Reportage from the east
A reporter for the New Orleans Picayune visited Westport, Missouri, just outside Independence and published in the issue of November 21, 1843, the following description:
“Gathered in the town were between six and eight hundred persons, few of them expected, or thought, of ever returning to the States again. They have with them their wives and children, and aged, dependent relatives.”
“It was a curious mingling of the whimsical with the wild men running about the prairie in long strings so that the all-important business of forming a government seemed very much like the merry schoolboy game of “snapping the whip.”
“It was really very funny to see the candidates for the solemn council of ten, run several hundred yards away, to show off the length of their tails “running for office” is certainly performed in more literal fashion on the prairie than we see the same sort of business performed in town”
About the same time the 1843 wagon train was choosing its officers, the settlers in Oregon were lining up in two strings at Champoeg to make their decision to form a Provisional Government. That is when “Big Joe Meek” defied Robert's Rules of Order by roaring, “Whos for a divide?”
Four months later, the journal of March 21, 1844, published in Louisville, Kentucky, put the thoughts of many into an editorial called “Oregon Craze.”
We would not be subjected to the innumerable tortues of a journey to Oregon for all the soil that its savage hunters ever wander over. That such wretched territory should excite the hopes and cupidity of the people of the United States, inducing them to leave comfortable homes for its heaps of sand, is indeed passing strange.
“Russia had Siberia and England her Botany Bay, and if the United States should ever need a country to banish its rogues and scoundrels, the utility of such a region as Oregon will be demonstrated.
“Until then we are perfectly willing to leave this magnificent country to the indians, trappers and buffaloes that roam its sandbanks and by the side of its rushing and non navigable waters A man embossed of the loveliness of Oregon is as crazy as a coon in the last agonies of starvation.”
But despite this gloomy picture, emigrants continued to prepare. Once they decided, few turned back. Out across the prairie, the Oregon Trail was becoming more plainly marked by the ruts left by each rolling wheel. You can still see some of them.
This year, as Oregon celebrates 150 years of statehood, there’s a strong element of fierce independence among most Oregonians, but it might be going a little far to describe them as “rogues and scoundrels.” Maybe a few rascals, mischief-makers, and hooligans, but not rogues and scoundrels.