Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 4.djvu/252

242 Wagon Road was located. The other to the north comes into the Willamette Valley via the Table Rock and down the Abiqua. Both these trails were used exclusively by the Indians of the east side of the range as means of coming into the Willamette Valley with the exception of the Mollalas, who were intermarried with the Warm Springs Indians and the Klamaths when the settlement by the whites began. The free trappers and the retired Canadians, who had settled as farmers and trading parties of the Hudson Bay Company, continued to use the trail up the North Santiam Valley until 1844-45, when, in addition to the country reached by it being "trapped out," furs fell in price in the general market so that it temporarily ceased to be used by the engagees of the Hudson Bay Company. In the summer of 1845 Dr. E. White, then a sub-agent of the United States for the Indians of Oregon, examined, or claimed to have examined, the route as a means of getting immigration into western Oregon more easily than by way of the Columbia River Pass. Either the doctor did not examine closely or was very easily discouraged; at all events no beneficial results followed. At this same time Stephen L. Meek was leading a party of the immigration of that year with the purpose of entering the Willamette Valley by that way. Meek had trapped on the head waters of the John Day River a few seasons previous, and had here met Canadians from the Willamette, who had come over the trail and doubtless thought he could easily find it; and there is little reason to doubt that he would have done so had it not been that by reason of their much wandering in searching the way from the mouth of the Malheur to the waters of the Des Chutes, the people he led were in such desperate straits that he had to flee for his life. There was another reason: a ridge makes out on the east side of the main range, but parallel with it, which completely