NOT MUCH METHOD TO THEIR MADNESS

Oregon or the Grave: A fresh perspective on the aftermath of the Lewis & Clark Expedition (Randol B. Fletcher, July 2003, Oregon Magazine)

On the first day of May 1839 a group of 16 armed and mounted men rode up to the courthouse in the town square of Peoria, Illinois, bowed their heads, pledged themselves never to desert one another, turned and rode west to the cheers of local citizens who had turned out to see them off. Their stated intent was to colonize the Oregon country on behalf of the United States and drive out the English fur trading companies operating there. Their organizer and elected captain was a Peoria lawyer, Thomas Jefferson Farnham and he called his men the Oregon Dragoons. They carried with them a flag emblazoned with the motto Oregon or the Grave, a gift from Mrs. Farnham.

The seed for the expedition had been planted the previous fall when Rev. Jason Lee visited Peoria on a national speaking tour about the Oregon country. Lee was a Methodist missionary who had been living and working among the Native Americans in the Willamette Valley since 1833. Lee was in the vanguard of missionaries that were sent to Oregon in response to an 1831 visit to the United States by a delegation of four Native Americans representing the Flathead and Nez Perce tribes of the Pacific Northwest. These tribes had contact with Catholic Iriquois Indians who were working with French-Canadian trappers in the Northwest.

These meetings aroused the Northwest tribes' curiosity about the white man's religion practiced by the Iriquois. Their delegation was dispatched to seek counsel from the trusted white men who had visited the Oregon country some 25 years earlier: Merriweather Lewis and William Clark. Lewis was long dead, but Clark was Superintendent of Indian Affairs in St. Louis. News of the meeting between Clark and the Northwest Indian delegation was sensationalized in East Coast newspapers, and churches mobilized to send missionaries in response. Lee's Methodists were the first to arrive in the Oregon region.

Hard to see NASA scrawling "Mars or the Grave" across the nose cone of a rocket, eh? Posted by Orrin Judd at July 5, 2003 9:53 AM