on to Boston, organized the Columbia River Fishing and Trading Company, and secured another vessel to proceed to Oregon by sea. This time Wyeth's party was trebled, and with a following of over seventy he started from St. Louis on March 7, 1834. Among his companions were the naturalists Nuttall and Townsend, and the missionaries Jason and Daniel Lee, all of whom were seeking the Oregon country on errands of their own. The fate of Wyeth's second expedition need not here be recounted, further than to state that the contract being repudiated by the Rocky Mountain men, Wyeth established a trading post in eastern Idaho, which he later (1837) sold to the Hudson's Bay Company and proceeded on to Oregon. After indefatigable efforts, and fatigues seldom paralleled, Wyeth finally (1836) abandoned the country and his ambitious project, and settled down to the humdrum role of ice-merchant in Cambridge, amassing a moderate fortune in shipping that useful commodity to the West Indies.
In recent years the journals and correspondence of Nathaniel J. Wyeth, recounting the experience of his two expeditions, have come to light and been published by the Oregon Historical Society. These documents, however, furnish but terse and bald statements of events, whereas detailed narratives appeared in works published many years before. The historian of the first expedition was a kinsman of its leader—John B. Wyeth, a young man of eighteen summers, who had previously been to sea and acquired a taste for adventure. After the long journey into the mountains, young Wyeth became dissatisfied with the hardships and ill prospects of the venture, and joined those malcontents at Pierre's Hole who voted for return, thus abandoning his leader before the journey was more than two-thirds complete. Upon arrival at Cambridge, the narrative of the young Wyeth's adventures sped
