Peter Hardeman Burnett (1807–1895)

Born on November 15, 1807, in Nashville, Tennessee, Peter Hardeman Burnett was the eldest son of George and Dorothy Hardeman Burnett, originally spelled Burnet. At the age of ten young Burnett moved with his family to Howard County, Missouri. In 1826 he returned to Tennessee, where he worked as a clerk in hotels and stores around Nashville. While there he met and married Harriet W. Rogers, and they for a time ran a general store.

When the store did not succeed, however, the Burnetts moved to the Missouri frontier and settled in Liberty, Clay County, in about 1828. For an enterprising young man in the Jacksonian era, no place in the United States was more inviting than the recently created state of Missouri, and Burnett made the most of the state’s opportunities. In Liberty he founded the Far West newspaper, studied and later practiced law, and invested in several businesses. By the early 1830s he had built a fine law practice in western Missouri, established some political ties, and made credible economic gains.

In one of his earliest political activities, Burnett became involved in the process of incorporating into Missouri the Platte country, a fertile tract located between the state’s original western boundary and the Missouri River in what is now the northwest corner of the state. Though it was reserved for Native Americans, many white settlers in the western part of the state viewed it as rich land that they wanted to use. In 1835, Burnett participated in a rally in Clay County advocating annexation of the Platte region and served on a committee to prepare a memorial to Congress on the issue that included several other leading political figures such as Alexander Doniphan and David Rice Atchison. Within two years, Congress had approved the annexation, ordered the removal of the Native Americans to the West, and opened the region to American settlement. When learning of the decision, Burnett supposedly rode “hell-bent-for-leather” from Liberty to the settlement of Barry, in what became western Platte County, with the news of annexation. After the announcement the townspeople adjourned to the local “grocery” to imbibe. In the commotion Burnett lost his tall hat, but according to one eyewitness “more than one hat went up, like the Hebrew children, on that occasion.” 

Burnett also found himself involved in the most sustained controversy in the state during the 1830s: the Mormon problem in the western part of the state. Significant numbers of the sect’s members had settled in Jackson County beginning in 1831. In 1833 they had been forcibly expelled from the county, and had moved as refugees to other counties in the area. For a time Burnett, acting as state prosecutor in the western region, was involved in cases against several members of the church for bad debts and other charges. On at least one occasion he also represented a member of the church in a civil suit.

When violence erupted between the Mormons and the citizens of Daviess County, in northwestern Missouri, in August 1838, Missouri’s governor, Lilburn W. Boggs, called out the militia to restore the peace. Burnett was an officer in the Clay County militia and participated in the dramatic siege of the Mormon stronghold of Far West, in Caldwell County, the trial of several Mormon leaders, including the prophet Joseph Smith Jr., and the eventual expulsion of the sect from the state in the winter of 1838–1839. 

Burnett’s business activities, never truly successful, took a turn for the worse in the early 1840s, and that, coupled with the failure of his wife’s health, prompted him to consider making a new start farther west. The place that caught Burnett’s attention was Oregon, for which he set out with a historic wagon train of 875 people that left Independence, Missouri, on May 22, 1843. As its captain for a time, he led the train on the epic trek to Oregon in the summer of 1843 and reached the mission of Marcus Whitman on October 14. Once the train disbanded, Burnett and his family left their friends and journeyed on to Fort Vancouver, where he took up farming near the mouth of the Willamette River. The farm failed, however, and he later established another farm near the present town of Hillsboro, Oregon.

Burnett quickly became prominent in territorial politics, serving on a legislative committee for the region in 1844, as a judge on the Oregon Supreme Court in 1845, and as a member of the territorial legislature in 1848. Even as his political fortunes in Oregon rose, in the fall of 1848 Burnett led a cadre of 150 men to California, where the gold rush was just getting under way. There he continued a meteoric political career. In less than a year he had been appointed judge of the superior tribunal of California. He also lobbied for California statehood, and in the process attained the governorship on November 13, 1849, a post he held until January 6, 1851, when he resigned and began a highly successful law practice. In 1857 and 1858 Burnett served on the California Supreme Court, but that was his last public office. His political career in the West was tarnished by his advocacy of laws to exclude African Americans from settling in Oregon and California; such legislation was passed in Oregon in 1844 but failed in California.

For the rest of his long life, Burnett engaged in a variety of business activities, especially finance as the founder in 1863, with Sam Brannan and Joseph Winans, of Pacific Bank in San Francisco. He served as its president for many years, retiring only in 1880. Burnett died on May 17, 1895. The prominent late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historian H. H. Bancroft characterized Burnett’s career as one of great success, due largely to his ability to be in the right place at the right time and to accommodate the circumstances of the situation.