33.8 America: a.d. 1801 to 1900  (Page 17/31)

The west

The original Oregon Territory included the present day states of Oregon, Washington and Idaho and the province of British Columbia. The final border settlement with Great Britain was made in June 1846 under Polk's administration. Backwoodsmen from Iowa, Missouri, Illinois and Kentucky made up most of the early white settlers and they were originally led there by the Rocky Mountain beaver hunters known as "Mountainy men". Indian troubles occurred from time to time, including the Cayuse War of 1847. The Cayuse Indians

The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints, commonly called the Mormon Church, was responsible for settling Utah. Brigham Young, heir to Joseph Smith, who was murdered in Illinois in 1844, reached Utah with his followers in 1847. Included were some 4,000 English converts. By 1848 over 5,000 people had arrived and the Utah Territory was organized in 1850 with Young as territorial governor.

The development of Wyoming was closely allied with the fur trade and the great westward migrations. When John Colter, a trapper in the Wyoming Mountains, first returned to St. Louis with tales of the great canyons and steaming geysers of Yellowstone, he was ridiculed. Soon, however, the "Mountainy men" entered the country and helped establish the western route to Oregon through South Pass. The trail has hundreds of graves of those who died in blizzards, from starvation, disease and Indian attacks. In the first half of the century Colorado, part of the Spanish territory, was occupied chiefly by Indians, with only the occasional white hunter. The Comanches, Cheyennes, Arapahos and the Kiowas combined forces in 1840 to combat the invasion of their grounds and the settlement of Colorado by whites was accompanied by massacres, lootings and subsequent reprisals.

In Arizona the Pima Indians, whose language was of the Uto-Aztecan linguistic family, were joined early in the century by the Maricopa of the Hokan-Siouan linguistic stock, along the Gila River. That new alliance allowed them to severely defeat their old enemy, the Yumas, by 1857. (Ref. 38 )

We have mentioned in another connection that the Russians visited San Francisco in 1806 and that they established a short-lived Fort Ross some 100 miles north of the Golden Gate in 1812. In 1826 Yankees arrived overland in the persons of Jedediah Smith and his fellow fur trappers, but colonization remained chiefly Mexican until the 1840s. In 1834 Governor Figueroa removed the San Francisco Solano mission from Franciscan monk control and put Mariano Vallejo in charge. Some 250,000 acres of land thus soon fell to his personal ownership and eventually he had 50,000 cattle, 24,000 sheep and 8,000 horses of which 1,000 were broken to saddle. He later supported the United States take-over, although he was put in prison for awhile and lost most of his land.