FootNote
The new kid on the block, FootNote is known for digitizing historical
documents... many of which are genealogical gems. With naturalizations,
city directories, war records, newspapers, town records, etc... this new
kid is quickly being recognized as an alternative to Ancestry.
While we know our northern friends may not feel it, in the South, Spring is
here. So we thought we'd share a few of our gardening sites appropriate
for this time of the year. Along with gardening, there's grilling, and getting
ready to diet so that you can fit back into that bathing suit this summer!
The Catholic missionaries devoted their time not only to the
Indians, but ministered to the Canadian French, who, after
leaving the Hudson's Bay Company, settled in the Willamette
Valley and on the Cowlitz. The Willamette Falls was selected
by the company in 1829 as a place of settlement for its
retired servants. It had previously been the policy of the
company not to permit settlements to be made by their
servants whose term of service had expired, since they
deemed such settlements detrimental to the preservation of
the region as a fur producing wilderness. But the company
was bound under heavy penalties not to discharge any of its
servants, even after they could render no service, and was
therefore forced to provide homes for them where they could
to a degree be self-supporting. They were still retained on
the company's books as its servants, and still inclined, as
British subjects, to uphold and maintain the supremacy of
Great Britain in the country where they lived. The
settlement at Willamette Falls did not prosper, and a few
years later it was abandoned. The ex-servants then located
near Champoeg, in Marion County, and became quite a
flourishing colony, and there their descendants live to the
present day, useful and industrious citizens.
At the close of 1837 the independent population of Oregon
consisted of forty-nine souls, about equally divided between
Missionary attaches and settlers. With but few exceptions,
the arrivals during the next two years were solely of
persons connected with the various Missions whose advent has
already been noted. The settlers who followed then were
moved by no religious incentive. Some were independent
trappers from the Rocky Mountains, who had become enamored
of the beautiful Willamette valley, and had come here to
settle down from their life of danger and excitement. Some
of them were sailors, who had concluded to abandon the sea
and dwell in this land of plenty, while still others were of
that restless, roving class, who had by one way and another,
reached this region in advance of the waves of emigration
which swept into it a few years later. Including the
arrivals of 1840, among whom were Dr. Robert Newell and
Joseph L. Meek, there were in the Fall of that year
(exclusive of the officers and employees of the Hudson's Bay
Company), one hundred and thirty-seven Americans in Oregon,
nearly all in the Willamette Valley, about one-third of whom
were connected with the Missions in some capacity. There
were also sixty Canadian settlers, former employees of the
Hudson's Bay Company, who had left the service of the
company and settled in the Willamette Valley, and who
eventually cast the weight of their influence on the side of
the independent American settlers, as those unconnected with
either of the Missionary societies or Hudson's Bay Company
were called.
Up to 1839, the only law or government administered in this
region, was the rule of the Hudson's Bay Company, but in
that year, deeming that there should be some authority that
settlers would respect, the Methodist Missionaries appointed
two persons to act as magistrates. Thus, the independent
settlers acquiesced in, although it had been done without
their co-operation or consent. So far as the latter class
were concerned they were, through the inattention and
neglect of Congress, absolutely without government or laws
of any kind. The Missionaries had rules and regulations
established by themselves which governed them in their
social intercourse with each other, and united them in a
common cause for their mutual protection. But the
independent settlers had not even that security for their
lives or their property. By their own government, which
ought to have thrown around them its protecting care, they
were treated literally as political outcasts, nor was
Congress unaware of their condition. On January 28, 1839,
Hon. Lewis F. Linn, one of the United States Senators from
Missouri, and the most zealous and indefatigable champion of
the American settlers in Oregon and of the claims of the
United States to the Oregon Territory, presented to, the
Senate a petition of J. L. Whitcomb and thirty-five other
settlers in Oregon, which in simple and touching language
set forth the conditions of the country, its importance to
the United States, its great natural resources and necessity
of civil government for its inhabitants. The settlers thus
plead with the Nation's Representatives:
"We flatter ourselves that we are the germ
of a great State, and are anxious to give an early tone to
the moral and intellectual character of our citizens-the
destiny of our posterity will be intimately affected by the
character of those who emigrate.
* * * *
But, a good community
will hardly emigrate to a country which promises no
protection to life or property.
* * * *
We can boast of no
civil code. We can promise no protection but the ulterior
resort of self defense.
* * * *
We do not presume to suggest
the manner in which the country should be occupied by the
government, nor the extent to which our settlement should be
encouraged. We confide in the wisdom of our national
legislators and leave the subject to their candid
deliberations."
