# Oregon Historical Quarterly/Volume 5/Antecedents of the Oregon Pioneers and the Light These Throw on Their Motives

ANTECENDNTS OF THE OREGON PIONEERS AND THE LIGHT THESE THROW ON THEIR MOTIVES.
By JOHN MINTO.
CHAPTER I.
THE MOTIVE OF THE PIONEER HOME-BUILDERS IN OREGON.
It is the purpose of this paper to endeavor to give the prevailing sentiment of the heads of families who crossed the plains and mountains and made their homes in Oregon prior to the settlement of the Oregon boundary question in June, 1846, on the subject of which nationality—that of the United States or that of Great Britain—they intended to support by their movement to and settlement here.
As a means of indicating my point of view, I will say that I left England as a member of my father's family with a strong bias towards the United States form of government, so far as it differed from that of England in recognition of personal freedom and the individual right to have a voice or vote in framing the laws to which one should submit. I was only in my eighteenth year, but I had heard much discussion on the subject, and under the inﬂuence of my father's teaching had been led to believe that under the United States Government that personal freedom and the voting privilege could be attained as conceded rights.
On the passage from Liverpool to New York I had opportunity to read "The Pioneers," by Cooper, and the picture of life on the frontiers there given was a fascination to me, as, very soon after landing. the name of Oregon became. Before the end of my ﬁrst year in America, I had resolved, if ever opportunity served, I would go to Oregon. Before the end of the second year I had answered the question of an American much more intelligent than myself as to "which side I would take in case I went to Oregon and war arose between the ​Britain and United States governments for dominion over the country." With rising indignation at the doubt implied, I replied: "The United States, of course!" and was let down with the exclamation: "That's loyal, my friend." Between this occurrence in 1842 and November, 1848, I had more information as to life on the Western frontiers. I declared my intentions of citizenship in Washington County, Pennsylvania, in that month, and, in February, 1844, started from Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, to reach the frontiers of Iowa by the river system of the Mississippi, and at St. Louis fell into the human tide setting towards Oregon. Every other plan of life was forgotten.
Before noon of the day succeeding that on which I learned there was a chance for me, by my labor, to get to Oregon, I had as complete an outfit for the trip as my means could provide. With least possible delay I made my way to the rendezvous of Gilliam's Company, about twelve miles west of the present city of St. Joseph. Here I first met the leaders of this movement, and next morning I was under verbal engagement to give my labor in exchange for bed and board from the Missouri River to Oregon. I had a fair outfit of clothing, arms and ammunition for the trip. During the first hour I was at the camp. I learned of a proposed donation of land to encourage emigration to Oregon. It had little interest for me. I was too young to properly value it.
Two of us, who had come from St. Louis on the same boat, and as comrades by land part way. were being entertained by Colonel M. T. Simmons, when, in conversation with the late W. H. Rees, the land question came up, and Colonel Simmons said: "Well, the Donation Bill passed the Senate, but failed to reach a vote in the House, but I believe that, or a law like it, will pass, and I am going to Oregon anyhow."
Simmons and Rees were the first two of Gilliam's Company who attained legislative honors after arrival in Oregon, and from Simmons. Rees and I got information which led to our engagement to help R. W. Morrison, a highly esteemed settler near by. to get his family and effects to Oregon. Simmons received his title, as did Gilliam. by the election which formed ​their followers into a rude military and civic organization for our trip; and Morrison was the first Captain of four elected, Rees was the First Sergeant with the duties of Adjutant, and I was elected as Corporal. Honors were easy, but the proceedings were conducted in serious earnest.
The family men of the body were almost all frontier settlers in Missouri, sons and grandsons of frontier settlers of Kentucky and Tennessee, tracing back to Virginia and North Carolina. From Captain Morrison I learned that most of them (himself included) had been influenced in their determination to go to Oregon by a series of addresses delivered at various point* in 1842 in Missouri, then known as "Platte Purchase by Pete Burnett," as they called him. Personally, Morrison's reasons for the trip, given to his family relatives and friends, in my hearing the day before leaving his Missouri domicile, and which I fully endorsed, were: First, he believed that Oregon of right belonged to the United States, and he was going to help make that right good. Second, he supposed there were many of the native race in Oregon who needed instruction to a better condition of life than was then theirs; and, though no missionary, he had no objection to help in that work. Third, he was unsatisfied to live longer so far from the markets, that there were few products he could raise whose value in the world's markets would pay cost of production and shipment especially when the producer, who would neither own nor be a slave, had to compete with breeders and owners of slaves. For these reasons he was "going to Oregon where there would be no slaves, and all would start in life even." In this declaration Mr. Morrison was a representative of the class of anti-slavery frontiersmen who came in 1843 and 1844 and took dominion over Oregon as American citizens from the British occupancy of the Hudson Bay Company who had held trade dominion over the country for twenty-five years. I was not only glad but proud to be an assistant to this family I had joined. My declared intent of citizenship was carried inside my vest as my most precious possession.
Most of the families marshaling under Gilliam as a leader were animated by sentiments so closely akin to those ​annunciated by Mr. Morrison that my feelings went out towards them closely to the relations of father or mother or brother or sister to me, according to age. I became "John" to old and young, and was pleased with it, and it lightened the monotony of the journey to me. Many of the older men besides General Gilliam had seen service against the Indians and against the British at New Orleans, but more interesting to me than the talk of these men, even, was the campfire traditions of Gilliam's sister (Mrs. Sallie Shaw, wile of our second elected captain). Among her ancestry five brothers and their friends had fought against the British as far back as the Revolution.
