The Indians
became convinced that the missionaries were to blame, and it is claimed,
too, that the emissaries of the Hudson Bay Company urged them on.
However that may have been, on the twenty-ninth of November, 1847, the
Indians fell upon the missionaries and killed fifteen, of them, among
the dead being Marcus Whitman and his wife. So ended the life of the man
who saved Oregon, and of the woman who was the first of her sex to cross
the continent.
Meanwhile, far to the south, a drama scarcely less thrilling was
enacting, its chief personage being John Augustus Sutter. Sutter was a
Swiss and had received a military education and served in the Swiss
Guard before coming to America in 1834. He settled first at St. Louis
and then at Santa Fe, where he gained considerable experience as a
trader. Finally, in 1838, he decided to cross the Rockies, and after
trading for a time in a little schooner up and down the coast, was
wrecked in San Francisco Bay. He made his way inland, and founded the
first white settlement in the country on the site of what is now
Sacramento. Here, in 1841, he built a fort, having secured a large grant
of land from the Mexican Government, and set up what was really a little
empire in the wilderness, over which he reigned supreme. And here, three
years later, down from the snow-filled and tempest-swept passes of the
Rockies, came a party of starving and frost-bitten scarecrows, the
exploring expedition headed by John Charles Fremont, of whom we shall
speak presently.
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