed the problems to his “Spartan life,” his incessant hiking, canoeing, and camping in the back country of northern New England, sleeping under the stars in wet and cold weather, wading through frozen streams, and pushing himself to exhaustion in the college gymnasium.

  In his senior year at Harvard Parkman suffered a physical collapse and since he abhorred idleness, he convalesced by sailing for Europe, then part of the education of every wealthy gentleman, well or ill. He reached Gibraltar on a barkentine out of Boston loaded with fruit, traveled on to Sicily and wandered for weeks in the island’s western wilds, spent time in a Passionist Fathers retreat in Rome in hopes of gaining some insights into Catholicism, and tramped about Switzerland, France, and England.

  He returned to Cambridge in June 1844 and received his degree in August, then spent eighteen more months studying law, earning his jurisprudence degree in January 1846. He never applied for admittance to the bar and seems to have given little thought to actually practicing in the profession. History and literature (they were attached in Parkman’s time, great histories rising to great literature) had taken command of his imagination.

  He did not have to earn a living, but since it would have been unthinkable for a Parkman not to do something constructive with his life, he began thinking of combining his literary interests with his love of the outdoors. He began by publishing articles on his trips to New Hampshire in Knickerbocker Magazine in New York, something his family and friends believed was more a harmless hobby than anything leading to a profession, but soon he cast about for a bigger project. When he was eighteen and at Harvard, he had made an exploration into the northern New Hampshire woods and out of the experience felt an inspiration to write a history of the last French war in America and the conquest of Canada. That great project now returned to mind: Since he had conceived a great admiration for Pontiac, the Ottawa chief who conspired against the British, perhaps he could begin a history of the French and Indian Wars with a scholarly book on Pontiac’s rebellion of 1763. To do so he would have to visit many libraries, read original documents, and make voluminous notes, but he had strained his eyes studying law and his physician warned him that he must take a respite from reading and research. What to do until he could resume scholarship?

  He was considering his options when a cousin, one with the perfect Bostonian name of Quincy Adams Shaw, came visiting and said he was preparing to depart for the Rocky Mountains on a hunting expedition and would Frank like to come along?

  Parkman’s darkening days suddenly brightened. The seasoned if somewhat insular outdoorsman had been handed the opportunity to travel west of the Mississippi with a trusted and lively companion for a season among the savages such as Herman Melville—whose first novel, Typee, was published in 1846—had experienced in the South Seas. Here was a chance to witness Indian life firsthand. He realized that the Plains natives differed markedly from the forest tribes of the Eastern Seaboard, but even the differences could be important grist for preparation of the book he intended to title The Conspiracy of Pontiac and the Indian War after the Conquest of Canada.

  Parkman visited Nathaniel Wyeth of Cambridge, Oregon Trail pioneer and one-time bourgeois at Fort Hall, then bid his parents and friends farewell, and took a riverboat down the Ohio to Saint Louis, where on April 28, 1846, he and Shaw set out up the Missouri by riverboat to Westport Landing.

  The things he saw with his tired eyes, no matter how lovely or awful, invigorated him and soothed, if not cured, whatever ailed him, stimulating his ability to remember and describe. Everything interested him, especially the people—the emigrant farmers, the traders, soldiers, and frontiersmen—he squinted at and who peered back at the handsome, long-nosed Bostonian with the shock of brown hair curling over his ears and collar who wanted nothing more than to learn from them and jot things in his notebooks.

  At Westport, Parkman and Shaw completed outfitting for their journey and hired as guide Henry Chatillon, an intelligent, illiterate plainsman, “a natural gentleman,” Parkman said, who had spent two decades trapping and hunting in the Rockies and, as the Bostonian delightedly learned, was married to the daughter of Bull Bear, principal chief among the Oglala Sioux. The party was completed by the hiring of a good-natured Canadian named Deslauriers to serve as cook, wagon driver, mule skinner, and general factotum.

  As they collected their horses and supplies to move out on the Trail, Parkman heard the pilots shouting at the emigrant men to get their wives, children, dogs, horses, chickens, cow herds, oxen, mules, and wagons ready to begin moving west by daybreak; watched trade wagon convoys coming in from the Santa Fé Trail; listened to the rumors of war with Mexico. One thing about Westport that concerned him more than the war talk: “Whiskey,” he wrote, “circulates more freely in Westport than is altogether safe in a place where every man carries a loaded pistol in his pocket.”

  Parkman and Shaw decided to avoid traveling with an emigrant train, too slow for their purposes, but did find themselves linking up with a party led by Captain Bill Chandler, an Irishman retired from Her Majesty’s Army, out to see the West with a vast amount of superfluous baggage and a variety of arms to kill the West’s animal life. With the captain were his brother Jack; three engagés hired as bearers, muleteers, and general handymen; and a fop named Romaine, said to be a Templar and graduate of Trinity College. This man, Bernard De Voto said, was “a faintly literary gentleman who bossed everything, knew nothing, was inept in all things, and expressed his type at the very beginning by leading them off the trail for a full week.”

  The ten men made their first stopover at Fort Leavenworth and there met General Stephen Watts Kearny of the First Dragoons Regimen
t, who was just then gathering his troops for the long march to Bent’s Fort, Santa Fé, and Alta California.

  2

  For one setting out with only a vague idea of linking the Plains tribes with future research on Pontiac of the Ottawa, there was a weird precision in Francis Parkman’s plans. Although he was trained for law, history had a hold on him, and it swirled in the wake of the steamer he took down the Ohio to the Mississippi and in the tracks of the horses he rode to Fort Laramie. Indeed, in the six weeks he took to reach that out-of-bounds place on the Laramie River, he quite literally rode into history, then made some of it himself.

  This was the summer of 1846 and, only a month after the Bostonian had departed the salons, soirées, eligible ladies, and intellectual causeries of Boston and Cambridge society, a leathery, tobacco-chewing American general named Zachary Taylor fought and won two battles against a Mexican army. These occurred on May 7 and May 9 among the cactus and chaparral at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma, places nobody could find on a map but that belated newspaper reports said were “just north of the Rio Grande,” and they took place a week before the United States and Mexico were officially at war.