Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  Parkman may have been fuming, but George Putnam’s publishing firm knew what would boost sales.

  At the time the book appeared in March 1849, over a year had passed since the first silt-like gold and small nuggets had been found in the race of a sawmill owned by John Augustus Sutter on the south fork of the American River in northern California. For a time the discovery was kept localized, but word of it inevitably spread to San Francisco, then shot eastward.

  At the uppermost estimate, there had been 1,000 emigrants in the “Great Migration” of ’43; 4,000 in 1844 and 5,000 in 1845, a very small trickle of these rolling south at Fort Bridger or Fort Hall to the California Trail. There had been some slight falling off in the emigrant numbers during the Mexican War years, but by 1849, 25,000 to 30,000 people, including 1,000 children, 2,000 women, and 60,000 animals, were clogging the Oregon Trail between South Pass and Fort Bridger, most of them bound for the goldfields—and this represented only about a third of those being somewhat ambitiously called “argonauts.” The majority chose alternate routes: southwestern trails such as that followed by Colonel Kearny in his march from Santa Fé to Los Angeles; deadly desert paths across Mexico; isthmian crossing of the fever swamps of Panama and Nicaragua (six weeks from New York to San Francisco and in 1849, $400–$500 per person); and the old Cape Horn sea route. Fully 16,000 people reached San Francisco by sea in 1849, and 12,000 in 1850. The average voyage from eastern ports or New Orleans via Cape Horn took 200 days, and the cheapest ticket cost $200.

  The overland argonauts followed the traditions of their Oregonian predecessors. They were struck by a cholera epidemic in western Missouri that killed 1,000 of them before they got a fair start, and they overloaded their wagons. They learned what was essential and what was not, heaved overside expensive gold-washing machines sold to them by fast-talking entrepreneurs in Saint Louis and Independence, plus weighty tools, furniture, and similar impediments. Even wagons, some of them perfectly workable, were left behind in the rush to get to California and dip gold out of the streams and chip it off the mountains. Wagons and oxen were traded for pack animals as hopeful miners threw together a few belongings and supplies and made up a pack train or rode on across the prairies with a single horse or mule for company.

  Along the south bank of the Platte the Trail was strewn with wagon hulks, the boxes, wheel-spokes and anything burnable broken up for firewood, and a detritus of other abandonments—piles of rancid bacon, yokes and horse collars, wheelbarrows, household goods, rusting machinery—as the Forty-niners fled toward their end of the rainbow.

  Beyond South Pass, more than half of the gold seekers followed the well-traveled Oregon Trail routes that led south to Fort Bridger, or north to Fort Hall, from these points aiming toward the Humbolt River valley. Some struck due west across the sagey wastes between South Pass and the Green River, and others, desperately short of supplies, followed the Mormon Trail to Salt Lake City. There they swapped their bags of beans, rice, and oats for fresh vegetables and meat, and traded their wagons and oxen (at a common rate of six trail-worn and skinny animals for two fresh and fat ones). They then proceeded around the rim of the Salt Lake to trudge across the desert wastelands that would take them to the Humboldt, the place where the California trails, detours, and cutoffs merged.

  When the winter of ’49 closed in, there were 10,000 argonauts at the foot of, or struggling across, the Sierra Nevada passes, a potential Donner party of such staggering proportions that $100,000 was appropriated for the army in California to mount rescue and relief work. In the end, miraculously, few lives were lost.

  By 1850, the California-bound overlanders, as well as the dwindling number trekking to Oregon, were traveling light, depending upon the Trail’s booming trading posts between western Missouri and the Snake or Truckee valleys for outfitting. These trailside emporia ranged from tented or brush-and-board gambling hells to hammered-up plank buildings with windows and large-lettered signs selling food, whiskey, draft and pack animals, placer gold mining equipment, repair and even mail services.

  The Oregon and California Trail traveler of 1850 also found ferries in operation, with prices escalating from forty cents each for wagons crossing the Sweetwater to sixteen dollars to cross the Green.

