Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 1.djvu/78

66 His Adventures in the far West recalled in association with the family home near Boston. "In Historic Mansions and Highways Around Boston," by Samuel Adams Drake, published by Little, Brown & Co., there is a sketch of the family home of Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth, the early explorer of Oregon. "Emerging from Mount Auburn," the author writes, "we take counsel of the swinging sign pointing to the lane leading to Fresh Pond, which is found to be the natural source of numerous underground streams, which are found wherever the earth is penetrated to any depth between it and Charleston." The writer continues:

Time out of mind the shores of the pond belonged to the Wyeths, and one of this family deserves our notice in passing. Nathaniel J. Wyeth was bred and born near at hand. Of an enterprising and courageous disposition, he conceived the idea of organizing a party with which to cross the continent and engage in trade with the Indian tribes of Oregon. He enlisted one and twenty adventurous spirits, who made him their leader, and with whom he set out from Boston on the first of March, 1832, first encamping his party on one of the harbor islands, in order to inure them to field life. The organizers provided themselves with a novel means of transportation — no other than a number of boats, built at the village smithy, and mounted on wheels. With these boats they expected to pass the rivers they might encounter, while at other times they were to serve as wagons. The idea was not without ingenuity, but was founded on a false estimate of the character of the streams, and of the mountain roads they were sure to meet with.

Wyeth and his followers pursued their route via Baltimore and the railway, which then left them at the base of the Alleghanies, onward to Pittsburg, at which point they took steamboat to Saint Louis, arriving there on the eighteenth of April. Hitherto they had met with only a