military post, and thence carried forward and distributed by army officers and soldiers. Among the arrivals were many children, made orphans en route, and it was in the interest of these and like helpless ones that Frederick Waymire petitioned congress to amend the land law, as mentioned in the previous chapter. Those who came this year were bent on speculation more than any who had come before them; the gold fever had unsettled ideas of plodding industry and slow accumulation. Some came for pleasure and observation.[1]
Under the excitement of gold-seeking and the spirit of adventure awakened by it, all the great north-western seaboard was opened to settlement with marvellous rapidity. A rage for discovery and prospecting possessed the people, and produced in a short time marked results. From the Klamath River to Puget Sound, and from the upper Columbia to the sea, men were spying out mineral wealth or laying plans to profit by the operations of those who preferred the risks of the gold-fields to other and more settled pursuits. In the spring of 1850 an association of seventy persons was formed in San Francisco to discover the mouth of Klamath River, believed at the
- ↑ Among those who took the route to the Columbia River was Henry J. Coke, an English gentleman travelling for pleasure. He arrived at Vancouver Oct. 22, 1850, and after a brief look at Oregon City sailed in the Mary Dare for the Islands, visiting San Francisco in Feb. 1851, thence proceeding to Mexico and Vera Cruz, and by the way of St Thomas back to England, all without appearing to see much, though he wrote a book called Coke's Ride. Two Frenchmen, Julius Brenchly and Jules Remy, were much interested in the Mormons, and wrote a book of not much value. Remy and Brenchly, ii. 507–8.
F. G. Hearn started from Kentucky intending to settle in Oregon, but seized by cholera was kept at Fort Laramie till the following year, when with a party of six he came on to the Willamette Valley, and finally took up his residence at Yreka, California. Hearn's California Sketches, MS., is a collection of observations on the border country between California and Oregon.
Two Irishmen, Kelly and Conway, crossed the continent this year with no other supplies than they carried in their haversacks, depending on their rifles for food. They were only three months in travelling from Kansas to the Sacramento Valley, which they entered before going to Oregon. Quigley's Irish Race, 216–17. During Aug. and Sept. of this year Oregon was visited by the French traveller Saint Amant, who made some unimportant notes for the French government. Certain of his observations were apocryphal. See Saint Amant, 139–391.
