Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 19.djvu/68

56 suffered the lack of a local market with long and costly outlet to that more remote, while the Willamette and lower Columbian settlements had the early ship arrivals with the steady demand of a Hudson's Bay Company. Later on and in 1843. greater facilities opened up there to increased population by the old Emigrant Road from Fort Hall. Lewis and Clark believed the Multnomah the Willamette now "watered the vast extent of country as far perhaps," they say, "as the waters of the Gulf of California." Vigilant explorers they were, yet to them it was the terra incognito, or "dark Continent."

The first white man's voice from that benighted region was in a cry of distress. This was in 1828, when Jedediah Smith, that intrepid American explorer and trapper, suffered an Indian massacre of most of his party when crossing the lower Umpqua river en route from California up the Coast heavily laden with furs valued at $40,000.

He with two others safely reached Vancouver. He was .a most remarkable man, and the first white man to lead a party across the Rocky Mountains to California.

Two years later the Hudson's Bay Company established their first trading post in Southern Oregon upon the Umpqua River opposite Elk Creek and named it Fort Umpqua.

Other trappers from the Willamette visited the country in 1832, and later, but it was not until 1837 that Ewing Young, a name afterwards noted in Oregon pioneer annals, with a party of other settlers from the Willamette, traveled through the country for purposes in aid of civilization. They were traveling to California to purchase cattle for Willamette settlers, and though they later returned over the same trail with a large herd of cattle, they were several times attacked by hostile Indians on the Klamath and Rogue Rivers, but more severely at Rock Point, on the latter river in September, where one of the whites was killed 1 and two others wounded, who