The petition concluded by urging the necessity of assumption
of jurisdiction of the territory by the United States, and
of the inauguration of energetic measures to secure the
execution of all laws affecting Indian trade and the
intercourse of white men and Indians. "The security" said
the petitioners, "of our persons and our property, the hopes
and destinies of our children, are involved in the objects
of our petition."
This petition was read, laid on the table and neglected. In
June, 1840, Senator Linn again presented a memorial signed
by seventy citizens of Oregon, praying Congress to extend
Federal jurisdiction over the territory, in which the
government was warned that the country is too valuable to be
lost, that attempts were being made by the rival nations to
reduce it to possession, and that appearances indicated
British intent to hold exclusively the territory north of
the Columbia. Then modestly invoking the attention of
Congress to the region because of its national importance,
they concluded with this patriotic prayer: "Your petitioners
would beg leave especially to call the attention of Congress
to this, our condition as an infant colony, without military
force or civil institutions to protect their lives and
property and children, sanctuaries and tombs, from the hands
of uncivilized and merciless savages around them.
"We respectfully ask for the civil institutions of the
American Republic-we pray for the high privileges of
American citizenship; the peaceful enjoyment of life; the
right of acquiring, possessing and using property and the
unrestrained pursuits of rational happiness."
This memorial, like the preceding one, was laid on the table
and forgotten by a majority of the Senators to whom it was
addressed. Senators Linn and Benton almost alone remained
the true and tried friends of Oregon. The former, during
three terms of Congress had not only introduced and urged
consideration of bills for the purpose of extending the
jurisdiction and laws of the United States over the
territory of Oregon, but had also urged the passage of bills
granting donations of the public lands in Oregon to citizens
who had settled there. He did not live to see the measures
he had so zealously advocated become laws, but eight years
after his death the legislative Assembly of Oregon, in a
spirit of gratitude and out of affectionate regard for his
memory gave his name to one of the largest and most
productive counties in the territory.
Why Congress suffered the petitions of the settlers in
Oregon to lie unheeded, why it failed to protect them by
extension of laws over the territory, as the English
government had done for British subjects, must remain a
matter of conjecture. But it must be borne in mind that at
this time, in the judgment of many of the leading men of the
day, Oregon was regarded as valueless and unpractical for
American settlement. Statesmen and publicists had been wont
to speak derisively of the idea that American civilization
would press westward of the Rocky Mountains and secure a
foothold on the shores of the Pacific. Among the first
recognition on the part of Congress of such a country as
Oregon, which occurred in 1825, on the introduction of a
bill by Mr. Floyd, of Virginia, "authorizing the occupation
of the Oregon river," Senator Dickinson, of New York,
assailed the measure in a sarcastic speech in which he
claimed that it would never become a State, that it was 4650
miles from the seat of the Federal Government, and that a
young and able-bodied senator might travel from Oregon to
Washington and back once a year, but he could do nothing
more. He closed his speech with the remark: "as to Oregon
Territory, it can never be of any pecuniary advantage to the
United States,"-a conclusion which subsequent events and the
present situation and prosperity of the State prove him to
have been little of a sage and a miserable failure as a
prophet. As late as 1843, when Senator Linn's bill was
introduced in the senate of the United States, providing for
granting land to the inhabitants of Oregon Territory, a
senator said, in the discussion of the bill: "For whose
benefit are we bound to pass this bill? Why are we to go
there along the line of military posts and take possession
of the only part of the territory fit to occupy-that part
lying upon the sea coast, a strip less than a hundred miles
in width; for, as I have already stated, the rest of the
territory consists of mountains almost inaccessible, and low
lands covered with stone and volcanic remains; where rain
never falls except during the spring, and even upon the
coast no rain falls from April to October, and for the
remainder of the year there is nothing but rain. Why, sir,
of what use will this be for agricultural purposes? I would
not for that purpose give a pinch of snuff for the whole
territory. I would to God we did not own it. I wish it was
an impassible barrier to secure us against intrusion of
others. This is the character of the country." This extract
will give an idea how dense was the ignorance concerning
Oregon less than half a century ago by a man presumptively
of more than average reading and information.
