Massachusetts. Wyeth, however, owed the inception of the enterprise to another New Englander, his quondam fellow-townsman, Hall J. Kelley. An enterprising schoolmaster, the narratives of Lewis and Clark and of the Astorian participants fired his imagination with a desire to behold the Far West, while the joint-occupancy treaty with Great Britain (1818) aroused in him a patriotic desire that the region watered by the Columbia might be possessed by his native land. Throughout more than a decade he published pamphlets and articles for the local press, glowing with praise of Oregon, and succeeded in organizing the Oregon Colonization Society, from among whose members he hoped to lead an expedition to the far-away land of promise.

Among those who hearkened to him was the young Cambridgian, Wyeth, whose mind, more practical than Kelley's, but as yet uninformed as to the real difficulties of the enterprise, conceived the project of a great commercial enterprise to the Northwest. In the winter of 1831-32, Wyeth formed his party of pioneers and formulated his plans. With the opening of the spring a vessel laden with supplies was to start around Cape Horn, to meet the overland adventurers at the mouth of the Columbia. Wyeth, meanwhile, was to lead a company of hale young men across the continent, who should hunt and trap on the way, and be ready on arrival to provide a cargo of furs for the vessel, and later to develop the products of the Oregon country.

Wyeth's original plan for the land party included forty companions, but he finally set forth from Baltimore with an enrollment of but twenty-four. Arrived in St. Louis, he learned for the first time of the vast operations that Western fur-traders were already carrying on among the mountains—men to whom the experience of a life-time had taught the conditions and the methods of trade beyond the frontier. Nothing daunted, however, young Wyeth joined the yearly caravan of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, and under its protection proceeded to that company's rendezvous at Pierre's Hole. There the majority of his men, finding the hazard greater than they had anticipated, turned back; but the leader, with a handful of followers, pressed on, only to learn in the Oregon country that his vessel had been wrecked on a Pacific reef, and his cargo of supplies lost.

Received at Fort Vancouver with hospitable courtesy on the part of the Hudson's Bay people, Wyeth passed the winter in exploring the region and learning its resources. He became more than ever eager to exploit the great possibilities lying before him, and returned across the continent to Boston, making en route the famous journey—commemorated by Washington Irving in his Scenes in the Rocky Mountains—down the Bighorn and Yellowstone in a bull-boat. While still among the mountain men, Wyeth confidently entered into a contract with Milton Sublette and the latter's partner, Thomas Fitzpatrick, to carry out to them their yearly supplies the following season.

Intent on this and other projects, our adventurer hastened on to Boston, organized the Columbia River Fishing and Trading Company, and secured another vessel to proceed to Oregon by sea. This time Wyeth's party was trebled, and with a following of over seventy he started from St. Louis on March 7, 1834. Among his companions were the naturalists Nuttall and Townsend, and the missionaries Jason and Daniel Lee, all of whom were seeking the Oregon country on errands of their own. The fate of Wyeth's second expedition need not here be recounted, further than to state that the contract being repudiated by the Rocky Mountain men, Wyeth established a trading post in eastern Idaho, which he later (1837) sold to the Hudson's Bay Company and proceeded on to Oregon. After indefatigable efforts, and fatigues seldom paralleled, Wyeth finally (1836) abandoned the country and his ambitious project, and settled down to the humdrum role of ice-merchant in Cambridge, amassing a moderate fortune in shipping that useful commodity to the West Indies.

In recent years the journals and correspondence of Nathaniel J. Wyeth, recounting the experience of his two expeditions, have come to light and been published by the Oregon Historical Society. These documents, however, furnish but terse and bald statements of events, whereas detailed narratives appeared in works published many years before. The historian of the first expedition was a kinsman of its leader—John B. Wyeth, a young man of eighteen summers, who had previously been to sea and acquired a taste for adventure. After the long journey into the mountains, young Wyeth became dissatisfied with the hardships and ill prospects of the venture, and joined those malcontents at Pierre's Hole who voted for return, thus abandoning his leader before the journey was more than two-thirds completed. Upon arrival at Cambridge, the narrative of the younger Wyeth's adventures sped around the circle of his acquaintances, and reached the ear of Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse, a well-known local physician and scientist.

Waterhouse desired to discourage the prevalent wild schemes of Western emigration, and published Wyeth's experiences as a useful warning against such projects. The little book as issued from the press bore the title: Oregon; or a Short History of a Long Journey from the Atlantic Ocean to the Region of the Pacific by Land, drawn up from the notes and oral information of John B. Wyeth (Cambridge, 1833). It is not difficult for the reader to distinguish the work of the young traveller from that of the older scientist—the literary finish, the allusions, the moralizing and animadversions, of this composite book, are certainly the elder's; the racy adventures, the off-hand descriptions, surely those of the younger collaborator.[1]

John B. Wyeth's publication was distinctly annoying and hurtful to the plans of his cousin, and caused the latter to characterize it as "full of white lies." It is in the animus rather than the words themselves that the deceit is to be found; but disregarding its injudicious criticisms and comments, Wyeth's book is a readable work of travel, written in the full flush of health and spirits experienced by a vigorous youngster on a journey taken more as an escapade than with serious purpose. How far this motive carried him, is witnessed by the recitation of practical jokes in Cincinnati, and by the disasters of the home journey, when, abandoned by his companions, he was turned adrift in plague-stricken New Orleans to shift for himself. As a picture of early life on the plains and in the mountains, the account is graphic and attractive, as exampled by the descriptions of the scene at the rendezvous—also that at the conference between the Blackfoot chiefs and the envoys of the whites, previous to the battle of Pierre's Hole. Vivid pictures of the fur-trade leaders, and swift glimpses of friendly and hostile tribesmen, jostle the description of what was in effect a New England town-meeting in Pierre's Hole, and the report of an Indian battle famous in the annals of the West. The Wyeth narrative was printed privately, for circulation among friends, and therefore in a small edition. Examples are consequently now extremely rare, and it is believed that its reprint in the present series will be welcomed by students of early Western exploration.

Nathaniel J. Wyeth's second expedition was even more fortunate in its historian. John K. Townsend, a well-known Philadelphia physician and naturalist, had long been desirous of exploring the far western country in the interests of science. Hearing from his friend, Thomas Nuttall, then botanist at Harvard College, that he was