[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
Mountains, a trade was opened between St. Louis and the old Spanish
settlements at Santa Fe. Although even in the days of Washington
adventurous frontiersmen like George Rogers Clark had set their eyes
on Santa Fe and the silver-mines of the southwest, it was not until
the Mexican revolution (1821), when Spain's control was weakened
throughout her whole domain, that systematic trade was possible.
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