Joseph L. Meek, a famed and unlettered mountain man, arrived in 1840 after driving from Fort Hall to Walla Walla in the first wagon on that part of the Oregon Trail. He was a founder of the Provisional Government and served as the first sheriff, the first marshal, and the first census taker. He carried word of the Whitman Massacre to Washington D.C., where President Polk, whose wife was his cousin, received him. Named marshal under the New Territorial Government, he accompanied Governor Lane to Oregon. His final Indian fighting was as a soldier in the Yakima War, 1855-56, and he died here in 1875. A neighbor called him very popular and as brave as Julius Caesar.