of 1844, and of those prominent in that year's movement in the next chapter.
CHAPTER II.
Estimates of Leaders of 1843 and 1844.
Believing no other single individual exerted as large an influence in swelling the number of tome-building emigrants to Oregon in the years 1843 and 1844 as Peter H. Burnett, I would ask the reader to refer to Burnett's statement of the considerations that impelled him to migrate to Oregon. (This statement is found in the opening pages of the following paper, pages 64 and 65.
His motives were patriotic as well as personal and pecuniary.
Mr. Burnett received the full consent of his creditors and set to work most vigorously to organize a company, visited surrounding counties, making speeches wherever he could get an audience, and succeeded beyond his own expectations.
Without any disparagement of many able men who became Mr. Burnett's fellow emigrants to Oregon in 1843-44, it is, I believe, true that he was all round the best equipped man for the work to be done in organizing American dominion over the Columbia River Valley. There were five other men who rose above the average of the emigration of 1843 to cope with the conditions they were to meet and overcome the three Applegate brothers, Daniel Waldo, and J. W. Nesmith. Another man whose patriotic zeal for the settlement of Oregon had sped him on his way from Oregon to Washington and Boston during the time when Mr. Burnett was engaged as he tells, was feeding a fever of enthusiasm for the settlement of Oregon. Dr. Marcus Whitman was making his wonderful winter journey to convey his personal knowledge of the feasibility of reaching Oregon with wagons to the national administration, handicapped by his obligation to missionary association whose ignorant action did much to blight the just fame of this most patriotic missionary. ([1]) It was natural for Peter H. Burnett to
- ↑ Doubtless the discovery by Captain Gray of the mouth of the Columbia, and the founding of Astoria and its history by Irving ["Astoria" by Irving was not published until 1886]], animated Hall J. Kelley and indirectly brought to and left in Oregon a few Americans who were here as permanent