The historian who settles to the belief that the movement to Oregon was "a blind and unintelligent action, performed by ignorant men, groping for exciting adventure," makes a grave mistake against the truth. It was not by chance that Thomas Jefferson interested himself for long years on the possible nature and condition of the western slope of the Rocky Mountains. It was not by accident that he selected Meriwether Lewis to explore that country. It was not by accident Lewis chose as his associate in the work William Clark—younger brother of General George Rogers Clark the winner of the Northwest territory from the British. It was not by chance that a generation after Lewis and Clark's exploit, one of the members of the United States senate was named Lewis F. Linn and became devoted to the occupation of Oregon by American citizens, and it was from Jefferson himself that Thomas II. Ben ton Linn's associate senator received the conception of planting 30,000 rifles in the valley of the Columbia as good American statesmanship. No! Aided by information slowly filtered from the campfires of adventurous men engaged in the fur and peltry trade from St. Louis to the Rocky Mountains and beyond, the character of the Oregon Country, together with its rightful ownership, was the theme of thought with leading frontiersmen passing from fireside to fireside, more by social intercourse than a multiplicity of books or papers. The few of these in use, especially on the southwestern frontiers, were more influential in producing the Oregon fever ​than ten times the number of publications of the same character in the Eastern seaboard States or the eastern portion of the then West,
East of the Alleghanies Irving's "Astoria" was read as literature mostly. On the frontiers of Missouri, Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana, Lewis and Clark's journal was read and passed from hand to hand for information till worn out,
The influence of this was indicated by the fact we had mature members in our company bearing the Christian names of Lewis and of Clark, Crockett and Boone. One of the youngest and favorite boys of the family I served on the way was named for Senator Benton of Missouri, another for Jefferson. These were not accidental facts. They prove a kinship of spirit often of blood to my mind.
On the way from St. Louis to Gilliam's camp the writer received a very correct outline of Irving 's "Astoria" from Willard H. Rees, who was born and schooled in Hamilton County, Ohio. After starting, the only books I could find in Gilliam's train, except the Bible, were Lewis and Clark's journal and the "Prairie," by J. Fennimore Cooper. This, while the influences of social gatherings of the young on the rough, stony clearings of the west slopes of the Alleghanies after the labors of raising house or barn, a log rolling or corn husking was ended, would still introduce a parlor play with:
"We'll march In procession to a far distant land, We'll march in procession to a far distant land, Where the boys will reap and mow, And the girls will knit and sew, And we'll settle on the banks of the pleasant Ohio."
The writer participated in such plays in Armstrong County, Pennsylvania, in 1842.
The actual historical frontier had reached Western Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa, Texas, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, and the tide of frontier homebuilding enterprise had set definitely without much regard to prospects of personal gain, to Oregon. As one fired with the desire to participate in this movement, it shall be my aim in a succeeding chapter to give my estimate of the most intelligent men in Oregon in advance of the immigration ​of 1844, and of those prominent in that year's movement in the next chapter.
CHAPTER II.
Estimates of Leaders of 1843 and 1844.
Believing no other single individual exerted as large an influence in swelling the number of tome-building emigrants to Oregon in the years 1843 and 1844 as Peter H. Burnett, I would ask the reader to refer to Burnett's statement of the considerations that impelled him to migrate to Oregon. (This statement is found in the opening pages of the following paper, pages 64 and 65.
His motives were patriotic as well as personal and pecuniary.
Mr. Burnett received the full consent of his creditors and set to work most vigorously to organize a company, visited surrounding counties, making speeches wherever he could get an audience, and succeeded beyond his own expectations.
Without any disparagement of many able men who became Mr. Burnett's fellow emigrants to Oregon in 1843-44, it is, I believe, true that he was all round the best equipped man for the work to be done in organizing American dominion over the Columbia River Valley. There were five other men who rose above the average of the emigration of 1843 to cope with the conditions they were to meet and overcome the three Applegate brothers, Daniel Waldo, and J. W. Nesmith. Another man whose patriotic zeal for the settlement of Oregon had sped him on his way from Oregon to Washington and Boston during the time when Mr. Burnett was engaged as he tells, was feeding a fever of enthusiasm for the settlement of Oregon. Dr. Marcus Whitman was making his wonderful winter journey to convey his personal knowledge of the feasibility of reaching Oregon with wagons to the national administration, handicapped by his obligation to missionary association whose ignorant action did much to blight the just fame of this most patriotic missionary. It was natural for Peter H. Burnett to ​recognize the spirit and value of Dr. Whitman and seek his counsel for the journey before starting at Fitzhugh's Mill, to trust his statements at Fort Hall as to the possibility of getting thence to the Columbia River with their wagons and to defend him against the unreasonable complaints of his fellow travelers when receiving the benefit of the supplies from his store. It was natural also for J. W. Nesmith, after many years, to see the basis of humor in the florid speech of Mr. Burnett at Fitzhugh's Mill, as well as his serious and high estimate of the effect of Whitman's counsel at Fort Hall, to trust his (Whitman's) guidance and cling to their wagons placing himself with the foremost of the working force clearing the way. Each of these men were students of the human tide setting toward Oregon. Burnett, much the most advanced, seeking to swell the tide as a possible means of giving him ultimate opportunity of paying off the heaviest monetary obligations any man is subject to, crossed the plains and mountains with view to the settlement of the Oregon boundary question, which, strange to say, he did while continuing to lead the way in Americanizing the Pacific Coast from lower California to British Columbia. Always a close student of men and things, and using his personal influence by wo>d and pen for peace, freedom and justice, Peter H. Burnett carved a first place as an American pioneer to the Pacific Coast. He should stand next to Whitman in that.
