NOTES ON THE COLONIZATION OF OREGON. 387 The sources for the study of this great emigration are now reasonably good and are constantly growing better. Their chief repository is the five volumes of the Oregon Historical Society, 1900 to 1904, inclusive (the sixth vol- ume is now nearly complete), supplemented by the publi- cations of the Oregon Pioneer Association, 1873 to 1886. Having elsewhere covered the narrative history of the movement with reasonable fulness, 1 I shall here simply indicate, for the convenience of students, the nature of the sources at our disposal. First in order is a series of brief documents relating to the manner of raising the emigration. It will be recalled that some writers, most conspicuously Barrows, in his History of Oregon, credit Dr. Marcus Whitman with hav- ing raised this great company for Oregon. Whitman left his Walla Walla mission early in October and reached the frontier of Missouri late in the following January or early in February. Our contemporary sources show, among other things, that prospective emigrants were be- ginning to enroll their names with the emigration com- mittees in western Missouri as early as September, 1842 ; that an association at St. Louis sent an emigration agent to Washington whose duty it was to watch the action of Congress, to keep the western people informed on the progress of the Linn bill for the organization of an Oregon territory and the granting of lands to settlers ; to send out literature bearing on the Oregon question to the emigra- tion committees scattered over the country from Pittsburg west ; and lastly, to secure if possible from the Secretary of War the promise of a company of troops to escort the emigrants on the march. The importance which western people attached to the passage of the Linn bill is illustrated by a number of 1 A history of the Pacific Northwest, New York, The Macmillan Company, 1905; see, especially, chapters XI, XII, and XIII.
