Portland State University PDXScholar Dissertations and Theses Dissertations and Theses 1-1-2011 The Pursuit of Commerce: Agricultural Development in Western Oregon, 1825-1861 Cessna R. Smith Portland State University Follow this and additional works at: https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds Let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Recommended Citation Smith, Cessna R., "The Pursuit of Commerce: Agricultural Development in Western Oregon, 1825-1861" (2011). Dissertations and Theses. Paper 258. https://doi.org/10.15760/etd.258 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of PDXScholar. Please contact us if we can make this document more accessible: [email protected]. The Pursuit of Commerce: Agricultural Development in Western Oregon, 1825-1861 by Cessna R. Smith A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in History Thesis Committee: William L. Lang, Chair David A. Horowitz David A. Johnson Barbara A. Brower Portland State University ©2011 ABSTRACT This thesis examines how the pursuit of commercial gain affected the development of agriculture in western Oregon’s Willamette, Umpqua, and Rogue River Valleys. The period of study begins when the British owned Hudson’s Bay Company began to farm land in and around Fort Vancouver in 1825, and ends in 1861—during the time when agrarian settlement was beginning to expand east of the Cascade Mountains. Given that agriculture in Oregon, as elsewhere, would eventually reach a standard of national development, and given that most of Oregon’s immigrants arrived poor and lacked the farm implements needed for subsistence, the question this study asks is what methods and motivations guided Oregon’s first agrarian settlers to improve their industry? It is the central premise of this study that commerce was the sine qua non of agricultural development, and that commercial gain was the incentive that underpinned the improvements necessary to its progress. The question itself necessarily involves physiographical and climatological conditions, existing and potential markets, and a merchant class whose commercial motivations were beyond doubt. Two additional matters that weigh substantially through most of this paper need to be mentioned: First, because not all farmers were commercially-oriented, the focus is on individuals, including merchants, whose entrepreneurial activities contributed the most to agriculture; second, the discovery of gold in California in 1848, and in southern Oregon in the early 1850s, had a huge and lasting influence on Oregon agriculture and on the overall economy. i DEDICATION For my beautiful daughters Stacey, Tracey, and Kelsey. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Special appreciation goes to my advisor, Professor William L. Lang, whose optimism, on several occasions, renewed my determination to finish this project. He was always available to share his immense knowledge of both the Pacific Northwest and the finer points of thesis writing. His immediate recognition of an off-topic idea, or any other errant path taken, was very important as a reminder to me that focus and consistency are integral to a manuscript of this nature. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract / i Dedication / ii Acknowledgements / iii List of Figures / v List of Abbreviations / vi Introduction / 1 Chapter One: Agriculture Begins: Hudson’s Bay Company and the Settlement of the Willamette Valley / 20 Chapter Two: Oregon’s First Farm Cooperatives: Willamette Cattle Company (WCC), Joseph Gale Venture, and the Oregon Producers' Exporting and Importing Company (OPEIC) / 46 Chapter Three: 1848: Gold, Growth, Towns and Transportation / 68 Chapter Four: Agricultural Conditions / 88 Chapter Five: Umpqua and Rogue River Valleys / 108 Chapter Six: County and State Agricultural Societies / 123 Conclusion / 136 References / 141 iv LISTOF FIGURES Figure 1. Map of Western Oregon (1851) / 155 Figure 2. Map of Lower Willamette Valley (1834) / 156 v LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS DLC Donation Land Claim HBC Hudson’s Bay Company OFGA Oregon Fruit Growers’ Association OHQ Oregon Historical quarterly OHS Oregon Historical Society OPEIC Oregon Producer’s Exporting and Importing Company OSAS Oregon State Agricultural Society PNQ Pacific Northwest Quarterly PSAC Puget Sound Agricultural Company TOPA Transactions of the Oregon Pioneer Association WCC Willamette Cattle Company vi Introduction Every business in life is mainly dependent, for its prosperity, upon the labors of agriculture. —Jesse Buel, The Cultivator (August 1836) The history of Oregon agriculture is essentially a history of the pursuit of commercial gain. From the cattle company created by settlers in 1837, to the county and state agricultural societies