In several respects the life and service of Peter Henderson Burnett typifies the best spirit of early Oregon's army of occupation. Ever watchful to effect his public object peacefully, yet keeping constantly in view his business obligations, he was generous in the extreme in preferring other men to
​positions they could fill more successfully than he could himself. This spirit of "in honor preferring one another" he began on the way to Oregon by resigning the captaincy, to which he had been elected. so that the company could be divided and the "cow column" of loose cattle move forward separate from the family wagons and the patient work oxen have a better chance to feed. This was for the general food on he way. There, perhaps, never was a community interest established as a governing power in which better fitted men were given the places than during the period of the Provisional Government of Oregon, continuing so until it was superseded.
In two particulars P. H. Burnett was not sustained by those coming later: First, the law to discourage negroes from coming or being brought to Oregon. Second, the law forbidding the manufacture and sale of ardent spirits. It is to the honor of the citizenship of Oregon that no man has ever been molested on account of his race.
In drafting this law forbidding negroes and mulattoes coming to or settling in Oregon the lion. P. H. Burnett was representing a class rarely considered in legislation the motherhood of. the southwestern frontier. I remember distinctly Captain Morrison saying, "In Oregon there will be no slaves and we'll all start even," on hearing Mrs. Morrison say that the only living creature of which she ever felt fear was a fugitive slave. Mrs. Morrison at the time she said that was the most complete embodiment of the gentleness of womanhood and the courage of manhood I have ever seen in one personality. P. H. Burnett in his law, which yet remains, though never used, represented the just fears of girlhood and womanhood of slaves fleeing for life and liberty. His being a true representative of the Oregon pioneers was clearly demonstrated by their votes even as late as 1862 when General Lane retired from his high estate as a public man and representative of Oregon. At the election of 1862 only one man known to sympathize with slavery and secession was elected.
The Applegate brothers, next to Burnett, claim attention for effectiveness in Americanizing Oregon. The Hon. Jesse ​Applegate was the oldest of the three brothers, and from a peculiar personal manner and mode of thought had more personal influence among men than his brothers, Lindsey and Charles, though perhaps both exceeded him in energy of character as men of action. They agreed as a family to put their means into live stock, a plan in which they had been joined by Daniel Waldo, with whom Jesse Applegate had been a partner in the ownership of a sawmill near St. Louis.
Of the Applegate brothers I think it may be safely said the winning of Oregon for the United States was to them even more a first object than it was of Mr. Burnett, and they were more pasturalists than agriculturalists, as was Daniel Waldo. All of these left land unsold in Missouri.
In public affairs Jesse Applegate was the natural leader upon the highest plane of thought for the future of Oregon as an American community. He united in his character and acquirements in a remarkable degree the talents of statesmanship, civil engineer and a professional teacher by oral methods. The writer was under his influence for more than a month through much danger and toil, as a soldier, but the campfire ​instruction given out! the younger men of the company of sixteen by Mr. Applegate was amply worth the cost of facing the danger and enduring the toil. From my point of view the abilities of P. H. Burnett and Jesse Applegate supplemented each other.
Daniel Waldo was of a different mold than either of the foregoing. Self-reliant in mind and aims, brusk in speech to bluntness, a lover of truth and justice, he had the saving grace of common sense in such a degree as made his selection as justice of his district a happy choice for the time and place. His residence amid the hills bearing his name was more the seat of government in 1845-46 for the east side of the Willamette Valley than was Green Point below Oregon City the residence of Governor Abernethy. Industrial thrift, public spirit and hospitality, and a quick perception of justice often enabled Daniel Waldo to settle differences between men without forms of law. As justice of the peace under the Provisional Government of Oregon Mr. Waldo conducted his office much as his father had conducted that of judge of his county in Virginia. There were other heads of families who came in 1843 who were men above the average as leaders. Jesse Looney, James Waters, M. M. McCarver, and T. W. Keiser, and to these past middle life, may he added J. W. Nesmith and H. A. G. Lee, all except Nesmith frontiersmen from southwestern States. Looney and Reiser were general farmers. Waters seemed to give his attention mostly to defence against the Indians and assisting, as much as his time and means allowed, arriving immigrants.
General McCarver was a singular, if not an eccentric man. His chief aim as a pioneer seemed to be the location of towns, being concerned in locating Linnton on the Willamette, The Dalles on the Columbia, and Tacoma on Puget Sound. He was an almost incessant talker, and although I never heard a word against his integrity I never have been able to think of Mark Twain's "Colonel Sellers" without bringing to mind my impression of General M. M. McCarver.
As to Nesmith and Lee, they were both natural leaders. Of the former it is sufficient to say he made his own standing amongst men. though often rough and domineering. He filled ​every one of the many positions of honor and trust worthily and well.
H. A. G. Lee was a man of different temperament from Nesmith. Quite as ambitious to serve he attracted young men whom Nesmith's tendency to domineer repelled. Lee's room in the chief hotel at Oregon City in 1845-46 was almost a common rendezvous for young men looking upward, and he had much of the gentle teacher's talent characteristic of Jesse Applegate, leaning more to military service. His dropping out of Oregon life was a loss to the young community. That occurred after the discovery of gold in California when we lost many good citizens by murder and by reckless exposure in placer mining, with a general result to Oregon of almost suspended industries for a few years.
The leaders of the emigration of 1844, were mostly a second installment of frontiersmen from the South rather than the East, who had been largely induced to make the venture by addresses delivered by Mr. Burnett, and by the publication of Whitman's winter journey. There were a few more men of mature age among them from east of the Ohio, and of single men also.