  By then there were even bridges going up across the Platte, the Laramie, the Bear, and the Portneuf below Fort Hall, although there were few similar luxuries for the Oregon-bound between Hall and the Willamette valley. Fort Boisé and Fort Walla Walla remained virtually unchanged since the days when the Hudson’s Bay Company ruled the Oregon Country.

  In 1850, the third year of California gold, the number of Oregon Trail travelers increased to 55,000. (At Fort Laramie, now an army post, a tally was made of the people, wagons, and livestock passing through that year: 7,472 mules; 30,616 oxen; 22,742 horses; 5,270 cows; 8,998 wagons.) Of that crush of 55,000, only about 400 were headed to Oregon.

  Even Oregonians were going to California in the gold rush years, thousands of them, and only half returned. During the trial of the Whitman massacre defendants, Governor Joseph Lane, mysteriously absent, was widely rumored to be at his gold diggings on California’s Tuolumne River.

  California gold ended Oregon’s supremacy as the Ultima Thule of westward emigration and transformed, for the rest of its history, the White Man’s Great Medicine Road. The Oregon Trail served for seven or eight years as the main overland thoroughfare in the 300-year journey to the Pacific Northwest; after 1848 it became the trail that intersected the trail to California.

  * * *

  In 1890, an assemblage of pioneers, children and grandchildren of pioneers met in Portland. The group debated a resolution that would extend membership in the organization to those who arrived in Oregon (or Washington, which gained territorial status in 1853, statehood in 1889) on or before February 14, 1859, the date of Oregon statehood. The old bylaws had established January 1, 1855, as the terminal date for those who could be considered “pioneers.”

  One of the 1849 pioneers present at the meeting drew a distinction between the overlanders and those arriving on shipboard:

  The word pioneer meant foot-soldier, foot-traveler; it properly represents the condition of those who came to this country as foot-travelers, and that word prepares the way.… I am very much opposed to extending the time beyond 1854. A pioneer is not a pioneer when he can get on a steamship in the port of New York, pay his passage, get three good meals a day, get a berth to sleep in at night, and be landed here with all his bag and baggage, without effort on his part; he is not a pioneer in any sense of the word.

  Not until 1894, at the twenty-second annual reunion of the pioneers association, was the amendment passed extending the date to 1859.

  * * *

  By 1869, when the transcontinental railroad was completed, something on the order of 400,000 men, women, and children had made the 2,000-mile journey from the Missouri frontier to the Pacific Coast on the Oregon Trail and fulfilled the ambition of presidents from Thomas Jefferson to James K. Polk, and visionaries from Hall Jackson Kelley to Jesse Applegate, who saw the United States stretching “from sea to shining sea.”

  NOTES

  8. To the Tetons

    1  He recovered enough to join the North West Company’s service but seems never to have conquered his infirmities and died, “infirm of body,” in a defile in the Salmon River Mountains of Idaho in February 1820. One of his trapper companions wrote, “He appeared to die the good death of a good man.”

    2  In January 1814, all three were killed by Shoshonis at the mouth of the Boisé River, together with the Irishman John Reed (who had lost the Astor dispatch box at The Dalles rapids) and Pierre Dorion, the liquor-loving interpreter with Wilson Hunt’s party. The only survivors of the massacre were Dorion’s Indian wife, Marguerite, and their two children. Marguerite married thrice again and died in 1850, at age eighty, at her home on the Willamette River.

  9. South Pass

    1  And the lives
of sixty-one men, according to Alexander Ross, who listed eight men lost “on the bar” of the Columbia, five in Hunt’s overland expedition, twenty-seven on the Tonquin, eight on the Lark, and another thirteen in miscellaneous mishaps between Astoria and the Snake River country.

  10. Fort Vancouver

    1  Nor did Gardner make a record of the encounter. Nothing is known about him except that in 1831 he was killed by Arikaras on the Yellowstone River.

  11. Captain Smith

    1  However, Oregon historian Horace S. Lyman states, “Thomas McKay was the military leader of these expeditions, and was naturally disposed to treat the Indians with severity, saying he would revenge his father (Alexander McKay, killed in the Tonquin massacre) upon the red race—although perhaps expressing more ferocity in his language than he actually felt, as he is not known to have killed Indians wantonly or without orders.”

