|
Joe
Meek:
While in the mountains, Joe Meek
had many adventures including a hand-to-claw encounter with a grizzly
bear, hand-to-hand combat with a Bannock warrior, the killing of his first
wife by a raiding party, participation in the battle at Pierre's Hole,
July 17, 1832 (see the 1832 Rendezvous)
and was a member of Joseph Walker's expedition to California in 1833-34.
As the fur trade lost importance in
the 1840s, Joe Meek and Doc Newell joined the immigrants to Oregon, and
escorted one of the first wagon trains across the mountains.
Settling in Willamette Valley of Oregon,
near what would become Hillsboro, he became a farmer, also serving as
sheriff in 1843 and in the legislature in 1846 and 1847.
With the Whitman Massacre and outbreak of the Cayuse War in the
Oregon Territory, Meek headed for Washington D.C. where he met with
President Polk. Joe Meek's
case for making the Oregon Territory a federal territory came to fruition
with the appointment of Joe Lane as Territorial Governor and Joe Meek as
Territorial Federal Marshal. A local resident described Joe Meek
as “bold, adventurous, humorous, a first-class trapper, pioneer, peace
officer, and frontier politician. More, he was the wittiest, saltiest,
most shameless wag and jester that ever wore moccasins in the Rockies - a
tall happy-go-lucky Virginian lover of practical jokes, tall tales,
Jacksonian Democracy and Indian women." To learn more
about Joe Meek see the following references:
|
Joe
Meek was born in Virginia.