1S34.] PLANS OF WYETH FOR THE OREGON TRADE. 359 



east, and Sonora and California on the west, and descended and 

 ascended the Colorado, and its principal tributaries, which he de- 

 scribes as being navigable by boats for considerable distances. He 

 also made trips across Sonora to the Californian Gulf, and across 

 California to the Pacific, as well as through the Mexican provinces 

 on the coasts of that ocean, where he suffered imprisonment and 

 many other hardships from the tyranny of the authorities. 



In 1832, Captain Bonneville, of the army of the United States, 

 while on furlough, led a band of more than a hundred men, with 

 twenty wagons, and many horses and mules, carrying merchandise 

 from Missouri to the countries of the Colorado and the Columbia, 

 in which he passed more than two years, engaged in hunting, trap- 

 ping, and trading.* 



About the same time, Captain Wyeth, of Massachusetts, en- 

 deavored to establish a regular system of commercial intercourse 

 between the states of the Union and the countries of the Columbia, 

 to which latter the general name of OREGON then began to be 

 universally applied in the United States. His plan, like that devised 

 by Mr. Astor in 1810, was to send manufactured goods to the 

 Pacific countries, and from thence to transport to the United States, 

 and even to China, not only furs, but also the salmon which abound 

 in the rivers of North-Western America. With these objects, he 

 made two expeditions over land to the Columbia, in the latter of 

 which he founded a trading post, called Fort Hall, on the south 

 side of the Snake or Lewis branch of that river, at the entrance of 

 the Portneuf, about a hundred miles north of x the Utah Lake ; and 

 he then established another post, principally for fishing purposes, on 

 Wappatoo Island, near the confluence of the Willamet River with 

 the Columbia, a hundred miles above the mouth of the latter. 

 This scheme, however, failed entirely. The Hudson's Bay Com- 

 pany's agents immediately took the alarm, and founded a counter 

 establishment, called Fort Boise, at the entrance of the Boise or 

 Read's River into the Lewis, some distance below Fort Hall, where 

 they offered goods to the Indians at prices much lower than those 

 which the Americans could afford to take ; and Wyeth, being thus 

 driven out of the market, was forced to compromise with his op- 

 ponents, by selling his fort to them, and engaging to desist from the 



* The narrative of this expedition, written from the notes of Captain Bonneville, 

 by Washington Irving, in the vein, half serious, half jocose, of Fray Agapida's 

 Chronicle, contains some curious, though generally overcharged, pictures of life 

 among the hunters, trappers, traders, Indians, and grisly bears, of the Rocky Moun- 

 tains; but it adds very little to our knowledge of the geography of thos<* -«*•«*>«. 