The whole of both years' emigration, so far as the writer knew them, were conspicuous for individuality of character and measure of acquirement. Even in business grasp, the difference between Peter H. Burnett and Daniel Delaney, though both Tennesseeans, was immense. Burnett, always a student of books and men, and always working upwards, a failure in his first efforts as a merchant he became a good success as a lawyer, a leader of people, a lover of freedom, and a statesman ardent in his convictions as to the value of the movement to Oregon, he used his pen freely to his fellow citizens east of the Rocky Mountains, yet lost no opportunity to mend his personal fortune, paying off principal and interest of his debts; in a word, lived in high endeavor and died in high honor.
Mr. Delaney, understood to be the man who came from East Tennessee and defined the locality he left as "High upon Big Pigeon, near K. Bullen's Mill," was a remarkably close economist in rearing live stock as well as in getting the produce of ​the soil. He brought to Oregon a slave woman and three of his five sons. He rarely purchased anything, living as much as possible on what the farm furnished. He planted a large orchard on a very rocky piece of land and got fine results from it by thickly covering the surface with crops of straw produced on the level land which was chosen more for keeping stock through the winter without feed, than for grain. His custom was to begin with so many breeding animals and keeping them, increase up to the line of overstocking, sell for cash, reserving a certain number to start again, hide his money and keep on towards another sale. He did little labor himself, leaving that for the slave woman and his sons, who were all industrious and some of them very worthy citizens. Mr. Delaney's exercise was to go with his hounds and rifle wherever, in the near vicinity, beasts of prey might lurk, and depend on his dogs to bring them within range of his rifle. He must, in this way, have destroyed very many panther, lynx, and wild cats, as well as some bears, and so was a benefactor to his neighbors. He seemed to read his bible chiefly to find in it support for his dominion over the soul and body of his female slave. His sales and expenditures having been watched by a neighbor and professed friend for over a period of twenty years he was murdered for his treasures. Such was the end of a pioneer of 1843, whose life action in nearly every respect was the very opposite to that of Peter H. Burnett, who wielded the largest influence as leader of immigrants of 1843-44, and was the most complete representative of the motive of the enterprise of Americanization of Oregon and California, of which latter State he was the first elective Governor.
It should not be understood leadership is claimed for Mr. Burnett over all his brother pioneers in every respect. Some (I think a large number) would have fought for dominion after arriving here more readily than either he or Jesse Applegate, his able co-laborer, in getting the leading men in charge of the Hudson Bay Company's property to place it and themselves under the protection of the Provisional American Government.
​It was common report that, in answer to a direct question of Lieutenant William Peel to Hon. Jesse Applegate at the home of the latter, "If he believed his neighbors would fight for possession of Oregon?" "Fight, Lieutenant, yes; they would not only fight you Britishers, but their own commanders also if they did not command to suit them." I cannot vouch for the truth of this, but it sounds like Mr. Applegate, though he, himself, was always for peaceful methods, if the object could be so attained, as were Burnett, H. A. G. Lee, General Palmer, Robert Newell, and James Waters, I believe. A strong indication that this question and answer between Lieutenant Peel and Mr. Applegate did occur is the fact that within fifteen or twenty miles of the Applegate residence, from which Mr. Peel and his party were traveling northward, the writer, listening to Mr. Daniel Matheny's question to Peel as to how he liked Oregon, heard the latter deliberately reply, "Mr. Matheny, it is certainly the most beautiful country in its natural state my eyes ever beheld," then after a slight pause, continued: "I regret to say that I am afraid we (the British) are not going to be the owners of it." This occurred within a month after the arrival of Lieutenant Peel and Captain Parks in Western Oregon as emissaries of the British Government at the head of which was Peel's father, Sir Robert Peel. At that time the open discussion of this question was often raised and sometimes hotly debated by the parties confined together in a single chinook canoe. The writer remembers having to take some very rough comments made by a Scotch sailor named Jack McDonald for the shamefulness, as he termed it, of my preferring the American cause against the country of my birth. I had to endure Jack's tongue, he being in one end of the canoe and I in the other, but, on landing he declined to support his right to question my right of choice.
Early in 1846 the finishing of Doctor McLoughlin's flouring mill at Oregon City was made the occasion of a ball by the young Americans, many of whom had assisted in the building. Lieutenant Peel and officers of the Modeste and of the Hudson Bay Company at Vancouver were invited. It was a good ​opportunity for Mr. Peel to poll the attendants as to their national predilection, and by the aid of Robert Pentland, an Englishman, the poll was made with the result that the majority present were Americans. A bet of a bottle of wine between Peel and Newell afforded excuse for the poll. Peel manifested chagrin at the result, pointed across the mill floor to a man who might easily he guessed to be an Englishman, and offered Newell another bet that that man would fight on the side of Great Britain in case of war over Oregon. Newell took the bet and Mr. Pentland went straight across the floor and said to the man: "Sir. which side would you support in case of war over the Oregon boundary?" The man without hesitation replied: "I fight under the Stars and Stripes, myself!" The man was Willard H. Rees, a neighbor of Newell and elected with the latter in the general election of 1847. Robert Newell as the ablest man of the American mountaineers.
As to Lieutenant Peel, he spent nearly a year in Oregon and used all the means in his power to increase pro-British sentiment, to be very generally gently defeated.