  13. The Iceman

    1  Later her remains were reinterred in the mission cemetery in Salem, where a marker told her story: “Beneath this sod, the first ever broken in Oregon for the reception of a white mother and child, lie buried the remains of Anne Maria Pitman, wife of Rev. Jason Lee, and infant son. She sailed from New York in July 1836, landed in Oregon June 1837, was married in July 1837, and died June 26, 1838, in full enjoyment of that love which constrained her to leave all for Christ and heathen souls. So we have left all, and followed Thee; what shall we have therefore.”

  14. The Macedonian Cry

    1  The reference is apparently to the passages in Acts 16, in which the Apostle Paul has a vision of a Macedonian coming in the night asking for prayer and saying, “Come over into Macedonia, and help us.” In biblical times, Macedonia, a land often visited by Paul, lay north of Greece in the Balkans and had been ruled, three centuries before Christ, by Philip II, and later by his son, Alexander the Great.

  15. Spies

    1  Actually, there were so few head to begin with that they went unslaughtered in order to multiply, and McLoughlin refused to sell them not only to Americans but to anyone, including the British. This simple explanation did not prevent the cattle issue from becoming one of the many bones of contention between the missionary-settlers and Hudson’s Bay agents.

  16. Champoeg

    1  At least until 1854 when a young man named Joaquín Young came out to Oregon from Taos, New Mexico, with papers seeming to prove that he was the son of Ewing Young and María Josefa Tafoya of Taos. Kit Carson was among those who provided paper testimony on the authenticity of the young man’s parentage, and others swore that Ewing Young spoke of having a son in New Mexico. The Oregon Territorial legislature found Joaquín Young’s claim to have merit and awarded him nearly $5,000 in settlement of his claim.

    2  Hence “cayuse,” an Old West word for an Indian pony.

  17. Sapling Grove

    1  These were common farm wagons and not, as often depicted, the big (and expensive) Conestogas built in Pennsylvania, which weighed a ton and a half when empty, carried five-ton loads over eastern roads, and hauled the first settlers over the Appalachians. They were too massive for the rain-sodden prairies, river crossings, and mountain defiles of the Oregon Trail. Nor did the 1841 emigrants carry their possessions and foodstuffs in “prairie schooners,” although use of this memorable conveyance, perhaps the most enduring single symbol of the Old West, lay just ahead.

  18. Jumping Off

    1  The book based on it, American Notes (arrangements for which he had made before he sailed), went through four quick printings in a year and earned him £40,000. In this book and in the novel Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) Dickens took a literary revenge on the United States for ignoring his copyright pleas. His friend, William Makepeace Thackeray, refused to review American Notes, considering it “vulgar and flippant.”

    2  The trip normally took five days or less, depending on the river’s height above the mud that gave it its nickname.

    3  This was a popular phrase for the westering adventure. In the 1840s, few Americans had actually seen an elephant and fewer in the country beyond the Missouri frontier. The trails west were thus “paths to the elephant.” The “turnarounds,” those who went as far as they dared then turned back to civilization, were said to have “seen enough of the elephant.” A recently published emigrant memoir by C. G. Hinman is titled A Pretty Fair View of the Elephant.

    4  Charles Preuss’s maps were used by Brigham Young, and Frémont’s narrative prompted the Mormon leader to move his followers to the Salt Lake valley in 1847.

  19. Toward the Elephant

    1  In 1851 Amelia Bloomer’s skirt-and-trouser outfit was introduced, but few emigrant women ever wore them.

    2  There were twelve murders recorded on the Oregon Trail and several executions, by hanging or firing squad. Merrill Mattes wrote of a drumhead trial and execution of a Missouri teenager found guilty of an ax murder. According to an eyewitness, the boy “was hyung on the limb of a basswood tree.”

    3  At least until 1846, when Illinois emigrant Samuel Barlow and workers completed a ninety-mile road over the Cascades to a point south of Mount Hood, which became the standard route into western Oregon.

    4  By 1846 Oregon City had a population of 1,000; flour mills and sawmills; a foundary; a circulating library; a temperance society; a debating club; Catholic and Methodist churches; two saloons; a weekly newspaper, the Oregon Spectator; and had become the center of the American populace of the Oregon Country, ten times the size of Portland, which lay fifteen miles downstream.

