01Biography
Peter Burnett was a Missouri lawyer, deep in debt, when he helped organize the great emigration of 1843. On June 1, near the Kansas River, the company elected him captain. He resigned on June 8, and the company soon broke into smaller trains. He kept a journal, and his memoir tells how Marcus Whitman urged the doubting families at Fort Hall to keep their wagons.
In November he reached Fort Vancouver, where John McLoughlin and James Douglas advised him to bring his family down and settle in the lower country. In 1844 he led Oregon's new legislative council and wrote its first law to keep Black people out. Its whipping clause became known as 'Peter Burnett's lash law.' Within a year the law had been dropped.
02Why they matter
Captained the great emigration of 1843 for its first week and later wrote a detailed memoir of the journey.
03How they died
He went to the California gold fields in 1848, grew rich selling land in Sacramento, and in 1849 became California's first elected governor. He asked lawmakers to bar Black settlers there too, and in 1851 he told them that 'a war of extermination' against Native people must be expected. He resigned in January 1851, later sat on the state supreme court and ran a bank, and died in San Francisco on May 17, 1895, aged 87.
04Legacy
His 1880 memoir, Recollections and Opinions of an Old Pioneer, is a key first-hand account of the 1843 emigration. Oregon remembers him most as the author of its first exclusion law.