There was probably no leader in the settlement at that time who more certainly would have been ready to take the field for the American side than Cornelius Gilliam. As leader of the largest following of the immigration of 1844, Gilliam was by nature and prejudice mast intensely opposed to British rule over Oregon. He was met at The Dalles with a liberal present of food sent by Dr. John McLoughlin. While partaking of this some of his family connection (one of his sons-in-law, probably) saw a chance to have a joke at his expense, and said: "General, they are trying to buy you up in advance." This raised a laugh, but Gilliam, who always took himself seriously, said, "Well, I have no objections to living in good neighborhood with the Hudson Bay Company as long as my rights are respeeted, but if they cut up any rustics with me, I will do my best to knock their stockade down about their ears." This story in different versions was campfire gossip while the writer, with Daniel Clark and S. B. Crockett, were engaged with a boat loaned by Doctor McLoughlin. probably the very boat which carried this present to Gilliam and his friends, ​who used it to help others of his company down to Linnton. Originating thus in family fun, the incident kept in circulation till the Whitman massacre, when on Gilliam's appointment as commander of the volunteers to go against the Cayuses, it took the shape of a rumor that Colonel Gilliam intended 1o levy contribution on the Hudson Bay Company's property and occasioned an exchange of letters between Chief Factor Douglas and Governor Abcrnethy. (See Brown's History of Oregon, pp. 333-9.)
From the writer's point of view to settle Oregon as citizens of the United States was a prevailing sentiment among those who came before the year of the Whitman massacre, and if war had come, the Provisional Government would have put out even greater energies to fight the British and Indians combined than were exerted, as many of the heads of families besides General Gilliam had been suckled on stories of the Revolution of 1776 and the war of 1812. This influenced men from the East and North as well as those from the South and western frontiers, but the latter were in a greater degree under fireside and campfire tuition as books were less common and much less read. In Gilliam's trains the only two books I was able to borrow were Cooper's "Prairie" and Lewis and Clark's journal the first showing little usage and the latter in tatters from much use.
To say that to save Oregon as rightful territory of the United States is too high a motive to be ascribed to the early pioneer homebuilders who crossed the plains and mountains to Oregon between 1842 and 1847 is unjust—as Daniel Clark, my traveling companion into Western Oregon, tersely put it in answer to the question of a British ship captain (who had just reached Vancouver with a cargo of goods for the Hudson Bay Company), of where he came from and his purpose in coming here, replied, "We've come from Missouri across the Rocky Mountains; we've come to make our homes in Oregon and rule this country." The writer was struck by this reply, received from Clark the evening of the day after it was made, as a concise statement of the general object of Gilliam's companies of the 1844 movement. This was the first motive given in the ​writer's hearing by R. W. Morrison before leaving his Missouri residence, which knit me to his service on the way to Oregon with his family and his effects. He was the first of Gilliam's captains chosen by election. His sentiments pervaded Gilliam's following and those of Colonel Ford and Major Thorp, and to deny them that motive as one of the most important of their lives is to pronounce them irrational men which they certainly were not.
CHAPTER III.
THE MEN THAT SAVED OREGON.
The boat on which I had taken passage from St. Louis to Western Missouri had barely cast off and got into the stream when I found myself among men who were talking of Oregon, some with means to make their way. and others, like myself, seeking opportunity to work their way. The large majority of heads of families who crossed the plains in wagons in 1843 and 1844 were from the southern rather than eastern and northern States. There were some of the single men from the Middle West and even a few from Europe. But the largest number, both of heads of families and single men, traced their origin to the Scotch-Irish who had been pioneers inland from the caravans of Virginia. Maryland, and the Carolinas. and breaking over the Alleghanies became pioneers in Kentucky. Tennessee, and Missouri, keeping with them family traditions of battles against the English on such fields as King's Mountain and New Orleans and with the native race. They were not a reading people, and were far from being a money-seeking people, a prevailing ambition among them was to be the most western members of their respective families and to call no man master. They, in many cases, were the sons of sons of frontiersmen for generations back. Men who. from choice, would rather struggle with and overcome natural obstacles than jostle with men. They had great and varied individuality and used many words (not negroisms) different from the yeoman class of New York or Pennsylvania. As they left the frontier of Missouri for Oregon, they showed little sign of attrition with recent European ​immigrants. Their freedom from that was perhaps caused by their lack of school and post office facilities common to frontiersmen, but bearing hardest against anti-slavery family life in slave States, so much so that the emigration movement was at this time rather away from than into the frontier slave States. These very families gathering to follow Cornelius Gilliam to Oregon had the getting away from the institution of slavery very generally as a motive. Yet, while they remained in Missouri, they had demonstrated their determination not to submit to organized power which to their minds was more repulsive than African slavery. Many of the very men who in 1843 selected P. H. Burnett as their leader to Oregon had followed Gilliam 's lead in the trouble arising between the Mormon settlement at Far West, Missouri, and the pioneer settlers previously located. As it is an admirable illustration of the character of the men who followed Burnett and Gilliam to Oregon later, I quote from Burnett's "Recollections of an Old Pioneer," page 59. Mr. Burnett, then residing at Liberty, Missouri, practicing law, was a member of an independent militia company at that place called the Liberty Blues, who .were ordered to the battle ground, where Captain Bogard's company and Patton's company of the Mormon Danite band met. Mr. B. says: "We were ready and were off before night, and marched some ten miles under General Doniphan. The next day we reached the scene of the conflict, and encamped in open oak wood next to the prairie that extended from that point to 'Far West.' * * * Among those who had fallen in with us was a lad of about eighteen, quite tall, green and awkward. He was dressed in thin clothing, and when put on guard was told by the officer not to let any one take his gun. He said: ' No one would get his gun. ' When the officer went around to relieve the guard this boy would not permit him to come near, presenting his gun with a most determined face. In vain the officer explained his purpose; the boy was inflexible and stood guard the remainder of the night, always at his post and always wide awake. The second night Doniphan's command were aroused from their sleep by the guards reporting the approach of a body supposed to be Mormons. ​Doniphan called for twenty volunteers to go out to reconnoitre and bring on the action." Of these volunteers Mr. Burnett was one. mounted on a mare that had been trained to race and carried him in front in spite of himself, the steed thinking itself in a race. "I was about twenty yards ahead, when, sure enough, we saw in the clear moonlight a body of armed men approaching. We galloped on till within some hundred yards, then drew up and hailed them, when, to our great satisfaction, we found it was a body of militia under Colonel Gilliam from Clinton County, coining to join us. Thus ended the alarm. * * * During all this hubbub the boy who had persisted in standing guard the previous night slept until some one happened to think of him and asked where he was. He was then awakened and fell into the ranks without hesitation or trepidation." So much as to the fighting spirit of the community from which Burnett and Gilliam got their following to Oregon later. This meeting by moonlight, and joining forces produced the surrender of the Mormon leaders, Joseph Smith, Jr., Rigdon Wight and others, and Mr. Burnett proceeds to give a further characteristic of this people: "As I understood at the time a proposition was seriously made and earnestly pressed in a council of officers to try the prisoners by court-martial, and if found guilty execute them. This proposition was firmly and successfully opposed by Doniphan. These men (the Mormons) had never belonged to any lawful military organization and could not, therefore. have molested military law. * * * I remember that I went to Doniphan and assured him that we of Clay County would stand by him. Had it not been for the efforts of Doniphan and others from Clay, I think it most probable that the prisoners would have been summarily tried, condemned and executed."
