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OREGON EMIGRATING COMPANIES 207

in a high degree their characteristic American political ingenuity. 5

I. THE EMIGRATING SOCIETIES.

Many of the overland pioneers took the first step by forming in their home town an emigrating society. Neighbors fre- quently moved together. Fractions of whole communities were sometimes broken off and transplanted in the new soil of Oregon. These prospective emigrants naturally gravitated to each other and as naturally formed a society to study the project from all angles and to win recruits.

Societies for diffusing information about the West and en- couraging emigration had existed all through the East some time before actual pioneering began. One of the first of these, called the American Society for Encouraging the Settlement of Oregon Territory, was organized in 1829, at Boston, by Hall J. Kelley, the enthusiastic Massachusetts schoolmaster. Kelley's object was patriotic, being nothing less than the asser- tion by actual settlement in Oregon, of the United States' claims to that region which he considered far from perfect. He said, in fact, "The title to the Oregon territory and the exclusive right of occupancy yet remains vested in the aborig- ines . . . [the region] lies beyond the civil jurisdiction of the United States of America." 6 Active settlement by American citizens, however, would, he saw, help to validate whatever claims this country did possess. Two years later, he issued a "General Circular to all Persons of Good Character who wished to Emigrate to the Oregon Territory," proposing that they assemble at designated points Portland, Portsmouth, Concord, Boston, Worcester, Springfield, and Burlington in New Eng- land, and in New York City, Buffalo, Albany, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington and proceed thence to St. Louis, where the actual journey was to commence. 7

Hall Kelley's project was not put into operation, for the year,

5 F. O. M'Cown, Address, O. P. A. Transactions, 1884, p. 19.

6 Hall J. Kelley, General Circular, Boston, 1831, pp. 5, 13.

7 Ibid., p. 23.