General Joel Palmer (October 4, 1810 – June 9, 1881) was an American pioneer of the Oregon Territory in the Pacific Northwest region of North America.

He was born in Upper Canada, and spent his early years in New York and Pennsylvania before serving as a member of the Indiana House of Representatives.

Specifically, Palmer is noted for having climbed high on Mount Hood to observe the surrounding area when the party ran into difficulty.

[4] Palmer married his second wife, Sarah Ann Derbyshire, in 1836, and bought land near Laurel, Indiana,[2] in the Whitewater Valley, where he supervised a construction project for a canal.

[7] The remaining parts of the wagon train reached the end of the overland Oregon Trail at the Columbia River, and unwilling to wait for transport down the dangerous Cascade Rapids, Palmer's party joined Sam Barlow's party in a quest for passage through the Cascade Range around the south side of Mount Hood.

Palmer climbed to the 9,000-foot level of Mount Hood on October 7, 1845—with little food and the scant protection of moccasins—to scout a route off the mountains.

[4] After the war, in 1848, Palmer joined the California Gold Rush but returned in 1849 to co-found Dayton, Oregon on the lower Yamhill River where he built a sawmill on his donation land claim.

[2] Palmer gained an anti-settler reputation among immigrants, newspapers and officials, who said he acted too favorably toward the Indians,[5][8] even though he moved the tribes to reservations outside the Willamette Valley, seeking to avoid friction between settlers and natives by physical distance.

[6] After leaving office as Indian Affairs Superintendent, Palmer worked his farm on his land claim and operated his sawmill and several other enterprises.

[4] Palmer blazed a route to the gold fields of the Okanogan Valley and the upper portions of the Columbia River from Priest Rapids in 1860.

[13] He ran for governor in the 1870 election as the Republican candidate, but was narrowly defeated by La Fayette Grover, largely for his Indian policies.

[15] During World War II the liberty ship SS Joel Palmer, hull number 2025, was built and named in his honor.