laid the foundation of a treaty with Spain for the cession of the Floridas and the settlement of the boundary of Louisiana, fixing the western limit of the latter at Rio Grande, agreeably to the understanding of France; that he had written home to our government for powers to complete and sign this negotiation; but that, instead of receiving such authority, the negotiation was taken out of his hands and transferred to Washington, and a new treaty was there concluded by which the Sabine, and not the Rio Grande, was recognized and established as the boundary of Louisiana.

"Finding that these statements were true and that our Government did really give up that important territory, when it was at its option to retain it, I was filled with astonishment. The right of the territory was obtained from France; Spain stood ready to acknowledge it to the Rio Grande; and yet the authority asked by our minister to insert the true boundary was not only withheld, but, in lieu of it, a limit was adopted which stripped us of the whole of the vast country lying between the two rivers.

"On such a subject, I thought, with the ancient Romans, that it was right never to cede any land or boundary of the republic, but always to add to it by honorable treaty, thus extending the area of freedom; and it was in accordance with this feeling that I gave our minister in Mexico instructions to enter upon a negotiation for the retrocession of Texas to the United States.

"This negotiation failed; and I shall ever regret it as a misfortune both to Mexico and the United States. Mr. Gilmer's letter presents many of the considerations which, in my judgment, rendered the step necessary to the peace and harmony of the two countries; but the point in it, at that time, which most strongly impelled me to the course I pursued, was the injustice done to us by the surrender of the territory, when it was obvious that it could have been retained, without increasing the consideration afterward given for the Floridas. I could not but feel that the surrender of so vast and important a territory was attributed to an erroneous estimate of the tendency of our institutions, in which there was mingled somewhat of jealousy as to the rising greatness of the South and West.

"But I forbear to dwell on this part of the history of this question. It is past, and cannot now be undone. We can now only look at it as one of annexation, if Texas presents it to us; and, if she does, I do not hesitate to say that the welfare and happiness of our Union requires that it should be accepted.

"If, in a military point of view alone, the question be examined, it will be found to be most important to the United States to be in possession of the territory.

"Great Britain has already made treaties with Texas; and we know that farseeing nation never omits a circumstance, in her extensive intercourse with the world, which can be turned to account in increasing her military resources. May she not enter into an alliance with Texas? And, reserving, as she doubtless will, the northwestern boundary question as the cause of war with us whenever she chooses to declare it, let us suppose that, as an ally with Texas, we are to fight her? Preparatory to such a movement, she sends her 20,000 or 30,000 men to Texas; organizes them on the Sabine, where supplies and arms can be concentrated before we have even notice of her intentions; makes a lodgment on the Mississippi; excites the negroes to insurrection; the lower country falls, and with it New Orleans; and a servile war rages through the whole South and West.

"In the meantime, she is also moving an army along the western frontier from Canada, which, in co-operation with the army from Texas, spreads ruin and havoc from the lakes to the gulf of Mexico.

"Who can estimate the national loss we may sustain, before such a movement could be repelled with such forces as we could organize on short notice?

"I return you my thanks for your kind letter on this subject, and subscribe myself, with great sincerity, your friend and obedient servant,

"HON. A. V. BROWN."

ANDREW JACKSON.

This question was also brought before the legislatures of the slaveholding states for expression of opinion. A committee of the state of Mississippi reporting thereon, said, "Your committee are fully persuaded that this protection to her (slaveholding) interests will be afforded by the annexation of Texas; an equipoise of influence in the halls of congress will be secured which will furnish us a permanent guarantee of protection.

