Dozens of foreigners, mostly men, entered California in the mid-1830s. In the main they were fur trappers, shipping agents, merchants, ordinary sailors who jumped ship, and roving adventurers. Some stayed to become citizens, others departed and went elsewhere as suited their personal impulses. One rather unique visitor, although he didn’t stay, arrived in 1834. His name was Hall Jackson Kelley.
Intelligent and Harvard educated, Kelley was a school teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who, for the past many years, had been obsessed with establishing a colony of Americans in Oregon; and, after that was accomplished, a similar one in northern California. Enamored from afar, he had never seen either place.
At the time, Oregon Territory was jointly owned by the U.S. and Great Britain, though firmly controlled by England’s Hudson Bay Company (HBC), and California was a wholly-owned province of Spain’s successor, Mexico. Neither welcomed agitators who might usurp their authority and take over their domains.
This reality was no deterrent to Hall Kelley. His obsession had first developed around 1817, after reading the reports of the 1804-06 Lewis and Clark Expedition; reinforced by the published accounts of various sea captains who had since visited Pacific shores. Moreover, Kelley was an insistent promoter from the start. He sent letters to the press, and many petitions and memorials to Congress. He held mass meetings, published promotional pamphlets and prospectuses, propagandized his fellow townsfolk—most of whom thought he was crazy—and established the American Society for Encouragement and Settlement of the Oregon Territory in 1829. By 1832, he claimed to have recruited hundreds of would-be colonists who were supposed to set out that year, but the plan failed.
Undaunted, the next year he went alone on a perilous journey across Mexico, safely reaching San Diego on April 14, 1834. There, he met and joined forces with experienced trapper Ewing Young, who was planning to take a herd of horses to Oregon.
This arrangement made, Kelley informed California Governor José Figueroa of his future plan to establish an American colony in the province, asked for the governor’s patronage; asked if he might explore the northern country and prepare a map. Figueroa declared he had no authority to grant a license for mapmaking, nor did he have the funds for the proposed undertaking, but offered to send the request to Mexico City.
Not wanting to delay any longer, Kelley’s and Young’s party started out on July 8, driving a number of legitimately purchased horses. Days later they were joined by a group of rough men Kelley characterized as “marauders,” but were unable to get rid of them. Although Kelley had not received official permission to survey and map the country through which he passed, on the way northward he made as thorough an examination as possible, using his notes to later prepare a “Map of Upper California and Oregon.”
But also, along the way—in the southern regions of the Sacramento Valley—Hall Kelley contracted malaria, and was a very sick man when at last, on October 27, 1834, he was carried into Oregon’s Fort Vancouver. However, the fort’s chief factor Dr. John McLoughlin, known to all as a hospitable friend to travelers, didn’t receive him, or Ewing Young, kindly. Governor Figueroa had sent word ahead that this party of men were horse thieves—as those unwelcome “marauders” who had joined them earlier probably were; and Kelley had an infectious disease. Besides, his trail-worn Mexican garments—white slouched hat, blanket capote, leather pants with a red stripe down the seam—outlandish even by frontier standards, excluded him from McLoughlin’s “gentlemen’s table.”
Illness and bizarre clothing notwithstanding, Dr. McLoughlin had a far more important reason to dislike and ostracize this visitor. He was already aware of Kelley’s years-long, public advocacy of American colonization in Oregon, which the HBC considered a threat to its interests.
Both Young and Kelley were cleared of the horse-thief accusation, but Hall Kelley remained isolated in a Fort Vancouver outbuilding until he fully recovered in 1835, at which time McLoughlin gave him passage to Hawaii on an HBC ship. From the islands, a broken-spirited Hall Kelley sailed home to Boston. He died there on January 20, 1874, blind, penniless, forgotten—and, some say, reduced to genuine insanity.
They say History has no accidents. Perhaps Hall Kelley’s obsessive vision of American colonization on the Pacific Coast wasn’t crazy . . . just premature. Jason Lee, America’s first missionary to Oregon, also arrived in 1834. Less than ten years later, in 1841, the Bidwell-Bartleson Party, the first American group of would-be settlers, entered California; and 1842 marked the first organized, successful effort to create an American settlement in Oregon Territory. The following year, an estimated 1,000 Americans in covered wagons swarmed into Oregon’s Willamette Valley.
Today Hall Kelley’s “Map of Upper California and Oregon” is in the bureau of indexes & archives of the U.S. Department of State, having been given by him to Secretary of War Joel Poinsett on June 12, 1839.
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