In the thirties the missionaries began their slow process of colonization. Their reports helped to keep the Oregon Question alive in the minds of those “back home.” President Jackson sent Lieutenant W. A. Slacum on the first official visit to Oregon. Slacum made a thoroughgoing and favorable report to Congress in 1837, recommending that we firmly hold out against Britain and demand the land as far as the forty-ninth parallel at least, lest the States should lose the fine waterways of Puget Sound. Slacum’s report brought the matter of Oregon’s admission to the States before Congress once more, and it remained there through the next ten years.
All the Congressional agitations, the speeches and reports, the stories in newspapers, the letters home from missionaries, began their slow and powerful infiltration through the people who were to pioneer this remote section. Around middle-western fireplaces, at corn huskings and quilting bees, Oregon began to be the most exciting topic of conversation. People discussed the fertility of the Willamette Valley, the advantages of the Columbia River for commerce, the great forests and the salmon-filled streams. Times had been hard in the frontier country and people were restless. Slavery was beginning to cause agitation. Above all there was that characteristic American wish to move out into the unknown. People in the sheltered midwestern valleys caught fire from the pictures of a great poetic landscape to the west; a landscape of vast plains, high mountains, swift turbulent rivers, and, at the farthest reach, a great ocean. Some few were also undoubtedly influenced by a patriotic wish to keep Great Britain from acquiring the land and the waterways explored for the United States by Lewis and Clark and Robert Gray.
The settlers were for the most part men interested in establishing homes, clearing land, raising cattle. The emigration of 1843 is particularly memorable because from this group—along with the settlers who had come in prior to that year—was composed the membership of the famous “wolf meeting” in the Willamette Valley. This was a gathering of settlers to discuss ways of protecting their herds from predatory animals; and during the meeting a resolution was adopted “that a committee be appointed to take into consideration the propriety of taking steps for the civil and military protection of the colony.” This was followed by the Champoeg meeting of May 2, 1843, at which picturesque Joe Meek forced into the open the opposing wishes of the French-Canadian settlers—still bound by sentiment to the Hudson’s Bay Company—and the newcomers from the States. With his height, his great voice, and his commanding gestures with his coonskin cap he succeeded in getting the two extra votes needed to organize a provisional government the American way, and became a figure for murals and town park statues down the years.
Thus once again the American method of forming a “government by compact” took place: “We the people of Oregon Territory for purposes of mutual protection and to secure peace and prosperity among ourselves agree to adopt the following laws and regulations until such time as the United States of America extend their jurisdiction over us.” One cannot read the concluding words of the message of the executive committee elected in this wilderness in 1844 without being moved: . . . “and in conclusion, we desire to impress your minds that although the colony is small and its resources feeble, yet the life, rights and liberties of an individual here are of equal value to him as to one in the city of Washington or London. And it is a duty which devolves on you and on us to use as much discretion, vigilance and caution in maturing and adopting measures for promoting the interests of the little colony, as if we expected our names and acts would be enrolled in the pages of history, or inscribed on pillars of stone when our day and generation shall have passed away.”
Jesse Applegate, the “sage of Yoncalla,” drew up in 1845 a revised draft of the first governmental laws, and under this for four years the “sturdy, sober, order-loving pioneers” conducted their lives.
No American colonists went north into the state which is now called Washington until after the Oregon emigration of 1844. This emigration numbered among its members an intelligent and well-to-do Quaker, named George Bush—considered a mulatto by early settlers, but according to family records of East Indian descent—and a tough-fibred Kentuckian, Michael Simmons. These men and their families wintered north of the Columbia and eventually explored around Puget Sound and took up claims not far from the present town of Olympia.
The Hudson’s Bay Company had had a flourishing farm on Nisqually flats for some years but there were no other settlements and the general opinion was that England intended to claim the lands north of the Columbia. The prolonged and rather dubious negotiations between Daniel Webster, as secretary of state, and Lord Ashburton, a special British commissioner, have led many people to claim that Webster was quite willing to relinquish northern “Oregon” to Great Britain, if Great Britain would force Mexico to sell us California.
A good deal of bitter feeling about the Oregon Question seemed to focus itself in communities in the Mississippi Valley. In 1843 one hundred delegates met in Cincinnati for an “Oregon convention” and there adopted a resolution to the effect that the United States had a right to the western country “between the parallel of forty-two degrees on the south and fifty-four on the north.” This was the origin of the famous “Fifty-four Forty or Fight” slogan which elected the Democrat, James K. Polk, to the presidency in 1844 and which was finally settled in 1846 after an outbreak of hostilities with Britain was narrowly averted by making the forty-ninth parallel the northern boundary.
Immediately after the settlement of the quarrel with England the Oregon colonists expected to be welcomed into the Union with open arms, but they had inserted into their provisional constitution a clause which read that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime” should ever be permitted in their territory. This roused the opposition of such Southern leaders as Calhoun, and the Congressional session of 1846–47 closed without providing in any way for this new colony.
The Whitman massacre had stirred the Oregon settlers and forced them to a sharpened realization of their need for help from the home government. During that famous winter of 1848 Joe Meek had been dispatched to Washington with news of the colonists’ plight. His great virility, masculine good looks, frontier clothes, tall tales, and way with the ladies—aided slightly no doubt by kinship with President Polk—had all of Washington at his feet from the moment he entered the genteel Willard Hotel in his rough costume and announced to the timid clerk that he was “Minister Plenipotentiary and Envoy Extraordinary from all Oregon to the United States of America.” The Whitman massacre was thus in no small measure responsible for the passing of the bill to make Oregon a Territory in 1848.
After this period three major events built up the Pacific Northwest and gave it its present character: the gold discoveries in California, Idaho, Montana, and British Columbia; the settlement of the Indian wars; the coming of the railroads.
Discovery of gold in California changed that state’s history almost overnight, bringing it from a feeble position of rivalry with the Territory of Oregon to one of easy dominance. The adventurous Forty-Niners have assumed a place in American history which many historians consider they ill deserve in comparison with the more sober missionaries, explorers, traders, and settlers who opened up the Oregon country. Even the Oregon Trail became for many the California Trail, but in recent years the northern states have begun to realize how easy it is for them to compete in glamour of history and beauty of landscape with their highly publicized southern neighbor.
Many of the men who did not go south from Oregon to make a fortune in the goldfields made it by staying home and supplying roaring San Francisco with timber for buildings and all kinds of farm produce, as well as oysters and fish. The Puget Sound region, having also prospered indirectly by the California gold discoveries, grew strong enough to seek independence from the Oregon settlers—claiming that