And so by one subterfuge after another the settlement of the Oregon boundary line was held back until after Texas was admitted to the Union as slave territory, and upon the express provision of Congress that four slave states might be carved out of Texas. The annexation of Texas and its proposed division into four slaveholding states was mainly the work of John C. Calhoun who had served as secretary of state in the Harrison-Tyler administration from 1841 to 1844. Calhoun saw nothing wrong in the institution of slavery. In his eyes it was not only good, but a positive good to both the white and the black race. He regarded slavery as a perfectly natural relation; and that if the abolition movement then in 1840 being first agitated, should ever succeed, the fate of the southern people would be worse than that of the native Indians. Calhoun was an Irish Presbyterian of the most rigid, arbitrary and unyielding faith, and be believed in his pro-slavery sentiments with his whole soul. He was a bold, brave leader of men of great ability, and of an uncompromising disposition. He swayed the Harrison-Tyler administration to his purposes, forced the annexation of Texas, brought on the war against Mexico to seize more slave territory and used neglected Old Oregon as a pawn on the international chess board to keep the British from seizing Texas or California. The annexation of Texas was formally completed on the 1st day of March, 1845, three days before James K. Polk was inaugurated the eleventh president of the United States. The question had been carefully nursed along during the entire administration of Tyler and Calhoun. Tyler, a very common-place man, had been extremely anxious to hasten the annexation of Texas as a matter of great moment to distinguish his administration; but Calhoun had been as equally anxious to hold the project back to the last minute, shrewdly seeing that it might arouse such a bitter antislavery sentiment in all the northern states as to endanger the election of a southern man to succeed Tyler. And to forestall any such a political revulsion, Calhoun cooked up the war-cry of "Fifty-Four Forty or Fight," as a platform for James K. Polk to run on to succeed Tyler. It was a great game, shrewdly and successfully played-"A good enough Morgan until after the election." And in all this double-dealing and duplicity the British agents had played into the hands of the slaveholders; as they always did, believing that sooner or later

the slavery question would divide the country and break up the Union of the States. Warre and Vavasour had been out here to Oregon surveying the country, picking out suitable sites for British forts and making recommendations as to the number of soldiers and cannon needed to seize and hold the country. And following up this recommendation, Her Majesty's government ordered a regiment of the Royal Sappers and Miners to report from different parts of England to the Woolwich Arsenal in readiness to proceed to America and go to Oregon territory for active service. And all this time Calhoun, on the part of the South, and the Northern "dough faces" under the lead of Dayton, of New Jersey, was denouncing Oregon as the "riddlings of creation," and not worth fighting about.

The slave states had now got Texas, and forced Mexico into a war that in the end would add New Mexico and Arizona and a large slice of California south of the Mason-Dixon line of division between free and slave territory. Sloat had seized upper California; and there was no reason to longer hold back the settlement of the Oregon boundary line with England. If there ever was a fair referendum of a political question to the people of the United States, it was the Oregon question. The people had passed on the question, and elected James K. Polk to carry out their sovereign will. It was to be the whole of Oregon or fight. But no sooner is Polk safely seated in the presidential chair than he presents a compromise boundary line-a line that had been repudiated by every president and every treaty that had preceded him. His secretary of state, James Buchanan, could ill conceal the disgust and humiliation he felt in making such an offer, and when England declined it he made haste to withdraw it. If Buchanan had now stood firmly by Oregon, he might have forced Polk to keep his pledges to the people, for the secretary of the treasury, Robt. J. Walker, a Southern man, hotly opposed giving up an inch of Oregon to England. But Buchanan was wheedled into yielding with Polk on a promise of the presidency by the slave power, which he got in 1856, and thus betrayed Oregon, just as he betrayed the Nation of 1860. The offer to give up half of Old Oregon, had been thus dishonorably made. Polk's administration was committed to it, and England took time to see what was best to do. An English representative was sent to Oregon in the person of a titled lady in disguise; and then it was discovered that the preachers, mountaineers and missionaries had organized a formidable government of their own, and were holding the fort under the Stars and Stripes; and that they were not good material to make British "subjects". And then it was that England accepted the line offered by President Polk, knowing that Polk was giving away one-half the territory the United States was justly entitled to. That the United States lost one-half of the Oregon territory, and gave our traditional and historical enemy a foothold to annoy us for all time on the Pacific is to be charged up to John C. Calhoun, President Polk and the slaveholders of the South. And that this History is fully justified in making this statement the reader is asked to consider the following letter written by Robert J. Walker, who was secretary of the treasury in President Polk's cabinet. When the purchase of Alaska was before Congress after the Civil war was over and twenty-three years after the settlement of the Oregon boundary, and after Polk was dead and buried and the institution of slavery abolished, Mr. Walker, in his old age, wrote a letter to the Washington City Daily Chronicle, published January 28, 1868, in which he says:

