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.Shannon Applegate and Terence O Donnell (Corvallis:Oregon State Univ.Press, 1994), 19: Our country is most beautiful, fertile, and well-watered, with the most equable [sic] and pleasant climate. 6.Burnett, Letter from Oregon, St.Louis Republican, reprinted in Niles National Register, 2Nov.1844.7.When he wrote his memoirs, Burnett was more candid, conceding that the journey toOregon was slow and wearisome, game was scarce, and supplies were nearlyexhausted en route.When the next band of pioneers reached Oregon, in 1844, theycomplained loudly about poor conditions, which they had been led not to expect.Burnett came in for his full share of censure for this unpleasant surprise, butprotested that he had told the truth about Oregon.He pointed out to the new arrivalsthat in this territory one had to work or starve. See Burnett, Recollections, 181.270 VIII.Manifest NecessityAside from settling his debts and improving his wife s health, Burnett hadmore complex personal reasons to cast his eye longingly on Oregon.For onething, he relished the chance to live in virtually unconstrained freedom, in a com-munity of equals far beyond the reach of established law and order.1 Here wasthe perfect arena for a man like himself a man with abundant drive, talent,and brains to thrive and live out the American dream.But Burnett, product ofthe poverty that so often befell non-slaveholding whites in the South, wasequally desirous of starting a new life in a place where blacks did not live andwhere they were not likely to come.Without question, one of the chief appealsof the Far West, in his mind, was the absence of both slaves and a free black pop-ulation there.Understandably, Burnett did not dwell upon this reason in theaccounts he later published about the early days in Oregon, but contemporaryrecords do indicate that he sought to persuade many of his fellow Southerners tomigrate to this remote land because it offered a refuge from racial tensions andconflict.2 The Oregon territory was the last best hope for poor whites like him tobuild prosperous lives free from competition from and degradation by blacks.Burnett emphasized this point during his lectures, which attracted local farmerswho already had a well-developed bias against both slaves and the system thatenslaved them.Most were little-educated yeoman farmers who had moved toMissouri from the Upper South.They were true Jeffersonian democrats, whochafed under any kind of yoke and who considered slavery philosophically aswell as materially intolerable.One of the leaders of the 1843 migration, JesseApplegate, would write to a fellow Oregonian some years afterward: You and Imade our livings by honest labor.We both expect to leave our children in Ore-gon.One of the worst features of slavery is to degrade labor.If slavery is intro-duced into Oregon our children must blush for themselves or their fathers; ifforced to labor they will be degraded from social equality, and blush for them-selves; if rich and slave owners, they will blush to confess that their father toiledby the sweat of his face. 31.Burnett later wrote that he wanted to participate in building up a new colony in the FarWest.Ibid., 192.2.Burnett s racist thinking emerged in comments he made about the people living inOregon when he arrived there.He was surprised and disappointed to discover that asmany as a third of the residents were Canadians, French, or persons of mixed blood.Burnett expressed his distaste for intermarriage between white trappers and nativeAmerican squaws, which was fairly common.Still, he felt these were bonds ofnecessity on the frontier.See letter of Peter H.Burnett to David R.Atchinson, 8 Dec.1844, Platte Argus, reprinted in Jefferson Inquirer, 26 Nov.1845.For further evidence ofthe diversity in frontier Oregon, see undated 1845 letter of Claiborne C.and Well-ington B.Walker to members of the Walker family, Purvine family records.They notethat the Willamette Valley community at that time consisted of people from all partsof the world, English, Americans, French, half-breeds, Quartroons, and SandwichIslanders. 271 Race to the FrontierThese Missouri plain folk were equally disdainful toward the well-to-doslaveholding whites who now controlled the state s economy and made theirown existence precarious.They were resolved to escape this economically injuri-ous situation, to end their subjugation by escaping the influence of the slave sys-tem once and forever.In the words of one historian, Slaveowning neighbors hadmoved in beside their small farms in the hills of Kentucky or southern Missouriand had scorned them for working their ground with their own hands.Noniggers whatsoever (the word is theirs) whether free or slave would beallowed inside the new territory [Oregon] if the more rabid of the migrants hadtheir way, as for a short time they would. 1 They looked at the Far West as theindependent white working man s last bastion the final chance for Jacksoniandemocracy on the North American continent.2 Similarly, when a group of mis-sionaries had journeyed to Oregon during the 1830s, they had declared theirgoals to be civilizing the Indians and establishing a white Christian society inthis wilderness.3 Many families who decided to participate in the Great Migra-tion had the getting away from the institution of slavery very generally as amotive, sums up a contemporary observer.4 A prominent Oregon migrant fromthe South, R.W.Morrison, subsequently acknowledged that he had respondedso positively to Peter Burnett s portrayal of the territory for this reason.Morri-son was tired of competing with slave-produced goods and declared he hadcome to Oregon where there would be no slaves, and all would start in lifeeven. 5 Specifically, he wanted to calm his wife s fears about the territory s beinginundated by runaway slaves.6Further evidence that this plain folk distaste for the slave system was amajor factor in migration can be found in letters written by Oregon missionaries.Ezra Fisher, a Baptist minister living in Washington Butte in the 1850s, wrote toa colleague back east that a large portion of our members are from slave-holdingstates, and a larger portion are professedly opposed to slavery, but all their sym-pathies are with the South. What a paradox! 7 (Later in the year this letter waswritten 1857 white residents would register their feelings toward the peculiar institution and black freemen by voting overwhelmingly to keep both3.Letter of Jesse Applegate to Medorem Crawford, 4 Feb.1855, Medorem CrawfordPapers, University of Ore
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