velopment of the country and the
securing of its great fur trade, but the outbreak of the war had stopped
all efforts in that direction, and Astor never took them up again.
Meanwhile through Canada, the Hudson Bay Company, a great English
concern engaged in the fur trade, had extended its stations to the
Pacific coast, and was quietly taking possession of the country.

In 1834, the American board of missions, learning of the need for a
missionary among the Oregon Indians, appointed Marcus Whitman to the
work. Whitman was at that time thirty-two years of age and was just
about to be married. His betrothed agreed to accompany him on his
perilous mission, and, after great difficulty, he secured an associate
in the person of Rev. H.H. Spalding, also just married. What a bridal
trip that was! At Pittsburg, George Catlin, who knew the western Indians
better than any living man, having spent years among them, warned them
of the folly of attempting to take women across the plains; at
Cincinnati, they were greeted by William Moody, only forty-five years of
age and yet the first white man born there; at the frontier town of St.
Louis, they joined a hunting expedition up the Missouri, and by June 6,
1836, were at Laramie.

A month later, they crossed the Great Divide by the South Pass,
"discovered," six years later, by Fremont; and toward the end of July,
they came to the great mountain rendezvous of traders and trappers high
in the mountains near Fort Hall. Some of those men had not seen a white
woman for a quarter of a century. You can imagine, then, what a
sensation the arrival of Mrs. Whitman and Mrs. Spalding occasioned, and
with what warmth they were welcomed. Ten days they tarried there, then
pressed on westward, and on September 2, 1836, after a journey of
thirty-five hundred miles, the gates of Fort Walla-Walla, on the lower
Columbia, opened to receive them, and the conquest of Oregon began.

Fort Walla-Walla belonged to the Hudson Bay Company, which had
undisputed control of the rich Oregon fur trade, and which was
determined to retain it at any cost. So the difficulties of the Oregon
trail were invariably exaggerated, and immigration from the states
systematically discouraged. Nevertheless, in the years following
Whitman's arrival, other parties of missionaries and settlers worked
their way into the country, until, in 1842, their number reached about a
hundred and fifty. The Hudson Bay Company realized that neither En