Background
Young was born in 1799 in Tennessee, United States, to a farming family.
Young was born in 1799 in Tennessee, United States, to a farming family.
Young was probably with the expedition under William Becknell which in the fall of 1821 opened the Santa Fé Trail, and thereafter for a number of years he operated as a trapper from Taos. In August 1826 he appears in the New Mexican records as "Joaquin Joon, " the leader of a company which visited the Gila and incidentally were victors in a spirited battle with a band of Pima and Maricopa Indians. Three years later he led a party which included young Kit Carson across the Mohave Desert into California, where he trapped the San Joaquin River.
He returned to Taos in April 1831, and in the fall united with David Waldo and David E. Jackson in organizing two expeditions for California. Young arrived in Los Angeles in March 1832, but the plans of the company failed, and he decided to remain on the coast. In October he set out on an expedition that carried him over a great part of California and to the Colorado River at Yuma, returning to Los Angeles in the early summer of 1834. Near San Diego, in May, Young met Hall Jackson Kelley, promoter of the Oregon colonization movement, and became deeply interested in that project. He joined Kelley at Monterey, California, and the two, with twelve others and a cavalcade of horses and mules, arrived at Fort Vancouver on October 27. Dr. John McLoughlin, local head of the Hudson's Bay Company, had received word from Governor Figueroa to look out for a party of horse-thieves, and though showing kindness to Kelley would accept no explanations from Young. The trapper resolved, however, to remain, and settled on the Chehalem, where he developed a farm. For two and a half years he was virtually ostracized.
Early in 1837, however, Young was enabled to join with his neighbors in a project for bringing in cattle. With ten others he went to California, where he soon cleared himself of the charge against him and purchased some 800 head of cattle, more than 600 of which he succeeded in taking to the Willamette. Exonerated of blame, he at once became a leader in the Oregon community and remained so till his death. In 1838 he erected a sawmill which enabled the settlers to build frame houses; he extended the cultivation of his lands, producing large crops of grain, and zealously cooperated with the other pioneers for the development of the community. In 1840 his health failed and he died at his home the next year.
Young was a trader who traveled in what was then the northern Mexico frontier territories of Santa Fe de Nuevo México and Alta California before settling in the Oregon Country. Young traded along the Santa Fe Trail, followed parts of the Old Spanish Trail west, and established new trails. He later moved north to the Willamette Valley.
Young was the first exponent of democratic organization and procedure in Oregon, and that largely through him the first effective steps were taken toward freeing the settlement from the tyranny of the Hudson's Bay Company.
Young was a man of great natural abilities. As a trapper and explorer he was, almost from the beginning, a leader, and as a pioneer settler he attained a position of first importance in his community. He was active, enterprising, fearless, and scrupulously honest. Probably he had little schooling; he had, however, a keen intelligence, and he wrote well. Among his effects was a two-volume edition of Shakespeare, which he is supposed to have carried with him in all his many wanderings