These quotation! are introduced here as illustration of the physical and moral courage of this district from which, a few years later, the largest proportion of the first homebuilders started to Oregon. The readiness to fight is well shown by the lo who would not give up his gun. and by Colonel Gilliam ​with his command seeking his Mormon enemies by moonlight, and the higher courage that risks life deliberately to "stand for justice, truth and right" by legal methods.
The two forces here were the pioneer class of American citizens, mainly originating south of Mason and Dixon's line used to establishing law and order on lands won from the natice race, suddenly confronted by a horde of fanatics, mainly gathered at that time from the strata just above the submerged tenth of England's population, led by a comparatively few men of mixed nationalities intent on the nursing into existence of a new oligarchical religious system. The shrewd Mormon leaders secured Doniphan and Burnett to defend them under the forms of law in Missouri, which was done under a condition of public feeling so near mob violence that they were justified in one sitting within six feet of the other with a loaded pistol in hand while each in turn made his plea for law and order, and both came out of it with a moral power over their unruly fellows which carved them big niches in American history during the succeeding decade.
The pioneer element of Missouri succeeded, and ultimately Mormonism became an important pioneer element in winning to humanity the central portion of the great American desert, while the frontier family life represented by those who drove the Mormons from Far West came to the lower Columbia basin and began planting the thirty thousand rifles of Jefferson's conception, aided and encouraged by Floyd, Atcheson, Benton, and Linn, disciples of Jefferson. The means those statesmen proposed to use armed occupation of Oregon, encouraged by a permanent interest in the soil had just ended the Florida war of seven years' duration vexatious, harassing and expensive without either treaty negotiated or battle fought. Homebuilders going there, as Senator Benton states, "with their arms and plows."
Dr. Lewis F. Linn, as already stated, introduced a bill into the senate of the United States providing this land inducement so liberal as to be of doubtful passage, and indeed failed to pass the house, but it answered the purpose, and why it did so may (as the writer believes) be largely answered by the ​fact the enterprise appealed to the imagination of a large community of born frontiersmen of kinship, by blood or spirit, dating back through seventy years of pioneer history comnieneinir with what is known as the Dunmore War in 1774.
From a historical pamphlet by E. O. Randall, secretary of the Ohio Antiquarian and Historical Society, largely published in the West Virginia Historical Magazine for January, 1903, the writer culls the names of officers who took part in the battle of Point Pleasant, deemed by some historical students to have been really the first battle of the Revolutionary War because fought by Virginia volunteers drawn from the eastern slopes of the Blue Ridge in Virginia, many of whom had reason for opposition to a recently proclaimed policy of the British crown. Mr. Randall says: "The American colonists had fought the French and Indian War with the expectation that they were to be, in the event of success, the beneficiaries of the result and be permitted to occupy the Ohio Valley as a fertile and valuable addition to their Atlantic Coast lodgments. But, the war over and France vanquished, the royal greed of Britain asserted itself and the London Government most arbitrarily pre-empted the territory between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi River as the exclusive and particular dominion of the crown, directly administered upon from the provincial seat of authority at Quebec. The parliamentary power promulgated the arbitrary proclamation (1763) declaring the Ohio Valley and the great Northwest territory should be practically an Indian reservation, ordering the few settlers to remove therefrom, forbidding the settlers to move therein, and even prohibiting trading with the Indians save under licenses and restrictions so excessive as to amount to exclusion.
On June 22, 1774, Parliament passed the detestable Quebec Act. which not only affirmed the policy of the crown adopted in the proclamation of 1763, but added many obnoxious features by granting certain civil rights to the French Catholic Canadians.
This policy of the crown stultified the patents and charters granted the American colonies in which their proprietary ​rights extended to the Mississippi and beyond, embracing the very territory to which they were now denied admittance, and ordered to vacate where located under previous grants. The Quebec Act was one of the irritants complained of in the Declaration of Independence "for abolishing the free system of English law in a neighboring province establishing therein an arbitrary government and enlarging its boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule."
