this name was eventually applied to the territory drained by this great western river. The name, like the whole story, may have been of Spanish or Indian origin, or it may have been purely fanciful.[1]
The Spaniards made no effort to colonize north-western America or to develop its trade with the Indians, but toward the end of the 18th century the traders of the great British fur companies of the North were gradually pushing overland to the Pacific. Upon the sea, too, the English were not idle. Captain James Cook in March 1778 sighted the coast of Oregon in the lat. of 44°, and examined it between 47° and 48° in the hope of finding the Straits of Juan de Fuca described in Spanish accounts. Soon after the close of the War of Independence American merchants began to buy furs along the north-west coast and to ship them to China to be exchanged for the products of the East. It was in the prosecution of this trade that Captain Robert Gray (1755–1806), an American in the service of Boston merchants, discovered in 1792 the long-sought river of the West, which he named the Columbia, after his ship. By the discovery of this stream Gray gave to the United States a claim to the whole territory drained by its waters. Other explorers had searched in vain for this river. Cook had sailed by without suspecting its presence; Captain John Meares (c. 1756–1809), another English navigator, who visited the region in 1788, declared that no such river existed, and actually called its estuary "Deception Bay"; and George Vancouver, who visited the coast in 1792, was sceptical until he learned of Gray’s discovery.
Spanish claims to this part of North America did not long remain undisputed by England and the United States. By the Nootka Convention of 1790 Spain acknowledged the right of British subjects to fish, trade and settle in the parts of the northern Pacific coast not already occupied; and under the treaty of 1819 (proclaimed in 1821) she ceded to the United States all the territory claimed by her N. of 42°. But even before these agreements had been reached, Alexander Mackenzie, in the service of the North-west Company, in 1793 had explored through Canada to the Pacific coast in lat. about 52° 20′ N., and Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, American explorers acting under the orders of President Jefferson, in 1805–1806 had passed west of the Rocky Mountains and down the Columbia river to the Pacific Ocean. Both British and American adventurers were attracted to the region by the profitable fur trade. In 1808 the North-west Company had several posts on the Fraser River, and in the same year the American Fur Company was organized by John Jacob Astor, who was planning to build up a trade in the West. In 1811 the Pacific Fur Company, a kind of western division of the American Fur Company, founded a trading post at the mouth of the Columbia which they called Astoria, and set up a number of minor posts on the Willamette, Spokane and Okanogan rivers. On hearing of the war between England and the United States, Astor’s associates, deeming Astoria untenable, sold the property in October 1813 to the North-west Company. In the following month a British ship arrived, and its captain took formal possession of the post and renamed it Fort George.
Soon after the restoration of peace between England and the United States by the treaty of Ghent (1814), there arose the so-called “Oregon question” or “North-western boundary dispute,” which agitated both countries for more than a generation and almost led to another war. As that treaty had stipulated that all territory captured during the war should be restored to its former owner, the American government in 1817 took steps to reoccupy the Columbia Valley. The British government at first protested, on the ground that Astoria was not captured territory, but finally surrendered the post to the United States in 1818. The United States was willing at the time to extend the north-western boundary along the forty-ninth parallel from the Lake of the Woods to the Pacific, but to this the British government would not consent; and on the 20th of October 1818 both nations agreed to a convention providing for the “joint occupation” for ten years of the country “on the north-west coast of America, westward of the Stony [Rocky] Mountains.” In the following year, as already stated, Spain waived her claim to the territory north of 42° in favour of the United States. In 1821, however, Russia asserted her claim to all lands as far south as the fifty-first parallel. Against this claim both England and the United States protested, and in 1824 the United States and Russia concluded a treaty by which Russia agreed to make no settlements south of 54° 40′, and the United States agreed to make none north of that line. From this time until the final settlement of the controversy the Americans were disposed to believe that their title was clear to all the territory south of the Russian possessions; that is, to all the region west of the Rocky Mountains between 42° and 54° 40′ N. lat. In 1827 the agreement of 1818 between Great Britain and the United States as to joint occupation was renewed for an indefinite term, with the proviso that it might be terminated by either party on twelve months’ notice.
For the next two decades the history of Oregon is concerned mainly with the British fur traders and the American immigrants. The Hudson’s Bay Company absorbed its rival, the North-west Company, in 1821, and thus secured a practical monopoly of the fur trade of the North and West. Its policy was to discourage colonization so as to maintain the territory in which it operated as a vast game preserve. Fortunately for the Americans, however, the company in 1824 sent to the Columbia river as its chief factor and governor west of the Rocky Mountains Dr John McLoughlin (1784–1857), who ruled the region with an iron hand, but with a benevolent purpose, for twenty-two years. On the northern bank of the Columbia in 1824–1825 he built Fort Vancouver, which became a port for ocean vessels and a great entrepôt for the western fur trade; in 1829 he began the settlement of Oregon City; and, most important of all, he extended a hearty welcome to all settlers and aided them in many ways, though this was against the company’s interests.
In 1832 four Indian chiefs from the Oregon country journeyed to St Louis to obtain a copy of the white man’s Bible; and this incident aroused the missionary zeal of the religious denominations. In 1834 Jason Lee (d. 1845) and his nephew, Daniel Lee, went to Oregon as Methodist missionaries, and with McLoughlin’s assistance they established missions in the Willamette valley. Samuel Parker went as a Presbyterian missionary in 1835, and was followed in the next year by Marcus Whitman and Henry H. Spalding (c. 1801–1874), who were accompanied by their wives, the first white women, it is said, to cross the American continent. Whitman settled at Wai-i-latpu, about 5 m. W. of the present Walla Walla and 25 m. from the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Fort Walla Walla; and Spalding at Lapwai, near the present Lewiston, Idaho. Roman Catholic missions were established near Fort Walla Walla in 1838. In this year Jason Lee returned to the Eastern states and carried back to Oregon with him by sea over fifty people, missionaries and their families. It is significant, if true, that part of the money for chartering his vessel was supplied from the secret-service fund of the United States government.
As early as 1841 the Americans in Oregon began to feel the need of some form of civil government, as the regulations of the Hudson’s Bay Company were the only laws then known to the country. After several ineffectual attempts a provisional government was finally organized by two meetings at Champoeg (in what is now Marion county, north-east of Salem) on the 2nd of May and on the 5th of July 1843. The governing body was at first an executive committee of three citizens, but in 1845 this committee was abolished and a governor was chosen. In
- ↑ There have been many ingenious, but quite unsatisfactory, efforts to explain the derivation of the word Oregon. They are enumerated at length in Bancroft’s History of Oregon, vol. i. pp. 17–25. It seems that after the publication of Carver’s book the word Oregon did not appear again in print until William Cullen Bryant employed it in his poem Thanatopsis, in 1817. It was applied to the territory drained by the Columbia river for the first time, perhaps, by Hall J. Kelley, a promoter of immigration into the North-west, who in memorials to Congress and numerous other writings referred to the country as Oregon.
