Joseph Lafayette "Joe" Meek (February 9, 1810 – June 20, 1875) was a pioneer, mountain man, law enforcement official, and politician in the Oregon Country and later Oregon Territory of the United States. A trapper involved in the fur trade before settling in the Tualatin Valley, Meek played a prominent role at the Champoeg Meetings of 1843, where he was elected a sheriff. He was later elected to and served in the Provisional Legislature of Oregon before being appointed as the United States Marshal for the Oregon Territory.
Joe was only nineteen when he ran away from his father's Virginia cotton plantation. Two of his brothers had already gone west and Joe caught up with them in St. Louis. Hiram was happily married and the owner of a grocery store, but Steve was a member of William Sublette's trapping expedition and this was what Joe wanted to do too. Sublette refused to take him because he was too young, so Joe stowed away as a mule boy and when he was discovered it was too late to send him back to St. Louis.
So began a life of incredible adventure, but young Joe thrived on it. He ranged the country of the Crow, the Blackfeet, the Flatheads, Diggers and the Nez Perce. He set his traps along the Big Horn, the Platte, the Snake the Yellowstone and the Columbia. He fought Indians, bears, starvation, the blizzards of the Rockies and the Salt Lake deserts.
His friends were the giants of the West who, like Joe himself, helped make history, Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, Jedediah Smith, Narcissa Whitman. He adored his Indian wife, Mountain Lamb, and their daughter, Helen Mar, but tragedy struck and one was killed in an Indian raid and the other in the Whitman massacre.
Saddened, and enraged by encroaching civilization, Joe moved further west settling in the Northwest Territory which was dominated by the activities of the Hudson Bay Company and was under British rule. Many of the settlers wanted United States protection, and Joe Meek journeyed to Washington to petition for this aid. He returned with Joseph Lane, first Governor of the Oregon Territory, and was himself appointed first United States Marshal.
Joe Meek's story is more than the story of a man who loved mountains, it is the story of the making of a nation, and Shannon Garst has written it with all the zest and action, the vigor and violence that marked these mountain men.
United States