Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 5.djvu/58

48 every one of the many positions of honor and trust worthily and well.

H. A. G. Lee was a man of different temperament from Nesmith. Quite as ambitious to serve he attracted young men whom Nesmith's tendency to domineer repelled. Lee's room in the chief hotel at Oregon City in 1845-46 was almost a common rendezvous for young men looking upward, and he had much of the gentle teacher's talent characteristic of Jesse Applegate, leaning more to military service. His dropping out of Oregon life was a loss to the young community. That occurred after the discovery of gold in California when we lost many good citizens by murder and by reckless exposure in placer mining, with a general result to Oregon of almost suspended industries for a few years.

The leaders of the emigration of 1844, were mostly a second installment of frontiersmen from the South rather than the East, who had been largely induced to make the venture by addresses delivered by Mr. Burnett, and by the publication of Whitman's winter journey. There were a few more men of mature age among them from east of the Ohio, and of single men also.

The whole of both years' emigration, so far as the writer knew them, were conspicuous for individuality of character and measure of acquirement. Even in business grasp, the difference between Peter H. Burnett and Daniel Delaney, though both Tennesseeans, was immense. Burnett, always a student of books and men, and always working upwards, a failure in his first efforts as a merchant he became a good success as a lawyer, a leader of people, a lover of freedom, and a statesman ardent in his convictions as to the value of the movement to Oregon, he used his pen freely to his fellow citizens east of the Rocky Mountains, yet lost no opportunity to mend his personal fortune, paying off principal and interest of his debts; in a word, lived in high endeavor and died in high honor.

Mr. Delaney, understood to be the man who came from East Tennessee and defined the locality he left as "High upon Big Pigeon, near K. Bullen's Mill," was a remarkably close economist in rearing live stock as well as in getting the produce of