Two of the men who made the rank of major general in the U.S. Army during the period of World War One had strong Oregon ties. After the war, both would retire to Oregon and eventually die there. They were very similar in many ways, though history remembers each a bit differently. Here are the Oregon generals.
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The Fighting McCooks account for three more actual generals and one brevet general. The McCooks hailed from eastern Ohio – Daniel raising his family in Carrollton while John grew his in Steubenville. Buried here Spring Grove is Daniel’s family – John’s family lies, for the most part, at Union Cemetery in Steubenville.
John, as a physician, volunteered his services to the Union army. He was joined by another brother George, a surgeon – joined also by his son. Daniel volunteered to serve as a paymaster. Nine of his sons joined the cause – the “Tribe of Dan”. Three would die in combat. John and his five sons – the “Tribe of John” – all survived.
The Fighting McCooks put more men from the McCook family into the Federal armed servics during the Civil War than any other family in the nation.
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One of the cool things a king – or queen – in an absolute monarchy can do is to give away land. So popular, democracies have tried similar editions of their own. One of the largest giveaways happened in British North America where King Charles II gave away lands within the drainage system of Hudson’s Bay. That included lands within the James Bay drainage since James is simply a bay off the main Hudson’s. He gave them to a group headed by his cousin Prince Rupert in 1670. The HBC many exclaimed as an “empire within an empire.”
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Mythology – a popular belief or assumption that has grown up around someone or something; one of the definitions of the word. Synonyms include “legend”, “tradition”, “lore”, “legend”, “knowledge”, “wisdom”, “folktale” and “anecdote” among other words. These words go a long way in describing the events at Champoeg, Oregon on 2 May 1843 and how those events lie remembered in our minds today.
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With a non-Native American population numbering in the low hundreds in the 1830s, the long-simmering struggle for control over the vast Oregon Country began its inexorable swing towards the United States. Methodist missionaries doubled down on their numbers at their Willamette Mission sited a few miles north from today’s city of Salem along the Willamette River. The Great Reinforcement brought fifty-one men, women and children from New York City all the way to the Hudson’s Bay Company fort at Vancouver.
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The United States and United Kingdom came to an agreement in 1818 in which they would share sovereign rule over the Oregon Country. Oregon’s borders came into reasonable shape in the next couple of years with an agreement between Russia and the US followed by one between Russia and England demarcating the northern border to be at the point of 54°40’ latitude.
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It was France’s sale of its vast holdings of Louisiana to the United States in 1803 that eventually led to the European settlement of Oregon. Maybe not surprisingly, in the decades after selling what amounts to almost a third of today’s lower 48 States, there might have been a little bit of seller’s remorse on the part of France. While, by the 1830 – 1850s, the watershed of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers represented a net loss for France’s diminishing Overseas Empire, Frenchmen still found themselves coveting regions also coveted by the upstart North American republic. Here are two visits from Frenchmen, De Mofras and Saint-Amant to Oregon a decade apart giving intriguing perspectives on the Oregon that might have been French.
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A long time in planning, preparing and recruiting, the United States Exploratory Expedition finally sailed out from Hampton Roads, Virginia, 18 August 1838, under the command of Navy Lieutenant Charles Wilkes en route for Madeira. The six-ship squadron would spend the next four years at sea moving around the world, exploring, charting and discovering. During their voyages which took them to six of the seven continents – they only missed Europe. In 1841, the ships visited the Oregon Country. An adjunct to their scientific missions was to visit Oregon to report on specific conditions there as American interest in those lands were on the upswing. Only one official American probe ventured into the Oregon Country previously.
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High in the southernmost reaches of the French Alps, lies the small slot-like canyon of the Vallée des Merveilles – the Valley of Marvels. The name came about from the many thunderstorms ranging through this uppermost section of the Maritime Alps which contain the last of the alpine peaks in France reaching up to 3,000 meters in elevation heading south through the range towards the Mediterranean Sea. Those same ‘marvels’ led men centuries ago to create marvels of a totally different sort, literally thousands of pictographs allowing us a small peek into life during the Bronze Age.
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Most stories – articles or books – discussing the Methodist Mission of Jason Lee to Oregon which lasted from 1834 until 1843, start with the same story. The story of four Native Americans who came to St. Louis to ask Missouri governor William Clark – yes, the same “Clark” of the Lewis & Clark fame – for teachers to provide them with the power of white man’s religion. Of the Native Americans, three were of the Nez Percé tribe and one was a Flathead elder. The two tribes were both neighbors and friends. They reached St. Louis early in October 1831, soon after meeting with Governor Clark, also the superintendent of Indian Affairs.
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