I first moved to Portland, making my residence along the mighty Willamette in 2005, to go to a school named after Meriwether Lewis & William Clark. It was the bicentennial of their arrival at the Pacific Ocean in Oregon, which means it was also the 100th anniversary of the great Lewis & Clark Exposition in Northwest Portland. And as first-year college students we were constantly bombarded by metaphors relating our impending intellectual discoveries with more traditional notions of adventure.
The expedition party left the Illinois shore May 14, 1804 and proceeded up the Missouri. Their trip was not a pleasure trip. There were no auto courts and paved highways.
The core class was renamed Exploration and Discovery after our year. There was an abundance of trails and woods surrounding the campus so it was easy to persuade oneself of this feeling of amiable conquest.
The trail they blazed was through almost impassable paths and impenetrable forests, and months were spent on the way with scarce rations and clothing.
Wikipedia had reached my attention by this time, as well as everyone else’s, making You Time’s person of the following year. I learned many facts about Portland through Wikipedia, my favorite of course being the naming of the city, disputed by the two stakeholders. Pettygrove and Lovejoy each wished to name the new city after his respective home town. In 1845, this controversy was settled with a coin toss, which Pettygrove won in a series of two out of three tosses.
During this time a few American settlers came in, some of them sailors, and trapping was about the only way known by which they could make a living. Among these there were men who had been mechanics in early life. Their experience in following the streams entering the Willamette River made them realize that this country was destined to be more than a hunting preserve. They had visions of homes, institutions, and civilization at its best. Cattle were needed. A plan was formed and carried out by Joseph Gale, John Canan, Ralph Kilbourn, Pleasant Armstrong, Henry Woods, George Davis and Jacob Green, and the “Star of Oregon” was the result. She was a trim little sailing vessel, keel 48 ft. 8 in.; 53 ft., 8 in. over all; beam 10 ft., 9 in.
This feeling remains with me today, the feeling that in Portland I am on a symbolic path into the unknown, that, now that I live here again, the endeavors I pursue and the routes I take are meaningful, that we, each of us, as we labor away in our houses, head out our doors to work or otherwise explore, we are in pursuit of that which we are unfamiliar yet know some how to be of our destiny. And this is why I don’t feel the pull this January. The adventure happens in my head and on my feet.
Three other men deserve mention: Felix Hathaway, ship’s carpenter, Thomas J. Hubbard and J.L. Parrish, blacksmith doing the iron work, all under the direction of Gale. Equipment was needed and the Hudson’s Bay Company at Port Vancouver was applied to for it and first refused; fortunately, however, through the act of Captain Charles Wilkes, U.S.N., head of the Naval Exploring Expedition, in becoming responsible for it, all needs were supplied. The vessel was built on Swan Island and sailed for San Francisco, September 12, 1842, with Gale as Captain, and Canan, Armstrong, Green, a ten-year-old Indian boy, as crew, and one passenger.
There is no real need for travel anymore, no real need for anything. Everything is a luxury. No more cattle drives, wagon trails, putting everything you’ve got on a train and selling the rest to get a ticket. Everything is unnecessary, tourism, anachronism. The day of the adventurer is over. We don’t need him anymore.
The “Star” was sold for 350 cows. Gale and his men remained in California all winter. Early in 1843, aided by 42 men, they brought back 1250 head of cattle, 600 mares, colts, horses, and mules, and 3,000 sheep, thus breaking the monopoly of the Hudson’s Bay Company in the stock mentioned. The trip northward lasted 75 days. The honorable James W. Nesmith, pioneer of 1843, who knew Gale well, said of him in 1880, that he was “a man of great energy, brave, fearless, and honest, and that at no distant day that the enterprise he that he imagined would be recognized as the starting point of a great commercial marine.
Yet Portland welcomes more people now than this magnet of wanderlust ever did in its heyday. 8.1 million tourists visited the city in 2012. I moved here in the midst of a massive migration to “the Clearing” 10 miles downriver from Oregon City, one that ebbs as I type, or may have yet to even do so. Neighborhoods are unrecognizable from just ten years ago, from when I left the city in 2009. The condominium in construction defines the city in the way felled evergreens did at its beginning.
When his followers gradually backed away from the venture, Kelley decided to come to Oregon anyway, to look over the site he had chosen for his city. He was 42 years old when he left Boston, in November 1832. He stopped first at Washington D.C., for an unsuccessful attempt to persuade Congress to appropriate money for his expenses. He then travelled via New Orleans and across Mexico, at that time the best established land route to the Pacific. He had made much of the trip alone, or with a Mexican guide. He reached San Diego in April 1834. There, he found companions for the last leg of the trip, some men who were taking horses northward to sell in Oregon. Unfortunately, the Spanish authorities in California had reason to believe that some of the horses were stolen. The Spanish governor at Monterey sent a message by sailing ship to McLoughlin [of the Hudson’s Bay Company], informing him that a band of horse thieves were headed for Fort Vancouver.
Like most parts of the New World the story of the lower Willamette Valley is one of displacement, displaced persons displacing and replacing persons now, in turn, if not already, displaced. Land occupied by the Chinook became owned—the great idea of Western Civilization—and occupied by trappers and employees of the Hudson’s Bay Company here to capitalize on the endless “beaver farm” of the Oregon wilderness, displaced by American settlers of varied characterization, from the wagon trains of the 19th century to the Californian creation of the Oregon suburb in the 1970s, as a flood of upwardly mobile, white, future-condo-dwelling young urban professional rolls in with the next tide of history.
On his arrival at Fort Vancouver October 15, 1834, Kelley got an unenthusiastic welcome, which was hardly surprising. Besides the dispatch about the stolen horses, McLoughlin had also read Kelley’s own writings, which, from the Hudson’s Bay Company point of view, could only be regarded as subversive. American colonization would mean Britain’s ultimate loss of the country, and extensive agriculture the end of fur trapping. Despite these misgivings, the humanitarian McLoughlin took care of Kelley’s physical needs, but denied him social intercourse and required him to sleep in a hut outside the stockade.
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