But a new force was about to appear on the scene that was to
demonstrate the falsity of the ideas held by many
pretentious and assuming statesmen; that was to prove that
the 3,500 miles of land lying between the nation's capital
and the mouth of the Columbia could be traversed by the
ordinary means of conveyance; that was to settle the
question of America's right to the country, and force
Congress to extend the protection and blessings of our form
of government over all the great country lying between the
two oceans. It was the home-seeking emigrants, with their
wives and children, flocks and herds, who in wagon trains
began to make the long pilgrimage across the plains. This
movement, on the basis of any magnitude did not begin until
after 1840. Then began that steady stream of young, vigorous
life which has annually flowed into Oregon for nearly half a
century, the end of which will not be seen for many years.
Deep causes existed, which moved this living stream to force
its way across rocky barriers and arid plains. Very
naturally the movement began in the region then known as the
West, and had its greatest strength in Missouri, Illinois
and Iowa. Trappers returning to St. Louis had sung the
praises of the lovely and fertile valley of Willamette,
where winter was unknown and the grass remained green all
the year round. The Western frontiersmen caught up the
refrain as it passed from cabin to cabin, and in a few years
the tale was an old one to the pioneers of the West. The
panic of 1837 and the consequent stagnation of business, had
produced a feeling of despondency in the West, and
especially in the States named where there was no market for
stock or produce; where credit, public and private was
destroyed, and a large number of persons were looking
anxiously about for means of subsistence. This state of
things helped very much to turn the public attention to
Oregon. Moreover, the publication of a book by Dr. Parker, a
missionary, who visited Oregon in 1835, a historical and
descriptive work by John Dunn, of the charming narratives of
Bonneville and Astoria by Washington Irving,
and of a letter written by Robert Shortess, who had come out
in 1839, were well calculated to fill the minds of the
romantic and adventurous with an interest in the country and
a desire to make the marvelous journey across the plains.
Moved by the impulses just recited, the first regular
emigration began the long journey to Oregon in the Spring of
1841. It consisted of one hundred and eleven persons. In the
Fall of the, same year, twenty-three families from the Red
River settlement of the Hudson's Bay Company came out and
settled on Cowlitz Prairie, some of them locating later in
the Willamette Valley. These were brought out as an offset
to the American settlers, but they were too few in numbers
to stem the tide setting Americanward, and were overwhelmed
by the American emigration of the next few years.
In 1842, the first regular emigrant wagon train started for
Oregon, consisting of sixteen wagons and one hundred and
nine people. No wagon wheel had ever cut the sod of the
country over which they proposed to go, and the region
through which they must pass was practically unknown as a
route for wagons. With infinite difficulty the party
advanced as far as the old trapping rendezvous on Green
River, where half of the wagons were dismantled. The other
half were taken as far as Fort Hall on Snake River, where
they were abandoned, owing to the deep-rooted belief that
wagons could not be taken through the Snake River Canyon and
Blue Mountains. In the train was Dr. Elijah White, who had
spent three years in Oregon in connection with the Methodist
Mission, and had now secured the appointment of Indian Agent
for the region West of the Rocky Mountains. Among others
were the well remembered names of A. L. Lovejoy, L. W.
Hastings, Medorum Crawford, J. R. Robb, F. X. Matthieu,
Nathan Coombs, T. J. Shadden, S. W. Moss and J. L. Morrison,
all of whom deserve to he placed in the front rank of
Oregon's pioneers. Lovejoy was a lawyer from Boston-the
first lawyer in the colony-and was prominent in its affairs
for the next twenty years, while Crawford afterwards held
various positions of honor and trust under the National and
State governments.
The year 1842 also witnessed the first successful attempt at
independent trade in Oregon. In July of that year, Captain
John H. Couch brought the ship Chenamus into the
Willamette River with a cargo of goods from Boston, which he
placed on sale at Willamette Falls. Prior to this event the
Hudson's Bay Company and the Mission had a monopoly of the
mercantile business in Oregon. Couch was so well pleased
with the country that he gave up the sea and settled in it.
Couch's addition to the city of Port-land is built upon the
land claim taken up by him in 1845.
Wherever the American citizen goes he carries with him the
great fundamental principle of representative democratic
government, and no better example of this great fact can be
cited than the conduct of the early settlers of Oregon.
Hardly had the first pioneers erected a shelter from the
inclemency of the season, when, true to their American
instincts, they missed and at once desired to supply the
protection afforded by civil institutions. Too weak for
self-government, naturally they turned to the United States
Congress to supply their first necessity. Their petition of
1838, is an admirable argument for the principle that good
order can only be assured by a "well judged civil code." In
1840, they eloquently lamented that they were without
protection which law secured. Their appeals ignored by their
government, they turned to themselves, to each other, and at
once agitated the question of establishing a temporary
government.
