Already an interest in Oregon and the Rocky Mountain region was
arising on the eastern seaboard. In 1832, Captain Bonneville, an
officer in the United States army, on leave of absence, passed with
a wagon-train into the Rocky Mountains, where for nearly three years
he trapped and traded and explored. [Footnote: Irving, Bonneville.]
Walker, one of his men, in 1833, reached California by the Humboldt
River (a route afterwards followed by the emigrants to California),
and made known much new country. A New England enthusiast, Hall
Kelley, had for some years been lecturing on the riches of the
Oregon country and the need of planting an agricultural colony
there. It was natural that Boston should be interested in the Oregon
country, which was visited by so many vessels from that port. In
1820, New England missionaries settled in the Hawaiian Islands,
closely connected by trade with the coast. In 1832, Nathaniel Wyeth,
of Cambridge, Massachusetts, led a party of New-Englanders west,
with the plan of establishing a trading and fishing post on the
waters of the Columbia. [Footnote: Chittenden, Am. Fur Trade, I.,
435; Wyeth's "Journals" are published by the Oregon Hist. Soc.; cf.
Irving, Bonneville, chap. vi.]

With Wyeth, on a second expedition in 1834, went the Reverend Jason
Lee and four Methodist missionaries. Two years later came Dr. Marcus
Whitman and another company of missionaries with their wives; they
brought a wagon through South Pass and over the mountains to the
Snake River, and began an agricultural colony. Thus the old story of
the sequence of fur-trader, missionary, and settler was repeated.
The possession of Oregon by the British fur-trader was challenged by
the American farmer.

Contemporaneously with the development of the fur-trade in the Rocky