There had been tales told of trappers passing between Oregon and California as early as 1820 by the land routes, but the earliest record of such a trip is that of Jedediah Strong Smith, the American who went from San Francisco Bay via the Sacramento valley and the coast trail in 1828.[1] The earliest of the Hudson's Bay Company brigades reaching as far south as California was led by Alexander Roderick McLeod and guided by Turner, of the Smith party. They reached the Sacramento valley in the summer of 1829.[2] Ewing Young, another American, went up the coast in 1829. He met a Hudson's Bay party in the San Joaquin under command of Peter Skene Ogden.[3] This party had entered California from the east, after a detour through Utah.
A. R. McLeod, for whom McCloud's River is named, met disaster on the trip north by the inland route over the Siskiyous in 1829. Nevertheless, the company sent another party. By 1832 yearly brigades entered California for trapping purposes and to trade with the Indians for pelts. One of these parties set out from Fort Vancouver in August, 1832, under command of John Work. He learned that a party of Americans had carried on a large trade with the Indians. When he reached California he found the Indians hostile, influenced, as he supposed, by the Spaniards. The Russians hindered the party and would sell them no supplies.[4]
Ewing Young, in the fall of 1832, found the San Joaquin already hunted, and on the American River met Michel (La Framboise) with a large force of Hudson's Bay Company trappers.[5] In March, 1833, John Work applied to Figueroa for a permit to get supplies for his trappers, and in April Padre Guiterrez, of Solano, complained of the presence of forty men at Suisun calling themselves hunters but willing to buy stolen cattle and otherwise disposed to corrupt the neophytes. Hall Kelley,
- ↑ Sullivan, Travels of Jedediah Smith.
- ↑ Cleland, History of California, American Period, 81.
- ↑ California Historical Quarterly, I, 114, 118; [[Oregon Historical Quarterly/Volume 24|Oregon Historical Quarterly, XXIV, 24.
- ↑ Lewis and Phillips, Journal of John Work, 59.
- ↑ Oregon Historical Quarterly, XXIV, 32.
