their followers into a rude military and civic organization for our trip; and Morrison was the first Captain of four elected, Rees was the First Sergeant with the duties of Adjutant, and I was elected as Corporal. Honors were easy, but the proceedings were conducted in serious earnest.
The family men of the body were almost all frontier settlers in Missouri, sons and grandsons of frontier settlers of Kentucky and Tennessee, tracing back to Virginia and North Carolina. From Captain Morrison I learned that most of them (himself included) had been influenced in their determination to go to Oregon by a series of addresses delivered at various point* in 1842 in Missouri, then known as "Platte Purchase by Pete Burnett," as they called him. Personally, Morrison's reasons for the trip, given to his family relatives and friends, in my hearing the day before leaving his Missouri domicile, and which I fully endorsed, were: First, he believed that Oregon of right belonged to the United States, and he was going to help make that right good. Second, he supposed there were many of the native race in Oregon who needed instruction to a better condition of life than was then theirs; and, though no missionary, he had no objection to help in that work. Third, he was unsatisfied to live longer so far from the markets, that there were few products he could raise whose value in the world's markets would pay cost of production and shipment especially when the producer, who would neither own nor be a slave, had to compete with breeders and owners of slaves. For these reasons he was "going to Oregon where there would be no slaves, and all would start in life even." In this declaration Mr. Morrison was a representative of the class of anti-slavery frontiersmen who came in 1843 and 1844 and took dominion over Oregon as American citizens from the British occupancy of the Hudson Bay Company who had held trade dominion over the country for twenty-five years. I was not only glad but proud to be an assistant to this family I had joined. My declared intent of citizenship was carried inside my vest as my most precious possession.
Most of the families marshaling under Gilliam as a leader were animated by sentiments so closely akin to those annunci-