they created between 1853 and 1861, their overarching goal was individual and community economic enrichment. This thesis seeks to know how the pursuit of commercial gain affected the course of agricultural development in the Willamette, Umpqua, and Rogue River Valleys by examining the subjects that measure its progress: economic organizations; improvement of plants, livestock, and cultivation practices; farm groups and individuals; gold mining; towns; and transportation. The Willamette, Umpqua, and Rogue River Valleys comprise the area of study. Primary focus is on the Willamette Valley because it is where Oregon pioneers first began to settle, and it is where agricultural development first began.1 The Willamette Valley lies between the Cascade Range to the east, the Coast Range to the west, and surrounds the Willamette River as it flows north from near Eugene to its confluence with the Columbia River. Approximately 130 miles long and between 20 and 30 miles wide for most of its length, it first caught 1 Joseph Shafer, ed., “Documents Relative Warre and Vavasour’s Military Reconnoisance [ sic ] in Oregon, 1845-6,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 10 (March 1909). Overland immigrants began to settle the Willamette Valley in the early 1830s, while settlement of southern Oregon valleys did not begin until well into the 1840s. 1 the attention of pioneer farm immigrants because of its productive soil and the navigability of the Willamette River and its many tributaries. 2 American settlers who immigrated to Oregon’s Willamette Valley in the 1830s through the 1850s were motivated by what historians have come to recognize as an overlapping mix of concerns and attractions most commonly related to health, economics, and free land, and the great majority of them were either farmers or those who depended on farming for economic reasons. 3 In his study of migration patterns, William A. Bowen, in The Willamette Valley: Migration and Settlement on the Oregon Frontier (1976), found that the majority of immigrants came from the Midwest and Upper South, and of the Midwesterners a majority had either immigrated from or had cultural ties to the Upper South,4 Clarence H. Danhof in Change in Agriculture: The Northern United States, 1820-1870 (1969), and John Mack Faragher, in Women and Men on the Overland Trail (1979) argue that free land and commercial opportunity were the primary motivators for Oregon’s immigration. 5 William A. Bowen argues that physical health and economics were 2 D. W. Meinig, The Great Columbia Plain: A Historical Geography, 1805-1910 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), 96-124 passim; William A. Bowen, The Willamette Valley: Migration and settlement on the Oregon Frontier (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976), 6-7. 3 Bowen, 17-24. 4 Bowen, 24-27. For this paper, and elsewhere generally acknowledged, the Midwest states are: Illinois; Iowa; Kansas; Indiana; Michigan; Minnesota; Missouri; Nebraska; North Dakota; South Dakota, Ohio; and Wisconsin. Upper South states are: Kentucky; Tennessee; Virginia; and North Carolina. Peter G. Boag, Environment and Experience: Settlement Culture in Nineteenth Century Oregon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 30, found that of the children of 161 Donation Land Claimants who filed in the Kalapuya Valley between 1850 and 1855, only 3 percent were born outside the Midwest and Upper South. Boag considered the Kalapuya to be a microcosm of the Willamette Valley “Historically, culturally, and environmentally,” (p. 42). 5 Clarence H. Danhof, Change in Agriculture: The Northern United States, 1820-1870 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), 149-150; John Mack Faragher, Women and Men on the Overland Trail (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 17-18 . 2 coequal motivations, but that once settlement was established the “typical Oregon farm was a commercial enterprise.”6 In Oregon’s agrarian community, the word Improvement commonly referred to the pursuit of better crops, livestock, methods of production, and laborsaving implements. Although the idea was often expressed in conjunction with agricultural sciences and the virtues of men who worked the soil, its principal meaning was more accurately understood as a method for commercial gain. 7 Nowhere is this dual meaning more clearly acknowledged than in nearly all of many speeches delivered at agrarian events, as in this excerpt from a speech made by Yamhill Agricultural Society President Ahio Watt at his annual county fair in 1859: 8 We have again met in … rivalry [competitive exhibits]. … we have brought samples from our herds and fields; our orchards and gardens; our dairies and households. It is a source of pleasure, as well as profit, to meet