Page:A History of the Pacific Northwest.djvu/143



Dacre, which had been expected to reach the Columbia early in the summer, during the salmon fishing season, came in tardily the day after the land party arrived. Nothing could then be done about fishing, so Wyeth sent her to the Hawaiian Islands with a cargo of timber, while he spent the winter in trapping beaver on the streams south of the Columbia, principally the Des Chutes. By the middle of February he was back at Vancouver, the guest of McLoughlin. His trading plans were now all ruined. Nothing could be done with the fur trade in opposition to the Hudson's Bay Company. His trading establishment at Fort Hall did not prosper, the fisheries and other commerce amounted to little. Wyeth lingered in the country till the summer of 1836, when he returned to Boston and soon closed out his business in Oregon.^

But there was also another motive, very different from the motive of the fur trader, which was drawing men into the great western wilds and on toward the Pacific Ocean. This was the desire on the part of

1 Wyeth kept a regular journal, which has been preserved in the family of one of his descendants. This manuscript was sent from Massachusetts to Oregon and published (1899), together with a large number of Wyeth's letters, under the editorial direction of Professor F. G. Young, secretary of the Oregon Historical Society. The volume forms an invaluable source for the study of conditions in Oregon, and the state of the western fur trade, during the years covered. A very rare book on the first part of the first Wyeth expedition is the little volume by John B. Wyeth, published at Boston in 1833. Only a few copies are now in existence. It has been reprinted under the editorship of Reuben Gold Thwaites, LL.D. in his series Early Western Travels.