for their oil, and seals for their skins? A score of our farmers seeing that Nantucket and New Bedford had acquired riches and independence by traversing the sea to the distant shores of the Pacific, determined to do something like it by land. Their ardor seemed to have hidden from their eyes the mighty difference between the facility of passing in a ship with the aid of sails, progressing day and night, by skilfully managing the winds and the helm, and that of a complicated wagon upon wheels, their journey to be over mountains and rivers, and through hostile tribes of savages who dreaded and hated the sight of a white man.
This novel expedition was not however the original or spontaneous notion of Mr. Nathaniel J. Wyeth,[1] nor was it entirely owing to the publications of Lewis & Clarke or Mackenzie.[2] Nor was it entirely owing to the enterprise of Messrs. Barrel, Hatch and Bulfinch, who fitted out two vessels that sailed form Boston in 1787, commanded by
- ↑ Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth belonged to one of the oldest families of Cambridge, Massachusetts, his ancestor settling there in 1645, on a place held by his descendants for over two centuries. Nathaniel's grandfather, Ebenezer, in 1751, purchased an estate embracing part of the present Mount Auburn, and extending to Fresh Pond. There Nathaniel's father, Jacob (1764-1856), built a summer resort known as Fresh Pond Hotel. Nathaniel, the fourth son, was born January 29, 1802, and was intended for Harvard College, of which his father and eldest brother were graduates; his ambitious spirit, however, made him impatient to begin commercial life, and to his subsequent regret the college course was abandoned. He first aided his father in the management of the hotel, but soon entered the ice trade, in which he remained until his expedition in 1832-36. In 1824 marrying his cousin Elizabeth Jarvis Stone, he shortly before the first expedition moved into a new house on the family estate, in which he resided until his death in 1856. For the Oregon expeditions, see the preface of the present volume. Returning to Cambridge in 1836, he re-entered the ice traffic, and after 1840 was the head of the concern. His highly accentuated qualities of activity and enterprise, added to his strong personality, caused him to be esteemed by his contemporaries.—ED.
- ↑ In the centennial years of the Lewis and Clark expedition, their original journals were for the firs time printed as written — Thwaites (ed.), Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (New York, 1904-05). For an account of the earlier edition of their journals, edited by Nicholas Briddle, see Introduction to the work just cited. On Mackenzie, consult Franchère's Narrative in our volume vi, p. 185. note 4.—ED.
