Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,061

This is the grave of Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth.

Born in 1802 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Wyeth went into the ice industry as a young man. It was more lucrative than you might think at first–big demand to keep things cold, no artificial refrigeration to make it possible. He got a job with Frederic Tudor, a big ice capitalist, to harvest ice out of ponds near Cambridge and store it to ship all the way to India with minimal loss. Insulating it with sawdust was the key and worked better than you’d think after experimentation. Well, Wyeth was already a big deal in the ice trade. Jarvis approached him with the idea of using a team of horses dragging a metal blade to cut the ice, which evidently was not already being done, even as it sounds obvious. This worked tremendously well and Wyeth started making a lot of money too. This was in the early 1820s. Wyeth began to experiment in all sorts of advancement in the ice trade, including better storage houses and things like that.

Now, if Wyeth had been a lifelong ice capitalist, we might not remember him much except for students of the trade and there aren’t that many of those. But, in 1832, Wyeth got interested in having a big adventure. He wanted to explore the West, where very few whites had gone. Hall Kelley was a Massachusetts guy who, despite having never been to the Oregon Country, became determined that there were great profits there. He was a fanatic about it. Wyeth became a follower. Wyeth hoped to make another fortune in furs and fish. The latter is more interesting to me because New England cod was a huge industry, but when white Americans first came to the Northwest, they totally ignored the salmon, used it for fertilizer for their crops, and barely ate it. That would change of course, but Wyeth saw Pacific salmon as the new Atlantic cod before most others did.

Wyeth thought Kelley was taking to long to get out to Oregon. So in 1832, he just organized his own expedition. First, he loaded a big ship of goods to trade and sent it around South America to meet him at the mouth of the Columbia River. Then, he got out to Missouri and started across the Plains with about 20 men. Luckily for him and his men, they got together with William Sublette, who was bringing supplies to trappers. It was a hard journey. Turns out, the Tribes weren’t thrilled by all these whites showing up. There was a brief battle in Idaho. One of Wyeth’s men died, 7 more abandoned the mission and headed back. Wyeth was down to 7 men at this time. He didn’t care. He managed to get all the way to the mouth of the Columbia thanks to bouncing from fur trading fort to fur trading fort and the traders probably thinking this guy is nuts and needs our help. But he made it. At that point, most of his remaining men abandoned him to take jobs with the Hudson’s Bay Company. In 1833, he started back, having explored the Willamette Valley, which he determined would be fantastic farming land (quite true!). He made it back that fall, having made connections and built contacts and was determined as ever to push for rapid settlement of the Northwest.

In 1834, Wyeth started a new expedition that brought Methodist missionaries to the Northwest, including Jason Lee. This time, he turned out once he got to Idaho and established For Hall, in what is today the southeastern part of the state. Basically, what Wyeth wanted to do here was undercut the Hudson’s Bay Company and start a new trading firm that would bring American dominance to the region. He did not succeed financially here but his actions did push forward the conquest of the West by Americans and of course the resulting genocide against the Tribes. But effectively, Wyeth opened the Oregon Trail and Fort Hall would be a critical stop on that for settlers. It used to be that men like Wyeth were seen as heroes and taught that way too. It’s hard to square that with the genocide at the heart of the American project. Of course, Trump and Rufo and their minions want to return that kind of history, with celebration of the genocide as “progress.”

There’s not too much to say about Wyeth after this. He still supported western colonization, which soon became a thing. He just didn’t make any money in it. So he went back to the ice trade, where he still made plenty of money. He did that for the rest of his life. That ended in 1856, at the age of 54.

Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

If you would like this series to visit other figures from Wyeth’s adventures, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Thomas Fitzpatrick is in Washington, D.C. and Osborne Russell is in Placerville, California. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.