Pacific Destiny: The Three-Century Journey to the Oregon Country by Dale L. Walker

Author:Dale L. Walker [Walker, Dale L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2002-06-29T04:00:00+00:00

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Samuel Parker left Ithaca on March 14, 1835, and reached Saint Louis three weeks later via Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Wheeling, Cincinnati, and Louisville, staying with church families, distributing tracts, holding services in the ladies’ cabins of steamers, talking to whoever would listen about his forthcoming journey.

Whitman was awaiting him and had made preliminary arrangements with the help of local churchmen to attach Parker and himself to a party of trappers heading up the Missouri to the summer rendezvous on the Green River. Leading the brigade was a capable if somewhat boozy trader named Lucien Fontenelle. This man, a Louisianan, had twenty years’ experience trapping along the Missouri and in the Rockies; skirmishing with Blackfeet, Snake and Crow horse raiders; and confronting Hudson’s Bay agents over “rights” to certain rich beaver streams. He was not enamored of the idea of escorting church folk to rendezvous, but he was persuaded, probably by Whitman, who could be quite persuasive.

They traveled upriver by steamer to Liberty, the Missouri frontier town just above Independence, and were delayed there three weeks. Fontenelle used the time to enlarge his trapping party to fifty men and put together a pack train of horses and mules, three yoke of oxen, and six light wagons. The wagons were to carry trade goods and supplies to rendezvous and furs and buffalo hides (which were fetching more on the market than beaver hides) back to Missouri. Parker and Whitman occupied themselves by visiting a nearby Mormon settlement and riding “twenty miles out of the United States” to Cantonment Leavenworth in Kansas, where Parker preached to the garrison.

At first, Fontenelle and his rough-hewn mountaineers treated both New Yorkers with contempt. Parker in particular seemed an easy target for their sneers. To the filthy, foul-mouthed, buckskin-ned trappers sucking their pipes at the campfires the reverend cut a comic figure in his plug hat, black suit, white neck stock, and nose-in-the-air manner. He seemed to think he was in charge of the expedition, and it was galling to watch him standing aloof and unhelpful, never bending his back to any camp labor, parceling out chores to his companion then finding fault with everything done, including the doctor’s “unskillful management” of their horses and the single mule they had purchased in Liberty. Whitman took everything in stride. He felt fortunate to be at the brigade camp waiting to jump off into savage lands, soon to see the Indian country of the Upper Missouri, the great Shining Mountains, and the mysteries that lay beyond them. He was learning from Fontenelle and his men, felt he was fulfilling his destiny, knew that he would be useful.

Whitman’s utility was proven sooner than he expected. The caravan departed Liberty on May 15 and made its way upriver to Council Bluffs, crossed the Missouri in bull boats, and camped at Bellevue, a few miles below Omaha. There in the rain-soaked bottomlands Fontenelle and several of his men fell ill with cholera. The Asiatic strain of the disease had ravaged Europe in the

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