This was the condition in 1774 on the northern frontier of Virginia at a time when the head of the Ohio Valley was supposed to be part of that province. John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, Governor, held his allegiance due to the crown, but he also was eager to champion the cause of Virginia as against either the Indians or her sister colonies. He was avaricious, energetic, and interested in the frontier land speculation. He had appointed an agent or deputy at Fort Pitt, then deemed a Virginia town, and surveyors who were locating lands in the upper Ohio, who were attacked by Indians and driven out. It was a bitter race war on both sides, rendered more bitter to the Virginians by the very general belief that the Indians were furnished arms, ammunition and clothing from Detroit by the Quebec Government through French traders, now its special pets.
"In May the Virginia House of Burgesses, of which George Washington, Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson were members, resolved with a burst of indignation to set aside the first of June when the Boston bill should go into operation as a day of fasting and prayer to implore divine interposition for averting the heavy calamity which threatens the civil rights of America." Governor Dunmore at once dissolved that highly impertinent King insulting body. Meanwhile the race war on the northern and western frontier was growing more and more serious where the heat of patriotic resistance to the tyrannical measures of the mother country mingled with the bitterness of the race war for proprietary rights. And Governor Dunmore in August called out two bodies of militia and volunteers consisting of fifteen hundred each. The ​northern division chiefly from country west of the Blue Ridge to be commanded by Lord Dunmore in person. The southern division mused in counties east of the Blue Ridge, led by General Andrew Lewis. The two armies were to proceed by different routes to the month of the Big Kanawha, unite and from thence cross the Ohio and penetrate the northwest country. defeat the red men and destroy all the Indian towns they could reach. This was the plan made by Dunmore, but which he failed to follow, thereby making his real intentions subject to suspicions which cloud his name yet. It is with the command under General Lewis we have to deal while it was left to meet the onset of the flower of the fighting force of the Ohio tribes in an all-day's desperate action, the Indians being under command of Cornstalk, the famous warrior of his day. Both sides greatly suffered and were completely exhausted, the Indians drawing off, cowed so that their brave leader could get no further tight out of them. The result was their signing of a treaty Governor Dunmore had tried to make in the Scioto Valley on the day of the battle of Point Pleasant, though according to his plan of campaign he should have joined Lewis at Point Pleasant. In the belief about his failure and the brave and successful fight made without him the seeds of distrust of England and her policies were sown which nourished through three generations of family tradition by the frontier settlers of the Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Illinois, and Missouri, and reaching Oregon seventy years afterward, nerved the arms and steadied the aims of just such men as mustered under George Rogers Clark at old Vincennes and Jackson at New Orleans. Just such men as settled the Florida and Black Hawk Wars; and just such men as took dominion over Oregon and as marched through Mexico under Doniphan.
The writer was first led into this line of thought on reading a very interesting paper in the West Virginia Historical Magazine of October, 1902, by Miss L. K. Poage, of Ashland, Kentucky, on the leaders who lived after participating in the battle of Point Pleasant, and seventy years later many of the names of whom were found among the pioneers to Oregon.
​It is not the purpose of the writer to mar Mr. Randall's fine description of the battle of Point Pleasant, October, 1774, but to show the names of leaders in the fight and the extraordinary proportion who never fought again. Beginning with that of General Andrew Lewis we have in Mr. Randall's, list Colonel Charles Lewis, brother of the general, Colonel William Fleming. Colonel John Field, Captain Thomas Buford, Captains Evan, Shelby, and Herbert. Captains Shelby and Russell were part of Colonel Christian's force which, by faster marching, arrived in time to take part in the battle.
Miss Poage's admirable paper is written from the native Kentuckian's standpoint, and she confesses that it is "now impossible to secure a complete list of the Kentuckians who fought in the battle of Point Pleasant." I transcribe the names she mentions who did: Isaac Shelby, Samuel M. Dowell, Silas Harlan, Aezercah Davis, Abraham Chapline, Colonel George Slaughter, James Trimble, Wm. Russell (afterward colonel, but fifteen years of age when this battle was fought), two brothers, James and John Sandusky, Simon Kenton, who arrived as a messenger from Governor Dunmore, Captain James Mongomery, James Knox, James Harrod leader of the first settlers of Harrodsburg, Kentucky John Crawford, Colonel Joseph Crockett. This last is the name which attracted the writer and led to writing this paper in hope of stimulating pioneers to Oregon to gather up all they can for the annals of this State on their origin. It has been well said by one who has labored in this direction that the time will come when the record of a pioneer to Oregon will be equal to a title of nobility. Believing that, I give Miss Poage's note on Colonel Crockett who was in Captain Russell's command at Point Pleasant: "For services in the battle of Monmouth he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel. He spent the winter with Washington at Valley Forge and was second in command to General Clark in the campaign against the Northwestern Indians. He moved to Jessamine County, Kentucky, in 1784. President Jefferson appointed Colonel Crockett United States marshal for the District of Kentucky, which office he held for eight ​years, and while in office he arrested Aaron Burr in 1806."
The foregoing brings us into line with the mind that conceived Oregon and planned its exploration, who appointed Meriwether Lewis to lead the exploration and commissioned William (Mark as his associate not without knowledge (we may easily conceive) of the services of Generals Andrew Lewis and George Kogcrs Clark to liberty and progress.
Just seventy years from the date of the battle of Point Pleasant the writer emerged from the west timber line of the Blue Mountains of Oregon in company with Daniel Clark and S. B. Crockett. Learning recently that the latter was yet living in his 84th year, I wrote to learn if he was a family connection with the Colonel Joseph Crockett before mentioned, and received an affirmative reply. S. B. Crockett was one of the most effective helpers in the pioneer movement of 1844, and in that which reached Puget Sound in 1845, settling on Whitby's Island in the Sound, he induced his father's family to follow him also.
