End of the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center • 1726 Washington St. • Historic Oregon City, Oregon
Oregon Trail History 101
[Home] - [History Library]

Joe Meek's biographer, Stanley Vestal, described him as, "the Davy Crockett of our Great Northwest, 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."

Born February 9, 1810 in Washington County, Virginia, Joe left home at the age of 18 to seek his fortune in the West. He signed on to trap for William Sublette, one of the original members of William Ashley's Rocky Mountain Fur Company, and roamed the Rocky Mountains for over a decade. His adventures were documented in The River of the West by Frances Fuller Victor.

In the 1830s, the Hudson's Bay Company consciously attempted to trap out the beaver populations in Idaho and Montana, as they were the last beavers then within legal reach of American trappers. The HBC hoped to remove the incentive for Americans to explore, exploit, and potentially claim the area. In response, many Americans headed north to get their share of pelts before the beaver were gone. Joe Meek was one of the trappers who headed north in response to the Company's actions, and it was in Idaho in 1838 that he married the daughter of Sub-Chief Kowesota of the White Bird band of the Nez Perce Indian tribes. Her true name was never recorded, but Joe called her "Virginia" after his home state.

By 1840, it was clear that the fur trade was finished as a commercial enterprise. Joe decided to throw his lot in with fellow trappers Caleb Wilkins and Robert Newell and try his luck in the Oregon Country. While on their way to Oregon, Virginia and the mountain men met a small group of emigrants at Fort Hall who were also Oregon-bound. The trappers agreed to guide them to the Whitman Mission near Fort Walla Walla, and the single wagon that the group risked bringing along became the first wagon to make it as far west as the Mission on the Oregon Trail. Before then, it was not generally believed that wagons could cross the intermountain west.

Once in Oregon, it is said that Joe took to wearing a bright red sash -- quite likely the one pictured about his waist, above -- in imitation of the French Canadian trappers employed by the Hudson's Bay Company. As the HBC enjoyed good relations with most of the Indian tribes whose lands the Company claimed on behalf of the British Empire, Joe hoped that the Indians would think he was a Quebecois trapper and leave him be when he was exploring the countryside.

Joe and Virginia settled in the Tualatin Valley northwest of Oregon City. Joe was politically active, and at the Champoeg meetings that brought the Provisional Government into existence, his was one of the loudest voices on the side of the American settlers. When the Provisional Government came into being in 1843, Joe Meek was appointed Sheriff of the Oregon Country. In the spring of 1848, it fell to him to travel to Washington, DC, with news of the killings at the Whitman Mission and the ensuing Cayuse War. While in Washington, he argued forcefully for making the Oregon Country a federal territory. The following spring, federally appointed Territorial Governor Joseph Lane stood on the balcony of William Holmes' farmhouse outside Oregon City and proclaimed that Oregon was now part of the United States of America. Joe Meek stayed in public service as a Territorial Marshal for several years.

In June of 1875, Joe died at his home on the Donation Land Claim he took out just north of Hillsboro. He was 65 years old. Prior to his death, in the late 1860s, Mrs. Frances Fuller Victor interviewed him many times for a book on early Oregon history. By the time her manuscript got to Connecticut to be published, it had become The River of the West: Life and Adventures in the Rocky Mountains and Oregon, embracing events in the life-time of a Mountain-Man and Pioneer with the Early History of the North-Western Slope -- essentially, the life and times of Joseph Lafayette Meek. By all accounts, Joe greatly enjoyed traveling and giving speeches to promote the book in the early 1870s.

Virginia survived her husband by almost 25 years, passing away on March 3, 1900 in the home of her youngest son, Stephen A. D. Meek. She was buried next to her husband near the beautiful Tualatin Plains Presbyterian "Old Scotch" Church north of Hillsboro.