booth gardner - Washington Secretary of State

Appendix: “Who’s for a divide?”
Robert Moore, Booth Gardner’s great-great-great-grandfather, was a formidable
pioneer. When he decided to go West with the Peoria Party out of Illinois in 1839, he
was “gray-haired and portly.” His wife, Margaret, was in poor health and they decided
she should stay behind for the time being. Their 10 children were mostly grown. Several
would make the trek to Oregon in the next few years, including the governor’s great-greatgrandfather,
James Marshall Moore. J.M. Moore arrived in 1847, together with his 10-yearold
daughter, Elizabeth Jane, Booth Gardner’s future great-grandmother. The pioneers of
’47 were particularly hard hit by sickness and mishaps that orphaned a number of children
along the trail. Margaret Moore never made it west, dying in Missouri in 1848.
Fractured by tribulations and squabbling en route, the Peoria Party was organized
to “raise the American flag” and run the Hudson’s Bay Co. out of Oregon. The earliest
emigrants faced many tribulations. Gardner’s great-grandfather, Ronald C. Crawford,
came to the Willamette Valley with the 1847 group. Crawford’s older brother, Captain
Medorem Crawford, arrived in 1842. Medorem’s detail-rich diaries have proven invaluable
to Northwest historians. “From Walla Walla to the Willamette Falls occupied about 20 days
and, all things considered, was the hardest part of the journey,” he wrote. “What with the
drifting sands, rocky cliffs and rapid streams along the Columbia River, and the gorges,
torrents and thickets of the Cascade Mountains, it seems incredible how, with our wornout
and emaciated animals, we ever reached our destination. On the 5 th of October, our
little party, tired, ragged, sun-burnt and hungry, arrived at the falls, now Oregon City, where
we found the first habitations west of the Cascade Mountains.”
Their Northwest boundary dispute unresolved, Great Britain and the United States
nominally held joint control over the Oregon Country. But for those with their boots and
ploughs on the ground, the source of law was often ambiguous. Order, likewise, was
haphazard in the face of the inevitable “quarrels and crimes which called for community
action.”
The cast of this complicated frontier drama featured Methodist and Catholic
missionaries; former Hudson’s Bay company operatives; the nationalistic American
emigrants; mountain men grudgingly attempting to recycle themselves as farmers and
assorted stragglers. The settlers soon discovered that with no codified laws practical
problems arose. For instance, how to exercise probate when someone died without heirs
or a will? Further, their livestock were falling victim to marauding wolves and cougars.
Some sort of bounty program was urgently needed. The “Wolf Meetings” that took
place in the winter of 1843 were also a subterfuge by the Americans to promote political
organization. The Canadians suspected as much but lacked wiggle room. “A good part of
the Canadian element” agreed to consider the merits of organizing a civil government.
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