page_title: Joseph Meek
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Joseph Meek / Early life
caption_attribution_description: English: "Joseph L. Meek," black and white photographic portrait by Joseph Buchtel &amp; John Chester Buttre. Engraved frontispiece to the volume entitled "The River of the West, Life and Adventure in the Rocky Mountains and Oregon," published by the Columbian Book Co., Hartford, Connecticut, 1870. Courtesy of the Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.
context_page_description: Joseph Lafayette "Joe" Meek was a pioneer, mountain man, law enforcement official, and politician in the Oregon Country and later Oregon Territory of the United States. A trapper involved in the fur trade before settling in the Tualatin Valley, Meek played a prominent role at the Champoeg Meetings of 1843, where he was elected a sheriff. He was later elected to and served in the Provisional Legislature of Oregon before being appointed as the United States Marshal for the Oregon Territory.
context_section_description: Joseph Meek was born on February 9, 1810, to James Meek and Spica Walker in Washington County, Virginia, near the Cumberland Gap. At the age of 18 he joined William Sublette and the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, and roamed the Rocky Mountains for over a decade as a fur trapper. In about 1829, the nineteen-year-old Meek traveled with a trapping party along the Yellowstone River. A band of Blackfoot scattered the trappers, leaving Meek to travel into what is today Yellowstone National Park.
  In a later account included in author Frances Fuller Victor's 1870 biography of Meek, The River of the West, Meek described the region: "The whole country beyond was smoking with the vapor from boiling springs, and burning with gasses, issuing from small craters, each of which was emitting a sharp whistling sound."
  In Idaho in 1838, Meek married a woman given to him by Nez Perce chief Kowesota; it was customary for trappers to make what were called "country marriages". Her Nez Perce name is not recorded, but Meek called her "Virginia".  He had previously been married to a different Nez Perce woman.
  By 1840, as it was becoming clear that the fur trade was dying due both to a change in fashion preferences and the overtrapping of beaver, Meek decided to join fellow trappers Caleb Wilkins and Robert Newell in the Oregon Country. On their way there, they met a small group of emigrants at Fort Hall who were also headed to Oregon. The trappers agreed to guide them to the Whitman Mission near Fort Nez Percés. The single wagon that the group brought became the first ever to make it as far west as the mission on the Oregon Trail, although to get it there they ended up leaving the load behind.
caption: Meek as a young man
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