Thomas J. Farnham

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Thomas Jefferson Farnham (* 1804 in Vermont or Maine ; † September 13, 1848 in San Francisco , California ) was an American publicist, politician and leader of an expedition to the American West in the first half of the 19th century. He tried to extend the territory of the USA to the then still stateless area of Oregon Country , to the Mexican area of Upper California (Alta California) and to the then independent Hawaiian Islands.

Childhood and youth

Thomas J. Farnham was born in 1804 in New England , either Vermont or what would later become the US state of Maine. He attended Phillips Academy , a boarding high school in Andover , Massachusetts , near Boston .

Farnham moved to Peoria, Illinois , where he became a lawyer. In 1836 he married Eliza Woodson Burhams , (1815–1864), an American writer and activist. The couple had three children.

to travel

In 1839 Farnham heard Christian missionary Jason Lee lecture on the Oregon Country . Lee recruited more missionaries to support his Methodist mission in the Willamette Valley , Oregon, from where Lee wanted to convert Native Americans ("Indians") to Christianity. After Lee's lecture, Farnham was "captain" of a 14-man armed group that set out on May 1, 1839 from Peoria, Illinois, on the Santa Fe Trail and Oregon Trail into the Oregon Country. The men of this Peoria Party referred to themselves as "Oregon Dragoons" (Oregon Dragoons ) and carried a flag with them, on which their motto "Oregon or the Grave" was written. Their aim was to push back the English and in particular the British Hudson Bay Company , which acted as the British de facto government in large areas of North America. Its ideological background was the " Manifest Destiny " doctrine.

On the way there were disputes within the group, which then - after reaching Fort William or Bent's Fort on the Arkansas River - resolved. Some "Oregon Dragoons" turned back, Farnham moved on with only four companions. The five men finally reached Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River . Farnham wrote the book Travels in the Great Western Prairies, The Anahuac and Rocky Mountains, And in The Oregon Territory about his adventures on the Oregon Trail , which was published in 1841 by Killey & Lossing in Poughkeepsie , New York. Farnham described the rigors of the trek in a letter to the editor to the New York Tribune on December 19, 1848, addressed to the editors Horace Greeley and Thomas McElrath .

The ownership structure in Oregon Country and Columbia was controversial until the Oregon Compromise of 1846. The area, which encompassed part of the present-day Canadian province of British Columbia and the present-day US states of Montana and Wyoming, as well as the entire area of ​​the present-day US states of Oregon , Washington and Idaho , was colonized by the British and the US at the same time and has been claimed by both Great Britain and the United States. During his stay in Oregon Country, Farnham wrote a petition in which he called on the US federal government to extend its legislation and thus its territory to the Oregon Country and to subject the Americans who settled there to its protection. This petition was signed by many Oregon settlers in the United States.

Soon after, Thomas Farnham left the Willamette Valley settlements and embarked for what was then the Sandwich Islands (now the Hawaiian Islands) . Apparently he was intended as one of the first envoys of the then Kingdom of Hawaii in Europe.

After nothing came of it, he returned to the American mainland in Monterey (California) , the capital of the then Mexican province of Upper California (Alta California). In 1841 he contributed to the liberation of a group of about a hundred prisoners, which consisted of Americans, British and Californios under the leadership of the fur trader and landowner Isaac Graham (1800-1863). The roughly one hundred men were involved in a revolt by two temporary governors of the Mexican province of Northern California - namely Juan Bautista Alvarado (term of office: 1837–1842) and José Castro (term of office: September 29, 1835 to January 1, 1836) - against a third governor of Northern California, namely against Nicolás Gutiérrez (terms of office: August 1, 1836 to November 3, 1836 and January 2, 1836 to May 3, 1836). After this revolt was successful, i.e. led to Gutiérrez's deposition, Alvarado (one of the two leaders of the revolt) had its participants arrested in 1840, shipped to San Blas (Nayarit) and taken from there to a prison in Tepic . This arrest led to diplomatic tensions between Mexico, Great Britain and the United States that came to be known as the " Graham affair ". Farnham intervened in this affair by traveling to San Blas, where he arrived on May 16, 1840 and then following the captured coup plotters to Tepic, who were finally released - also at Farnham's instigation. Farnham wrote a romanticizing account of these events.

After the prisoners were released, Farnham traveled through Mexico to New Orleans . In the same year, 1841, he moved to New York City , then for a short time to Wisconsin and on to Alton, Illinois . In 1846 he moved back to California, where he died in San Francisco on September 13, 1848 at the age of only 44. His widow, Eliza Farnham, moved to Santa Cruz, California , where she became known as an anti-slavery, early feminist, and novelist.

The German writer Friedrich Gerstäcker (1816–1872) translated a book by Thomas J. Farnham into German; the translation was published by Thomas J. Farnham, Leipzig, Verlag Gustav Maier, 1846, under the title “Hikes over the rocky mountains in the Oregon region”.

Works

Travels in California, and Scenes in the Pacific (1844)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Corning, Howard M. (1989). Dictionary of Oregon History . Binfords & Mort Publishing. p. 83.
  2. ↑ Jason Lee. End of the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center. Accessed March 2, 2008.
  3. ↑ printed in: Sangamo Journal / Illinois State Journal, January 25, 1844, p. 3, under the title: "Difficulties in Reaching Oregon - The Emigrants", https://idnc.library.illinois.edu/cgi-bin/ illinois? a = d & d = SJO18440125.2.127  ; viewed on October 6, 2019
  4. ↑ s. " Ben Butler and Early Hawaii - Secretary Lydecker Discovers A Letter Which Takes Thomas J. Farnham Out of the Grafter Class, But Does Not Shed Any Luster on Ben Butler, Afterwards Famous in War and Politics in America", in: The Hawaiian Star, May 24, 1906, second edition, p. 5, https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn82015415/1906-05-24/ed-1/seq-5/  ; viewed on October 6, 2019
  5. ↑ Thomas J. Farnham: Hikes over the rocky mountains in the Oregon area  - Internet Archive

swell

personal data
SURNAME Farnham, Thomas J.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Farnham, Thomas Jefferson (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American publicist, politician and expedition leader
DATE OF BIRTH 1804
PLACE OF BIRTH unsure: Vermont or Maine
DATE OF DEATH September 13, 1848
Place of death San Francisco , California