  20. The Great Migration

    1  As he turned out to be. In 1849 Burnett left Oregon, where he had been appointed a territorial judge, for the California gold fields, and in 1850 he was elected the first governor of the state. James M. Nesmith, Burnett’s orderly sergeant in the 1843 journey, became a judge, a brigadier general of militia, and, in 1860, a United States Senator from Oregon.

    2  Gantt died in California on February 14, 1849, of a heart ailment, at age fifty-nine. He had crossed the Rockies eight times in various trapping journeys and was said to have explored every river between the western settlements of Missouri and the Pacific. Among his other accomplishments, he was the first to see the opportunity for a prosperous trading post on the Arkansas River in southeastern Colorado, a project carried out with immense success by William Bent and his Bent’s Fort.

  24. Last Trails

    1  The Territory included what would become the states of Oregon and Washington (which gained its own territorial status in 1853) plus portions of Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana.

    2  Having lived not only to see the settlement of the Oregon Country but to read of the great migrations to the Pacific in the 1840s, some years after the western fur trade had dwindled to near extinction and long after he switched his investments to New York real estate. He died in New York City on March 29, 1848, at age eighty-one, leaving a fortune of $30,000,000 and in his will many philanthropical bequests.

    3  It appeared in book form in March 1849, three months before the death of President James K. Polk, on June 15, in Nashville, at the age of fifty-three, three months and twelve days after he left office.

  SOURCES

  The literature of the old Oregon Country and the Oregon Trail—scholarly material, first-person accounts by participants in the saga, popular works—is massive and, for any new writer of the story, rich beyond imagining.

  Some illustrative examples:

  • In the 1930s, Philip Ashton Rollins, a New York lawyer, followed virtually every footstep of Robert Stuart’s epic journey from Astoria to Saint Louis for the purpose of editing and annotating a new edition of Stuart’s journals. The result was a breathtaking work of scholarship, Robert Stuart’s Narratives of His Overland Trip Eastward from Astoria in 1812–1813 (1935), available in a recent edition from the University of Nebraska Pr
ess. The opening sixteen-page biography of Stuart has 174 footnotes.

  • The eminent Nebraska historian Merrill J. Mattes (1910–1996), in writing The Great Platte River Road, examined over 700 eyewitness overland narratives (only about half of which had been published) and listed at least 1,000 sources for his masterwork.

  • The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840–60 was published in 1979, three years after the tragic death from a brain tumor of its thirty-nine-year-old author, John D. Unruh, Jr., of South Dakota. His magisterial book, indispensable to any writer on the mid-century West, contains such meticulous data as the average travel time for overlanders to California in the period 1841–48 (157.7 days) and those to Oregon (169.1 days).

  • Francis Parkman, a formidable scholar himself, would have admired the work of E. N. Feltskog, whose edited edition of Parkman’s The Oregon Trail (1849) is a model, if not the model, for reintroducing such classics to new generations of readers. The recent University of Nebraska Press edition of Feltskog’s Parkman contains a staggering 314 pages of notes and bibliography, not a line of which is unimportant.

  In recounting the Astor experiment in Oregon, I have made extensive use of Washington Irving’s Astoria, or Anecdotes of an Enterprise Beyond the Rocky Mountains (published in 1836 in two volumes), recognizing that it was a work-for-hire, a collaboration, said Irving authority Alfred Powers, between “the nation’s Midas and the nation’s Homer,” and therefore predictably pro-Astor. Irving was paid $5,000 by the financier to write the book, and earned another $12,000 in royalties from its substantial sale. James Fenimore Cooper, when he heard of the Astor-Irving alliance, predicted that Irving would make Astor “greater than Columbus,” and H. H. Bancroft declared that the book contained “a current of unqualified sycophancy, trickery, sentimentality, and maudlin praise.” In scattered places, Bancroft said, Irving’s language was often “strange” and filled with “effeminate inconsistency,” but, worse than that peculiarly phrased charge, declared that “many of its most brilliant passages are pure fiction.”