INTRODUCTION
Through most of the decade of the 1840s, the Indians of the Great Plains came to the camps along the Platte River in Nebraska to witness the strange migration along what they called the White Man’s Medicine Road. They sat their ponies in the noisy dawnings, caught the scent of bacon cooking, watched and listened as the camps broke, heard gunshot signals, the clank of pots and pans, the shouts and curses of teamsters, the wails and shrieks of hungry babies and skylarking children, the babble of people scurrying to their tasks. They heard the pop of white canvas sails billowing and the crack of long bullhide whips over the backs of oxen and mules drawing the creaking prairie schooners westward.
What the Indians saw we still see: trains of covered wagons headed west, the archetypal image of our archetypal American saga, and there can be little wonder why the story has such a grip on us. Those who made that epic journey toward the setting sun had all manner of reasons for going—cheap land, escape from debt, the lure of gold, the craving to teach Christianity to the heathens, the sheer adventure of it all—but whatever their motives, they acted out a dream common to all of us: the dream of a new beginning in a new place.
So captivating is this epic that there is a natural tendency in books on the subject to dwell on the pioneer “experience,” to stitch together the journals and diaries of those who actually made the harrowing overland journey. For example, Merrill J. Mattes, whose The Great Platte River Road is among the undisputed classic works on the westering emigrants of the 1840s, listed over 1,000 sources for his work, and examined something like 700 eyewitness journal-diary narratives.
But in the research and writing of Pacific Destiny I kept imagining what the Indians of the Platte must have wondered: Where were these people going, and why?, and it seemed natural to me to begin where the emigrant dream really began. In this I was influenced by the lucky circumstance of having visited the end of the trail before traveling over the beginning of it.
During a trip to Portland a few years ago, I was able to visit the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, drive south along the Willamette River to spend a few hours in Oregon City, and even travel up the Columbia, the fabled “River of the West,” on a sternwheeler.
Oregon history is infectious, and I bought books at world-renowned Powell’s, collected maps and pamphlets, and caught the spirit of the place—even in the space of a week.
That trip came back to me during an October 1998 drive from Saint Louis to Fort Laramie, Wyoming, roughly following the Oregon Trail route taken by Francis Parkman in 1846.
Parkman did not reach the end of the Oregon Trail—he traveled about 40 percent of it, to a point sixty miles west of Fort Laramie—but he saw the trail better than anybody in his time, saw it as a symbol of the westering movement and of what that movement signified for the future. “Great changes are at hand,” he wrote, “the buffalo will dwindle away, and the large wandering communities who depend on them for support must be broken and scattered. The Indians will soon be abased by whiskey and overawed by military posts; so that within a few years the traveller may pass in tolerable security through their country. Its dangers and its charms will have disappeared altogether.”
With the benefit of 152 years of history and technology behind me, I traveled his route, passing in tolerable security through the Indians’ country, the dangers of which are restricted to flat tires or spewing radiators on lonely roads. I had two books with me: Parkman’s The Oregon Trail, and Gregory M. Franzwa’s indispensable guide for the modern traveler, The Oregon Trail Revisited. I stopped frequently to consult both, especially to examine the landmarks, sites, and swales described so meticulously by Franzwa. And I daydreamed, from the Museum of Westward Expansion at the Saint Louis Arch through a tour of the Fort Laramie National Historic Site, about the people who pointed their wagons toward the Pacific Rim and rolled free of the rude civilization of Missouri to take the first tentative steps of their 2,000-mile walk to the northwest coast of America.
By the time I dropped away from the trail to the town of Wheatland and made my way south to Cheyenne and home, I was thinking of those who blazed that trail thirty years and more before Parkman traveled it, and the story of that Land of Giants, the Oregon Country, before the name “Oregon” was concocted (a fascinating tale by itself).
In Pacific Destiny, by taking a somewhat chronological approach to the story, starting at trail’s end and ending with the trail’s beginning, my ambition has been to answer the questions I imagined the Platte River natives asking: Where are all these people going and why? and Why Oregon? This book seeks to tell the story of the original Oregon dreamers and pay proper homage to them: sea dogs and explorers; voyageurs, trappers, and traders; visionaries and missionaries; adventurers; misfits; opportunists—all pioneers in the purest sense of the word.
In no other episode in western American history is there a more beguiling assortment of characters than those figuring in the long journey to the lands north of the 42nd parallel and west of the Shining Mountains, the people who made the Oregon Trail not only possible, but inevitable. Only history, never fiction, could give us such figures as Dr. John McLoughlin, the White Eagle laird of Fort Vancouver; Captain Jonathan Thorn, doomed skipper of the frigate Tonquin; that “fuming, vainglorious little man,” Duncan McDougall, who cowed the Indians with his “phial of wrath”; Wilson Hunt and Robert Stuart, the original Astor overlanders; Hall J. Kelley, the half-mad dreamer who crossed Mexico to get to the Oregon Country after his followers double-crossed him; Nat Wyeth, the Cambridge iceman, and Francis Parkman, the Cambridge scholar. Not even a poet could have invented the adventures of the missionaries Jason Lee, Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, Samuel and Eliza Parker; the mountain men Jedediah Smith, Broken Hand Fitzpatrick, Ewing Young, and Joe Meek; or of such minor players as Miss Jane Barnes, the first woman to visit the Oregon coast, and Reverend Herbert Beaver (“a good name for a fur-trade station,” as Peter Skene Ogden dryly observed), who had the misfortune to say something scandalous about John McLoughlin’s wife.
Nor is there, to my mind at least, a more compelling tale in our Western history than that of the V-shaped ripples made by certain aquatic animals, especially Lutra enhydris marina and Castor canadensis, which aimed us toward our Pacific destiny and which bound together this astonishing melange of early dreamers.
A final note: There are necessary anachronisms in the pages that follow. Obviously there was no “Oregon” or “Oregon Country” when Ferrelo and Drake sailed up the Pacific coast of the continent in the sixteenth century; there were no Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Utah, or Nevada when the Astorians crossed the Rocky Mountains, or even during Frémont’s early expeditions and, as in the opening paragraph of this introduction, no Nebraska, at least as a state, until 1867. But for easy reader orientation in the often confusing geography of the era of western expansion, I have used out-of-time state and place names to avoid such tedious repetitions as “the future state of Washington” and “what would later become the state of Oregon.”
Among generous friends whose assistance of various kinds made it easier to write this book, I want to thank Richard S. Wheeler of Livingston, Montana; James Crutchfield of Franklin, Tennessee; Candy Moulton of Encampment, Wyoming; George Skanse, proprietor of the incomparable Book Gallery in El Paso, Texas; and my friends at the Village Inn, where some of the book was written: Celia Davidson, Evelyn Anderson, Tony Garza, Michelle Garza, Aldo Monterrey, Lisa De Haro, Travis Doctor, Nicole Smith, Julee Morrissy, and Marie Giger.
—DALE L. WALKERNovember 18, 1999
Pacific Destiny copyright © 2000 by Dale L. Walker
Bear Flag Rising copyright © 1999 by Dale L. Walker
