Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 6.djvu/392

386 386 JOSEPH SCHAFER. veniently summarized in House Documents, 29th Cong., 1st Sess.( 1845), Vol. I: Repts. of Committees, Rept. No. 13. The policy began to bear fruit at once, for in the spring of 1842 Fremont was commissioned to explore the best route as far as South Pass, though nothing was done about planting posts. At the same time the government yielded so far to the demands of Americans already settled in Ore- gon as to send out Dr. Elijah White, a returned missionary, as Indian sub-agent for that Territory. White was in- structed to go to the Columbia overland, and to take with him as many prospective settlers as he could enlist along the frontier. He gathered a party of about one hundred and twenty, and made a successful journey, although they took their wagons only as far as Fort Hall. White's " Ten Years in Oregon " contains a reminiscent narrative of these events; while the journal of Medorem Crawford, printed by the Oregon Historical Society, is our exclusive primary source for the incidents of the journey. The emigration of the following year, 1843, is the cen- tral fact in the colonizing movement. It resulted in the opening of the wagon road all the way to the Columbia, the planting of nearly a thousand American settlers in the Willamette Valley, the definite inauguration of an agri- cultural and commercial economy, and, above all. in the firm establishment of an American pioneer State on the Pacific. The coming of these emigrants in the fall of 1843 has always been looked upon by old Oregonians as the beginning of the distinctively American period in Pacific Coast history. As the coming of, Winthrop's party of Puritans to Massachusetts Bay in 1630 largely deter- mined the history of New England, so the arrival on the Columbia of Burnett's wagon train and Applegate's "Cow- Column" are events of fundamental significance in the history of the Pacific Northwest.