Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 18.djvu/75



Hall Jackson Kelley 53

him some of the men enrolled on the books of the Society. To this Wyeth answered on April 8 :

"I will in conformity with my first assurance given in my letter of the 23rd ulto. take charge of ten of your emigrants. Any further arrangement must be with the persons who are disposed to go out. My reason for this is that I am bound by my engagements to my Company and must consult them in regard to any arrangements on the subject but you need not by this understand me positively to refuse it as I do not know how the Co. will be disposed to act.

''I shall at all times be disposed to further an emigration to the Columbia as far as I deem, in actual knowledge of the country, that it will be for the advantage of the emigrants, but before I am better acquainted with the facts I will not lend my aid in inducing ignorant persons to render their situ- ation worse rather than better."^

Wyeth set out for Oregon in the spring of 1832. With him went his brother Dr. Jacob Wyeth, of Howell Furnace, New Jersey ; John Ball, a native of New Hampshire and a practic- ing lawyer of New York ; Calvin Tibbetts, a native of Maine and a stone-cutter, and J. Sinclair, of New York, all of whom had planned to go with Kelley. Sinclair left the party at Inde- pendence, Missouri, and Dr. Wyeth turned back at Pierre's Hole.*® Wyeth returned late in 1833, and led a second ex- pedition to Oregon in 1834. With him went a party of mis- sionaries led by Rev. Jason Lee and his nephew, Rev. Daniel Lee, who had been induced by the principal of Wesle3ran academy, at Wilbraham, Massachusetts, to respond to the call made by the Methodists for missionaries to the Indians in

2j Ibid., 51. It would seem that Kelley did not acknowled^ failure until the very fait; for while this correspondence was going on, he continued to advertise. As late M March 19 he announced in the National Intelligencer: "Those persons desirous of emigrating to Oregon in the first expedition* are notified that the com* mittee appointed for the purpose of making arrangements, have determined upon leaving on Monday, 2nd of April, for St. Louis. The expedition will leave St. Louis on the loth of May."

aSWveth, 51, sji Settlement of Oregon, 64-5; Colonization of Oregon, 6-7. Upon their arrival at Fort Vancouver, Ball opened the first school in that countrr. Later he and Tibbetts engaged in farming on a tract above the falls of the Wil- lamette, but gave up the attempt after the first yvar. Ball then returned to the East, but Tibbetts remained and taught school in the Canadian settlement.