Page:History of Oregon volume 1.djvu/140

Rh a curse, and missionary efforts are like a burst peat-bog sowing its black mud over the land!

While the missionaries were building, ploughing, and harvesting, teaching, preaching, and enduring, and becoming somewhat incorporated with the French settlers, a new element, and one in some respects less tractable, introduced itself in an unexpected manner. It was the party of Hall J. Kelley and Ewing Young, which arrived in the Willamette Valley late in October 1834. Something has been said of Kelley in the History of the Northwest Coast, but his appearance in Oregon at this time was a feature in the early history of the country demanding more than a passing notice here.

Kelley's object was to found an American settlement, and assert the rights of the United States government to the sovereignty of the country. Disappointed in his scheme of colonization, he set out with a few persons in 1833 to visit Oregon, travelling by a circuitous route through Mexico. At New Orleans he separated from or was deserted by his party, and proceeded alone to Vera Cruz. He was robbed, and suffered many hardships, but was not deterred from prosecuting his design.

Reaching California, he fell in with a number of American adventurers, chief among whom was Ewing Young, a native of Knox County, Tennessee, a cabinetmaker by trade, a man of fine intelligence and nerve united to a grand physique, and too restless and fond of new experiences to remain beside a turning-lathe all his life. As early as 1828–9, Young had visited California with a trapping party, hunting on Tulare Lake and San Joaquin River. Returning to New Mexico, he married a Taos woman, and was soon back in California with another party of trappers, which in 1831 broke up at Los Angeles, leaving Young to follow his bent among the friars and native Californians.