Ewing Young Totally Explained

Everything about Ewing Young totally explained

Ewing Young (1799 - February 9 1841) was an American fur trapper and trader from Tennessee who traveled the western United States before settling in the Oregon Country. As a prominent and wealthy citizen there, his death was the impetus for the early formation of government in what became the state of Oregon. Young would trade along the Santa Fe Trail and into California, prior to the region becoming a part of the United States before moving north to the Willamette Valley.

Early Life

Young was born in Tennessee to a farming family in 1799.

Early western travels

Young sold the farm he'd just bought, and in May 1822, became part of the first overland wagon train to leave Missouri and head for Santa Fe, along what would become known as the Santa Fe Trail. Young and the others found that they were welcomed by the new Mexican authorities. Despite tension that developed with Mexican authorities (trying to restrict American activities), Young became a successful trapper and businessman, eventually setting up a trading post in Taos in modern New Mexico in the late 1820s, and taking a Mexican common-law wife, María Josefa Tafoya, the daughter of a prominent Taos family.

California

In the Spring of 1830, Young led the first American trapping expedition to reach the Pacific Coast from New Mexico. Young's journey to California with traveling companions crossed Arizona, the Colorado River, the Mojave Desert and arrived at the San Gabriel Mission, near today's Los Angeles, California. After recuperating there, the group visited the San Fernando Mission, and headed north into California's great Central Valley, again, the first American trapping expedition to do so.
   Once there the group moved north to the Sacramento River where they encountered Peter Skene Ogden of the Hudson's Bay Company. The two groups jointly trapped the valley before Young’s group moved on to San Francisco Bay to trade their pelts. After this they went south to Los Angeles and then back to Taos before the year was up. Upon his return to Taos with the proceeds of this expedition, Young became one of the wealthiest Americans in Mexican territory.
   In the late 1820s and early 1830s, the Mexican authorities were growing worried about American settlers and influence in New Mexico, and began imposing increasingly severe restrictions on trade and trapping. Perhaps in part to avoid these restrictions, Young was baptized a Catholic in 1830 (perhaps he also became a Mexican citizen and formalized his marriage to Maria - however, if he did so, no record of these two events survives).
   Over the next few years Young and his group continued traveling to California to trap and trade. Then in 1834 in San Diego Young encountered Hall J. Kelley, the great promoter of the Oregon Country. Kelley invited Ewing Young to accompany him north to Oregon, but Young at first declined. After re-thinking, Young agreed to travel with Kelley and they set out in July 1834.

Oregon Country

Ewing Young, arrived in Oregon in 1834, arriving at Fort Vancouver on October 17th with Hall J. Kelley from California. Though a trapper by trade, Young then stayed as a permanent settler in the Willamette Valley. The group received little assistance from Dr. John McLoughlin and the HBC or the Methodist Mission group because the group was accused by the Mexican government of California of stealing 200 horses when they left.
Young then settled on the west bank of the Willamette River near the mouth of Chehalem Creek, opposite of Champoeg. During the drive Gay and Bailey murdered a native boy in retaliation for an attack several years earlier by the Rogue River Indians, which that attack had been in retaliation for murders that Young’s group had committed on their travel to Oregon in 1834. The activities that followed his death eventually led to the creation of a provisional government in the Oregon Country.

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