JOEL PALMER

'General Joel Palmer', October 41810 (Ontario, Canada) – June 91881 (Dayton, Oregon), was an Oregon pioneer, author of a popular immigrant guidebook, co-founder of Dayton, Oregon, a controversial Indian Affairs administrator, and a popular Oregon politician.^[1]

Contents

Biography

References

External links

Biography

Joel Palmer was born in Ontario, Canada to American Quaker parents.
When he was two years old, they moved to New York's Catskill Mountains in response to the War of 1812.
He received only three months of formal education in elementary school.^[2]
In 1822, at age 12, his parents indentured him to another family for four years. When he gained his freedom, he moved to Bucks County, Pennsylvania to work on canals and bridges.
He was married to Catherine Coffee from 1830 until her death after childbirth. Palmer married his second wife, Sarah Ann Derbyshire, in 1836. They bought land near Laurel, Indiana in Whitewater Valley, Indiana, where he supervised a canal construction project.^[3]
He was elected an Indiana Democratic state representative for two one-year terms, spanning 1843 to 1845.^[4]
In the spring of 1845, he traveled to Oregon, without his family, as captain of a train containing 23 wagons. The final leg of the Oregon Trail past the Cascade Range forced a choice of a dangerous Columbia River journey or crossing the hazardous mountains. Palmer's group chose the latter. They blazed what became the Barlow Road; included in the group was Sam Barlow who later returned to establish the Barlow Toll Road. In the course of discovering Barlow Pass, they lost their way. To escape the mountains before winter set in, Palmer climbed to the 9,000-foot level of Mount Hood on October 71845—with little food and the scant protection of moccasins—to scout a route off the mountain. This was Mount Hood's first recorded climb;^[5]
the Palmer Glacier is named for him.^[6]
The group was forced to leave their wagons on the mountain's south shoulder and continue to Oregon City on foot.
In 1846, he returned to his family in Indiana and, in 1847, published his diary as ''Palmer's Journal of Travels Over the Rocky Mountains, 1845–1846'',^[7]
which provided equipment guidance and comprehensive route information.
It became one of the first popular guidebooks for immigrants for the next ten years.^[8]
Also in 1847, he traveled with his family to Oregon as captain of that year's major wagon train. While passing through the Walla Walla Valley he met Marcus and Narcissa Whitman at their mission shortly before their deaths in the Whitman massacre, the event precipitating the Cayuse War. Perhaps motivated by meeting the Whitmans, he later returned to serve as a peace commissioner to tribes considering joining the Cayuse and as ''Commissary-General of volunteer forces'' for the war.
After the war, in 1848, he joined the California Gold Rush but returned in 1849 to co-found Dayton, Oregon on the lower Yamhill River where he built a sawmill on his donation land claim.
In 1853, President Franklin Pierce appointed him ''Superintendent of Indian Affairs'' for the Oregon Territory. The debate of what to do with Native Americans ranged from full integration to total extermination. Palmer proved effective negotiating ''Cessation of Hostility treaties'' with the native tribes in 1854 and 1855, brokering nine of 15 treaties. He joined Isaac Stevens, his counterpart for the Washington Territory, in the successful Walla Walla Treaty Council of the Yakima Indian War. Approximately 5,000 Indians attended deliberations from May 291855 to June 111855.
Palmer gained an anti-settler reputation among immigrants, newspapers and officials, who said he acted too favorably toward the Indians, even though he moved the tribes to reservations outside the Willamette Valley, seeking to avoid friction between settlers and natives by physical distance.
In late 1855, while moving the Rogue River tribes to the Grand Ronde Reservation, he was met by violent settler resistance who felt the land should not be given to the tribes. Palmer succeeded, but the state legislature petitioned for his removal from office which became effective in 1857.
Afterward, he worked his land claim farm, operated his sawmill and several other enterprises.
In 1862, he was speaker of the Oregon House of Representatives, and, in 1864-1866, State Senator. He ran for governor in 1870 as the Republican candidate, but was narrowly defeated largely for his Indian policies. In 1871, he was the state's Indian agent to the Siletz tribe.
He died in Dayton in 1881. All eight of his children completed higher education. His house is on the National Register of Historic Places, and is now operating as a restaurant.^[9]

References

1. Oregon Biographies: Joel Palmer
2. Joel Palmer, Oregon Pioneer Leader and Author Daniel N. Clark
3. Joel Palmer and Isaac Ingalls Stevens Oregon Historical Quarterly
4. Notable Oregonians: Joel Palmer- Pioneer/Writer Oregon Blue Book
5. Joel Palmer, Oregon Pioneer Leader and Author
6. A Sight So Nobly Grand: Joel Palmer on Mt. Hood in 1845, Joel Palmer, , , Oregon Historical Society Press, , ISBN 0875952526
7.
Joel Palmer, ''Palmer's Journal of Travels Over the Rocky Mountains, 1845–1846'' (1847), Library of Congress catalog F592 .T54 vol. 30. (viewable online)

8. Works by Joel Palmer
9. About Joel Palmer, 1810-1881

External links

★ Guide to the Joel Palmer papers at the University of Oregon