OREGON EMIGRATING COMPANIES 221
grating- companies. The type of man who will pull up stakes to undertake so far and so hazardous a journey is obviously the type which chafes under regulations and feels most keenly the irksomeness of subordinating himself to the general will. He is a thorough individualist; otherwise he would not be a pioneer. The members of all the emigrating companies, who were perfectly aware of this quality of mind, never ventured in their regulations to punish defection. They knew that it would be futile, and they were the last people thus to bind themselves. The most notable case in which the tendency to disintegrate never for a moment appeared as the Mormon migration of 1847 under the leadership of Brigham Young, and this is just the sort of an exception that proves the rule. The Mormon pioneers in accepting Young's guidance in matters temporal as well as spiritual renounced voluntarily much of their own independence, gaining thereby, of course, the ad- vantages of rigid discipline.
With such a latent tendency it is but natural that the actual causes of defection should depend largely on circumstances. Viewing the emigrations as a whole, no single immediate cause or group of immediate causes is recognizable as being in any sense general. Jealousy and what can be termed, vaguely, general discontent are accountable for it in a number of in- stances. 71 Frequently the disappointed candidates for office not only maintained a stubborn unwillingness to submit to the will of the majority but made it a point to stir up active disaffection. 72 Occasionally the slow rate of progress neces- sitated by the presence of so large a body of men, women, and children, of the all too frequent halts for the comfort of the sick 73 and the burial of the dead, or the lack of adequate
71 Medorem Crawford, Journal, p. 7, ff.
72 Palmer, Travels (Thwaites), p. 43, Wilkes, History of Oregon, Part II, p. 71, describes the language of these agitators. Passing the tent of one, Dumber- ton, after the adoption of rules and regulations by the great Oregon Company of 1843, he heard this gentleman discussing the veto power entrusted to the captain of the company, which he "denounced as an absurd innovation upon a con- servative system and a most gross violation of a cardinal principle of political jurisprudence!" For an estimate of the value of Wilkes, History of Oregon, however, see Joseph Schafer, Notes on the Colonisation of Oregon, Oreg. Hist. Quart., VI, 389. Cf. Bryant, What I Saw in California, p. 29.
73 Cf. Medorem Crawford, Journal, p. 7.