We will now return to the rank and file of those who fought the Battle of Point Pleasant. Mr. Randall tells us: "The volunteers who were to form the army of Lewis began to gather at Camp Union, the levels of Greenbrier (Lewisburg), In-fore the 1st of September. It was a motley gathering. They were not the King's regulars nor trained troops. They were not knights in burnished steel on prancing steeds. They were not cavaliers, sons from the luxurious manors. They were not drilled martinets. They were, however, determined, dauntless men, sturdy and weather-beaten as the mountain sides whence they came. They were undrilled in the arts of military movements, but they were in physique and endurance and power Nature's noblemen, reared amid the open freedom of rural life." * * * It was one hundred and sixty miles from Camp Union to their destination at the mouth of the Great Kanawha. The regiments passed through a trackless forest so rugged and mountainous as to render their ​progress extremely tedious and laborious. They marched in long files through "the deep and gloomy woods with scouts and spies thrown out in front and on the flanks, while axemen went in advance to clear a trail over which they could drive the beef cattle and the pack-horses laden with provisions, blankets and ammunition. They struck straight through the wilderness, making their road as they went. On September 21st they reached the Great Kanawha at the present site of Charleston. Here they halted and built dugout canoes for baggage transportation down the river, * * * arriving there October 6th, to learn, in a few days, that Governor Dunmore had changed his plans and had reached Kentucky Plains with the object of making a treaty with the Indians rather than fight them."
I have quoted Mr. Randall's description of the men and their movement towards the point where the desperate fight occurred on October 10, 1774, under circumstances which must have sown the seeds of suspicion of Governor Dunmore's motives, which are not yet removed, and to call attention of my readers to the close parallel between the men and the methods of General Lewis' army and the homebuilders of 1843, who to reach the Columbia with their wagons (which were, in fact, their traveling family homes), cutting their way through the dense timber growth in the Burnt River Canyon, and through that of the Blue Mountains of Oregon, part of them to descend the Columbia in boats and canoes and on rafts, and part to take Indian trails of the mountain or river gorge, and so reach Western Oregon. This was when the change of dominion over Oregon began, and the finish was initiated by a small portion of the immigration of 1844 descending the lower Columbia late in 1845, and thirteen men cutting a wagon road through the fifteen miles of heavy Oregon forest to reach Budd's Inlet of Puget Sound.
The would-be historian who claims that Oregon was won by an aimless movement of a restless, unreflecting, adventurous people has the rather hard fact to ignore of why a cadet of the Crockett family was present, and a most effective axeman and hunter in cutting out this last fifteen miles of ​American family road to the tide wash of the Pacific. He has got to find a rational reason for the names of Jefferson, Lewis, Clark, Russell, Fleming, Crockett, Boone, and many others appearing not only as family names among early Oregon pioneers to Oregon, but these names and those of Floyd, Linn and Benton were often bestowed on boy babies born in frontier cabins after the time of the Lewis and Clark exploration to successful overland emigration by family wagons. He has got to explain why Oregon has towns and counties, and mountains even, named for Jefferson, Lewis, Linn, and Benton.
Dominion over Oregon was the ripe fruit of patriotic statesmanship, conceived, cherished and nursed by Thomas Jefferson, and consummated by poor men influenced by the spirit of the lesser American patriots I have mentioned.
* ↑ Doubtless the discovery by Captain Gray of the mouth of the Columbia, and the founding of Astoria and its history by Irving ["Astoria" by Irving was not published until 1886]], animated Hall J. Kelley and indirectly brought to and left in Oregon a few Americans who were here as permanent settlers prior to March, 1843, but at that date the proceedings of forming the Provisional American Government would have failed except for the presence of a free trapper class represented by Russell, Newell, Meek, and Ebbarts, Virginians, and a very few ex-Canadian patriots like F. X. Matthieu; and this only began the contest for power, terminated by the homebuilders arriving in 1813 and 1844, whose knowledge of legal forms and diplomacy caused the officers of the Hudson Bay Company to accept the cover of the local laws of Oregon for the property in their care.
* ↑ The ignorance of the mission board Doctor Whitman enlisted under, the zeal for personal notice of some associated with him, and cold-blooded critics who Judge him after his heroic death at his chosen post (maintained for eleven years as a school for the natives and seven years as a place of rest and relief for the way-worn immigrant) may detract from this self-devoted man all they please. To me who never saw him, but got my impressions of his public spirit from fireside converse with other missionaries, he stands in first place as an American homebuilder, Burnett next, among Immigrants of 1843, Applegate, Nesmith, Waldo, and others following. The origin of the Applegate family, according to a brief sketch given the writer by a daughter of Jessie Applegate, was English. Arriving in New England as early as 1635; from there to New Jersey, then to Maryland, and from Maryland to Kentucky in 1784. Fighters in the Revolutionary War, and hereditary enemies of British power. Waldo's father was from New England to Virginia in his youth. Nesmith was of the Scotch-Irish colony of New Hampshire called his Oregon home Derry, and naturally affiliated with the Scotch-Irish of Western Virginia, who filtered through Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri to become the advance wave of the opposing force against the spread of British dominion in America. Jesse Looney was from Alabama. T. D. Keiser from North Carolina through Arkansas. A critical analysis of the origin of heads of families in Oregon prior to the settlement of the Oregon boundary, will show much the largest number to have been born south of Mason and Dixon's line, opponents of Great Britain, and to slavery. The leading men coming In 1844 were frontiersmen also, and would average with the last three names mentioned above in character, but not with Burnett, Applegate, and Nesmith in ability as legislators in a formative period.
* ↑ S. B. Crockett died at Kent, Washington, while this was in typewriter's hands.