Page:History of Oregon volume 1.djvu/68

Rh society was not good. After the failure of the Astor adventure, and previous to 1834, few persons had visited the Columbia River except those in some way connected with the fur-traders. Wyeth's first company of twelve, including himself, was the only party of the kind and number to enter Oregon. Two years previous, David Douglas, a Scotch botanist, had visited the territory and had spent some time roaming over its mountains; and rarely had the river been entered by a foreign or American vessel.

Another constituent of early Oregon society appears at this juncture, and if not so respectable as the fur magnates; so religious as the missionaries, so learned as the scientists, or so order-loving as the French Canadians, united with the small American element it became a power in the land. It made its appearance in the form of ten persons coming with a band of horses from California, and led by Hall J. Kelley, who once figured on paper as the would-be founder of a new Pacific empire.

East of the Blue Range, and in and about the Rocky Mountains, were American trappers and traders, who from their wandering and precarious mode of life could not be accurately numbered, but were in all probably ten or twelve hundred, to whom were opposed equal numbers owing allegiance to the Hudson's Bay Company. These were at that time hardly to be spoken of as component parts of any Oregon community, but some in time added themselves to those who had come from the United States.

Thus has been outlined a picture of the Oregon Territory in 1834, at which time this History of Oregon begins.

In regard to the word Oregon, its signification and origin, I will here give what is known. Its first appearance in print was in the book of Jonathan Carver, who therein represents that he heard from the natives in the vicinity of the head-waters of the Mississippi, to which region he penetrated as early as 1766, of a great river flowing into the great western ocean, and called by