Hall J. Kelley - Expedition To Oregon

Expedition To Oregon

In 1831 he sought to undertake an expedition to the west with Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth of Boston, and they assembled a party of several hundred men. Delays forced the last-minute abandonment of the plan. Wyeth went west in 1832 without Kelley, having attracted investors in Boston.

In 1833, Kelley set out with a smaller party for the West, traveling first to New Orleans Most of the men left the expedition, at great personal expense to Kelley. Hoping to salvage his expedition, he sailed south to Veracruz. After many hardships, he recruited a party of U.S. citizens from Monterey, then under Mexican rule. The party crossed Mexico to California, where Kelley, along with Joseph Gale, joined the party trader Ewing Young. He was moving into the Oregon Country backed by the missionary Jason Lee.

Kelley traveled northward by horse train with the Young party in 1834. On the trip north, Kelley fell ill with malaria among the Coquille (tribe) tribe in the Umpqua River valley near present-day Roseburg, Oregon. He was rescued by Michel LaFramboise, a Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) employee at Fort Umpqua near present-day Tyee. Kelley wrote of the experience:

"Captain (LaFramboise) engaged an Indian chief to take me in a canoe, forty or fifty miles down the Umpqua. At first the chief declined, saying, that the upper part of the river was not navigable. Finally, in view of a bountiful reward, he consented to try... At the landing, the faithful Indian received of my property, a fine horse, saddle and bridle, a salmon knife and a scarlet velvet sash, and was satisfied."

Kelley and the party arrived at the Columbia River on October 27, 1834. In Oregon, Kelley and his party found themselves excluded by John McLoughlin, district chief at Fort Vancouver of the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC). At this time, the HBC was very powerful in the Northwest and Canada; Great Britain and the United States disputed over the boundary and control in the Oregon Country. Both had private companies involved in fur trading.

By the time he arrived in the northwest, Kelley had fallen ill and become discouraged with the expedition. After Kelley had recovered, McLoughlin gave him passage to Hawaii in 1835. From there, he found a ship and sailed home to Boston.

Kelley continued to write newspaper articles and memoirs based on his trip that encouraged Americans to settle Oregon. On February 16, 1839, parts of memoirs of his Oregon trip were presented to the United States Congress in a report on the region. Kelley's report was bound with finely engraved map, showing the "Territory of Oregon" that was "compiled in United States Bureau of Topographical Engineers from the latest authorities under the direction of Col. J. J. Abert by Washi. Hood, 1838." He petitioned Congress 1851 for reimbursement for his expenses on the 1834 trip, but was unsuccessful.