Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 21).djvu/16

10 Northwest Coast; but the inhabitants of the interior of our country long found the Rockies and their outlying deserts insurmountable barrier to Western passage.

Fur-traders finally led the way into the heart of the mountains. The Rocky Mountain Fur Company, under General William Ashley, began in 1822 that series of explorations and excursions that opened the highland fastnesses to the men of the West, and paved the way for the tracing of the Oregon Trail.

But it was bona-fide settlers, not fur-traders or trappers, that captured Oregon for the United States. Among the earliest of these were members of the company escorted by Captain Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth, whose home was in the shades of academic learning at Cambridge, Massachusetts. Wyeth, however, owed the inception of the enterprise to another New Englander, his quondam fellow-townsman, Hall J. Kelley. An enterprising schoolmaster, the narratives of Lewis and Clark and of the Astorian participants fired his imagination with a desire to behold the Far West, while the joint-occupancy treaty with Great Britain (1818) aroused in him a patriotic desire that the region watered by the Columbia might be posses by his native land. Throughout more than a decade he published pamphlets and articles for the local press, glowing with praise of Oregon, and succeeded in organizing the Oregon Colonization Society, from among whose members he hoped to lead an expedition to the far-away land of promise.

Among those who hearkened to him was the young Cambridgian, Wyeth, whose mind, more practical than Kelley's, but as yet uninformed as to the real difficulties of the enterprise, conceived the project of a great commercial enterprise to the Northwest. In the winter of 1831-32, Wyeth formed his party of pioneers and formulated his plans. With the opening of the spring a vessel laden with supplies