Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 13.djvu/88

 80 T. C. ELLIOTT Hist, of N.-W. Coast). He entered the employ of the North- west Company in 1811 (just one hundred years ago), and his daring career as a clerk in that Company on the Columbia and elsewhere was known to Donald Mackenzie, with whom prob- ably Governor Geo. Simpson of the Hudson's Bay Company consulted as to the difficulties and importance of the Snake Country trade. At any rate Peter Skene Ogden (a name now familiar and honored in Oregon history), is the next fur trader to be noticed as a traveler over this trail. He assumed command of. the Snake Country expedition in the winter of 1824 and set out from Flathead Fort about the middle of December of that year at the head of "the most formidable party that ever set out for the Snakes/' consisting of "25 .lodges, 2 gentlemen, 2 interpreters, 71 men and lads, 80 guns, 364 beaver traps 372 horses." His first year was disastrous in that nearly half his men deserted under persuasion of a party of Rocky Mt. Fur Company (American) trappers, but for all that he passed through this valley en route to Fort Nez Perces about the first of November, 1825, with a goodly num- ber of beaver skins in his packs. The story of the career of Peter Skene Ogden could well occupy an entire address. He is the man whose name became tradition around Great Salt Lake in Utah so that upon the arrival there of the Mormons the present city of Ogden was christened in his honor ; the man who first explored the region of the Humboldt river, who first recorded the name of Mount Shasta, who first explored the central and southern Oregon country which is now being so rapidly developed ; the man who hastened up the Columbia immediately after the massacre of the white people at the Wai-i-lat-pu Mission in 1847 and ransomed the fifty or more women and children held in cap- tivity there by the Cayuse Indians. This story has been re- cently published by the Oregon Historical Society and is avail- able to such as desire it at your Public Library. You are more especially concerned in his associations with this particular Val- ley and the mountains which surround it and streams which flow through it. The Wilson Price Hunt party passed through