Tag Archives: Ewing Young

EWING YOUNG – WHISKEY, CATTLE EQUAL A NEW STATE

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Oregon White Oak marks the grave of Ewing Young in the Chehalem Valley.
Oregon White Oak marks the grave of Ewing Young in the Chehalem Valley.

Ewing Young lived a life of adventure. A major figure in the fur trade in the Far Southwest both as a trapper, but mainly as a leader. He migrated to the Oregon Country in 1834, where Young amassed a land claim of some 50 square miles. In his life, he figured big, but it was his early death at the age of 41 in the winter of 1841 for which he is best remembered. Dying without known heirs, local settlers came together to figure out how to settle his estate. That process is considered a germinal moment in the eventual founding of a local government in the divided Oregon.

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THE GREAT REINFORCEMENT – AMERICAN PUSH TO GAIN THE OREGON TERRITORY

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The Lausanne which carried members of the Great Reinforcement to the Oregon Country.
The Lausanne which carried members of the Great Reinforcement to the Oregon Country.

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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