Joseph Lafayette Meek 1810-1875

Joseph L. Meek was a 19th century fur trapper, explorer, gold prospector, U.S. marshal, historian, farmer, politician, legislator, storyteller and public personality. But, perhaps due his many portrayals in film and books, those who remember him may best do so as “Joe Meek, mountain man.”

And it is probable that very few people associate him with the beginnings of Pacific County’s settlement. However, Meek was our very first census-taker. His adventures after leaving the Rocky Mountains for the shores of the Pacific Ocean may not have been as colorful but they were often as life-threatening and most certainly made a positive impact on the early development of Oregon Territory.

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Very few people associate him with the beginnings of Pacific County’s settlement. However, Meek was our very first census-taker.

Meek grew up in a poor but respected family in rural western Virginia. Little is known about him until his journey to St. Louis Missouri in 1828 when he entered the fur trade as a “greenhorn” employee of Jedediah Smith. For the next six years he would work for various fur trading companies, his fur-trade career coinciding with the peak years of what was known as the “rendezvous system” (1825-1840.) His travels through the Rockies and the Pacific Northwest resulted in close relationships with well-known trappers, including Christopher Houston “Kit” Carson, Thomas Fitzpatrick, Robert “Doc” Newell, George Ebberts, Ewing Young and the Sublette brothers. During the 1830s, Meek also befriended and assisted Oregon Protestant missionaries, notably the Whitman-Spaulding party.

Like many trappers, Meek entered sequential marriages with three Native women, having children with each. His beloved Nez Perce wife, Umentucken (Mountain Lamb), was killed by enemy Indians. A second wife left Meek because he was often drunk. In 1838, he married a Nez Perce woman whom he called Virginia to honor the state in which he was born. By 1856, the Meek family included three daughters and four sons, Joe and his pleasant, soft-spoken Christian wife were devoted companions until his death, on June 20, 1875, at their farm home in Hillsboro, Oregon

“Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary from the Republic of Oregon to the Court of the United States” was the self-given title with which he arrived in Washington, D.C. early in 1848, penniless, ragged and dirty after a midwinter trip across the continent. He had come to report directly to President Polk, whose wife was a distant cousin, that while Congress delayed the organization of the Oregon Country, Dr. and Mrs. Marcus Whitman and others, including his own daughter, Helen Mary, had been massacred at Waiilatpu. Meek was appointed U.S. marshal and Joseph Lane was named governor. Back in Oregon, one of his first official duties was to serve as hangman to put to death the Indians convicted as alleged ringleaders in the Whitman massacre.

A favorite Joe Meek story also came out of that trip to the nation’s capital: Bold, handsome, and irrepressibly full of the joy of life, Meek, while a guest in the White House in 1848, became the toast of the capital city. Promenading one evening, his lady partner inquired whether he had ever been married. Yes, he had a wife and six children. “Ooh la,” she continued, “and isn’t Mrs. Meek afraid of Indians?” Bellowed the frontiersman, “Afraid of Indians? I reckon not! She’s an Indian herself!”

In 1850, Marshall Meek came to “North Oregon” — that part of Oregon north of the Columbia River, to take the census in 1850. He delighted in renewing friendships with John Edmonds Pickernell and William “Brandywine” McCarty, who had been with him at Champoeg. He visited in every home, including those of Henry Fiester, J.D. Holman, Dr. Elijah White,

P.G. Stewart, John Meldrum, Charles J.W. Russell, E.G. Loomis, Washington Hall, James Scarborough, Job Lamley, Father Lionet and Capt. James Johnson. I doubt that any of them ever gave thought to Meek’s experiences as a mountain man. After all, every single one of them had arrived under circumstances of equal magnitude — whether by land or sea or from another continent. It was just the way it was, moving west!