Pioneer Profiles – August 2023
Our saga of William T’Vault (or Tevault, or Teevault, depending on his current persona) is drawing to a close. An individual who regularly reinvented himself, we’ve traced T’Vault through legal and political careers in Indiana, Arkansas, and Oregon; a marriage to the supposed “granddaughter” of Daniel Boone; a jail break following charges of rape and murder; an arduous trek across the Oregon Trail; a very short-lived tenure as the Oregon Territory’s first newspaper editor; an equally short-lived religious conversion wherein he confessed to being “an adulterer, a gambler, a hard drinker, and a scoundrel”; disastrous exploits as an egotistical but inexperienced trail guide; a so-so “Indian fighter”; and publisher of Jacksonville’s first newspaper, the Table Rock Sentinel. Whew! (Previous installments can be found in the Review’s September 2022, October 2022, and July 2023 online editions.)
The Sentinel was T’Vault’s “bully pulpit,” and he used it and his positions in Oregon’s Territorial and State Legislatures to advocate for the introduction of slavery into what would become the new state of Oregon. As the Civil War loomed, T’Vault voiced often and eloquently his support for slavery and the “Southern cause.”
T’Vault also became active in the movement to establish a Pacific Republic. The predecessor of the State of Jefferson movement, it advocated dividing the United States into three separate republics. The Pacific Republic would be a utopia made up of western coastal areas and some inland states. The citizens would live like southern gentlemen with all labor being performed by Chinese, Africans, Samoans, and Hawaiians, working as servants without the benefit of citizenship. No doubt, the proposed workers would jump at the opportunity to become slaves.
T’Vault’s campaign for the idea received little encouragement, but General Joseph Lane took it seriously.
At least part of T’Vault’s political ascendancy may be attributed to his association with Joseph Lane. Lane, the first Governor of the Oregon Territory, was also a Southerner, born in North Carolina and raised in Kentucky. He had immigrated to Indiana, where he became prominent in politics and where Lane and T’Vault had both served in the state legislature. Lane served as Oregon’s territorial delegate to Congress and as the state’s first U.S. senator. He also ran unsuccessfully for president in 1852 and for vice-president in 1860.
Defeated in his bid for Vice President on the Breckenridge ticket, Lane returned to Oregon on the same ship that carried the news of the attack on and surrender of Fort Sumpter. Among Lane’s baggage were boxes of rifles which he planned to deliver to Jacksonville, and, with T’Vault’s help, arm southern Oregonians who were sympathetic to the Confederate cause.
Lane hired an Irish teamster to deliver the crates and joined him on the wagon seat. Just as they were reaching Jesse Applegate’s home in Yoncalla, the driver’s pistol accidentally discharged, wounding Lane. While Lane convalesced, Applegate talked him into giving up his rash plan.
However, Lane did not give up on a Pacific Republic. He became an advisor to the Knights of the Golden Circle. Eight hundred armed knights were to capture the arsenal at Fort Benicia. Fortunately, their plan was exposed at the last minute and the movement defeated. After both the Washington Territory legislature and the Oregon legislature repudiated a Pacific Republic, Lane’s star faded.
Meanwhile, the West Coast secessionist plans had come to the attention of the federal government. Union troops established Fort Baker near Phoenix to keep an eye on and prevent undercover opposition to the Union cause. T’Vault was one of the individuals kept under surveillance.
Having sold the Sentinel, T’Vault lacked a stage from which to espouse his views or defend himself. In 1862, he started a new Jacksonville newspaper, the Oregon Intelligencer, declaring himself “a Union loving man” and his “platform” to be the Constitution of the United States. Despite what he proclaimed, T’Vault continued to denounce the government and promote the Confederate cause. He seasoned the paper’s pages with accusations and slander against his rivals, name calling, and vicious attacks on political opponents, Indians, and Chinese.
Of course, rival editors replied in kind. When a rumor circulated that T’Vault had drowned, the editor of Salem’s Oregon Statesman declared it an impossibility, writing “A man born to be hung can’t be drowned.”
The Intelligencer lasted a little over a year, folding in 1864. Walla Walla’s Washington Statesman wrote one of its obituaries: “T’Vault’s Jacksonville Intelligencer is dead. Complaint supposed to be whiskey on the editor’s brain.”
We should note that “whiskey on the editor’s brain” along with various escapades support the contention that T’Vault was a “periodic drunk.” Newspaper accounts over the years reported his being gutted in a saloon fight (he survived), shooting a man in the back while drunk, brawling in a lager beer saloon, and more.
When his latest newspaper folded, T’Vault returned to the law but his attention span was short lived. In 1866, he was struck with “Idaho fever” and headed for the new mines in Silver City. Probably too old to prospect but wanting to be where the action was, he published the Idaho Index for the next year before returning to his family.
In 1867, T’Vault resumed his law practice and was again elected District Attorney to the First Judicial District of Oregon. The Oregon Sentinel acknowledged that under T’Vault, any “criminals would feel the heavy hand of the law.” It also pointed out that Oregon did not require candidates to be lawyers to be eligible for the office and that T’Vault had “never been admitted to any practice in any court” in Oregon.
Then, after two decades, T’Vault began thinking again about his immortal soul. It seems that General Lane did so at the same time. This reformation was noteworthy enough for the Oregon Sentinel to print the following:
“Col. T’Vault and General Joseph Lane have both professed religion and joined the Catholic Church. The old sinners have deceived the people and been obedient servants of the devil all their lives, but now in their dotage they are both trying to cheat the devil out of his just rights. Gen. Lane has been so strongly impressed with Catholicism that he has been remarried to his wife. Col. T’Vault ought to follow suit. It is meet for such worthies to float together, and there should be no bastards in the royal families.”
Perhaps T’Vault had had a premonition. He was the last victim of Jacksonville’s 1868-69 smallpox epidemic, dying in February 1869. Father Francis Xavier Blanchett performed the Last Sacrament. According to the Chronicles of the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, a few minutes before his death T’Vault said, “I have faced the enemy on the battlefield, I have occupied positions of honor in my country and now must I die of smallpox?” He was 62 years old.
So where does that leave us? T’Vault’s life was certainly not the open book his gravestone depicts. His character was at best questionable, his influence on Oregon history difficult to determine, but he had an uncanny ability to be first on the scene and his record is significant. He was the first editor of the first Oregon newspaper. He was Jacksonville’s first newspaper editor and publisher. He was the first to attempt an overland route from Port Orford to Jacksonville. He was the first Postmaster General or the Oregon Territory. He was the first Speaker of the House in Oregon’s first State Legislature.
If the “winner” is based solely on who gets there first, then we concede that T’Vault earned his share of bravos and ribbons.
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