Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 22.djvu/58



48 C. F. COAN

and agriculture were organized in 1834, 1836, 1838, and 1841, preceding the period of the coming of the American settlers by a few years, and at the beginning of the decline in the quantity of beaver procured by the trappers, and the decline in price. Both Whitman and De Smet felt that the flood of emigrants would flow into the country long before the work of teaching the Indians the ways of settled life could be accomplished, which proved to be the case.

Before the Annexation of Texas and the Mexican Cession there was no outlet for the frontier population so desirable as Oregon. This resulted in an immigration across the Plains to the Pacific Northwest between 1842 and 1847 of about seven thousand people. The influx of this population, and the delay of the United States in organizing the territorial government of Oregon until 1849, resulted in the occupation of the Wil- lamette Valley by settlers without any provision whatsoever being made for the Indians. The western Indians were not strong enough to prevent the settlement of their country. The Indians east of the Cascade Mountains, however, were of a different type. They refused to allow settlers to stop in the interior; emigrants must go on to the coast. This feeling against the settlers, and a desire to drive them out of the country, resulted in the Whitman Massacre and the Cayuse Indian War. The population had arrived before the military protection of the Federal government. This, together with the fact that during the period of settlement, 1842-1847, there was no government, other than a provisional one, organized by the settlers, resulted in a conflict over the occupation of the land prior to the organization of the territorial government by the United States.

Indian relations in Oregon had thus reached a rather ad- vanced stage at the time the United States took up the matter of adopting an Indian policy and yet the Commissioner of Indian Affairs wrote to I. I. Stevens that there was very little information in the Indian Office, May 3, 1853, on the subject