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3 The Pacific Northwest Apart from trappers and seamen, the first “American” emigrants to the Pacific Northwest—Oregon, Washington, western Idaho, and eventually Alaska—arrived in the late 1830s. Baptist Jason Lee used a story circulating around St. Louis about Flathead people from Oregon searching for teachers of the Gospel to spearhead a spate of missionary emigration. The overland journey in 1836 of two missionary couples from New York State (Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, Henry and Eliza Spalding) demonstrated the feasibility of overland travel for women. (The Whitmans were killed eleven years later in a Cayuse uprising.) Substantial immigration had to wait until the US and England solved the problem of the US-Canada boundary; a potential war between the two nations, narrowly avoided by diplomacy in 1846, was eclipsed in the national imagination by the actual border war with Mexico. Having secured a border, the government implemented the Oregon Donation Law of 1850 (precursor to the Homestead Act), granting 640 acres to each individual on the ground to claim it (women included and double for married couples). The Act, presumably intended to fill the territory to keep it firmly under US control, started the overland exodus, whose rigors were far greater than travelers anticipated. Some mishaps were ultimately comic, as Belle Walker Cooke’s poem “Crossing the Plains” in her 1871poetry miscellany Tears and Victory reports: “Have you traveled through the sand, / Up the famous river Platte, / Where the bluffs are so romantic, / And the water tastes so flat! / Have you camped out in a hail-storm, / When the wind was blowing high, / Upsetting tents and wagons, / And making children cry? / Did you get up in the morning, / Feeling somewhat water-soaked, / And finding cattle missing, / Did you never get provoked? / And while you hunted cattle, / Did the little muddy creek, / Rise like a second deluge, / And keep you there a week?” (149–50). But there was also loss of cattle and much death from waterborne diarrheic diseases, usually all called cholera. There were Indian scares and occasional incidents of Indian thievery as the emigrants crossed through Indian territory with their herds of cattle, their pots and pans, their knives and tools. In A Pioneer’s Search for an Ideal Home (1925), Phoebe Goodall Judson wrote simply that crossing the plains in the early days was unforgettable because it was so “terrible” (69). Pioneer narratives, many of them published in old age when the overlanders became objects of sentimental veneration, were more often about getting there and settling in than about the Oregon trail itself, which had to wait for the Lewis and Clark Centennial to emerge as a national icon. In tandem with the Donation Act came the discovery of gold in California, which was certainly much more newsworthy than the tribulations and tedium of remote homesteading. As Frances Fuller Victor wrote in River of the West (1870), “the fame of the California climate, the fascinations of the ups and downs of fortune ’s wheel in that country, and many other causes, united to make California, and not Oregon, the object of interest on the Pacific coast; and the rapidity with which California became self-supporting removed from Oregon her importance as a source of supplies. Therefore, after a few years of rather extraordinary usefulness and consequent good fortune, the Territory relapsed into a purely domestic and very quiet young State. This change in its federal status was not altogether acceptable to Oregonians. . . . When a rival darling sprang into vigorous life and excessive favor, almost at once, their jealousy rankled painfully” (485–86). In addition, the US government failed to provide military protection against Indians; the more or less endemic hostilities between whites and Natives in Oregon were completely overshadowed by the sensational Comanche, Sioux, and Apache wars of the plains and Southwest. When the military finally did arrive, they were criticized for coming too late and doing too little—in fact for being mercenaries not public servants. War in the Pacific at the end of the century opened a narrative whose meaning for these writers lay less in the transpacific expansion of US boundaries than the belated recognition by the rest of the nation of Oregon’s importance. In 1908, for example, Alice Rollit Coe in her poetic miscellany, Lyrics of Fir and Foam, welcomed the US Navy in “Hail to the Fleet” as signifying a new chapter in the history of the Pacific Northwest: “We have won the West for the nation,— / We must hold it...

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