"We own now the whole western Pacific Coast from lower California to the Arctic Sea, except British Columbia, which (against my earnest protest in the cabinet) was ceded to England in 1846. I say ceded, for our title to the whole of Oregon from the forty-second parallel northward to Russian America was in truth clear and unquestionable. British Columbia was lost to us by the most unfortunate diplomacy extending through a long period of time. The opposition to the acquisition of Louisiana was geographical and anti-slavery. In 1821, Texas was relinquished partly from geographical, but mainly from anti-slavery opposition. In 1845 the opposition to the annexation of Texas was based mainly on anti-slavery grounds. In 1846, in connection with the unfortunate action of preceding administrations, Oregon, north of the forty-ninth parallel, was lost to the Union. While the history of annexation in the United States shows various obstacles by which it has been retarded, yet the chief among these was the discordant element of slavery. Thus it was that, while the free states to a great extent opposed the acquisition of slave territory, the slavestates opposed the acquisition of free territory. But for these opposing principles, our area would be far greater than it is now. On extinguishing slavery, we have removed the principal cause which retarded annexation. We see already the good effects of the disappearance of this institution in the almost unanimous vote of the senate by which the Alaska treaty was ratified. Before the extinction of slavery, that treaty would have been defeated, upon the same principle that Oregon north of the forty-ninth parallel was ceded to England." That is the testimony of a statesman, and a southern man, too, who was on the ground in the cabinet, and knew all about the whole base betrayal of the rights of the United States to the whole coast up to Alaska;-and that settles the question. That the United States saved anything of the Old Oregon, and gave the nation a foothold on the Pacific ocean, and an open roadway on American territory across the continent is to be credited to the Oregon Pioneers and their provisional government. The Oregon that was saved to the Nation, is the Oregon that was organized and claimed by the provisional government that was organized by the fifty-two heroes at old Champoeg on May 2nd, 1843. And no words, or monuments can ever express or manifest the honor and respect due to those men from the people of Oregon.

CHAPTER X

1834-1844.

OREGON IGNORED BY U. S. GOVERNMENT—TREATY OF NON-OCCUPATION-NO MAN'S LAND THE OREGON TRAIL-OREGON IN CONGRESS FOR THE FIRST TIME-ROUTE OF TRAIL LOCATED BY HUNT AND STUART-WHITMAN WITH THE FIRST WAGON

ON THE TRAIL-IMMIGRATION OF 1843-PREPARATION FOR STARTING ON THE TRAIL CHARACTER OF THE IMMIGRANTS-BENEFITS OF THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT THE RESULTS OF THE MISSIONS.

It will be seen from the preceding Chapter that there was nobody in the Oregon country inviting settlement; no real estate agents; no boom towns; no getrich-quick schemes; no colonization schemes, and no government agents of any kind. The country was two thousand miles from the nearest American settlement on the Missouri river; and separated from it by thousands of miles of trackless plains, rugged mountains, inhospitable deserts, and savage tribes of Indians. Why should any American citizen with a family go to such a country as that? About all that anybody knew about Oregon that could be relied on before the emigration started, was to be found in the following brief notice of the country, in Mitchell's Common School Geography, of 1842, as follows:

"Oregon Territory is the most western part of the United States. It extends from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, and contains an area greater than that of the whole southern states. Though claimed by the United States, the territory is at present actually in possession of Great Britain. The Hudson's Bay Company have established forts at various points and exercise an unlimited control over the native Indians reckoned to amount to a population of eighty thousand."

Woodbridge's Geography, published by Oliver Cook and Co. of Hartford, Conn., in 1829, has no mention of Oregon; but classes the territory of Old Oregon in with and as a part of "Missouri Territory."

The emigration to Oregon actually commencing in the year 1843, was one of the most remarkable movements in all history. Neither the pioneers who wrought the great work, or their descendants who have lived to see its great results, have ever comprehended the full force of the great achievement. Moved by an impulse which they did not detect the origin of, and over which they seemed to have had no control or ability to foresee its possible failure or success, the pioneers of 1843 accomplished a result equal to the founding of ancient Rome or the colonization of the Atlantic coast by the Puritans of the North and the Cavaliers of the South. The goal to be obtained was neither wealth, power, selfish isolation, a new faith, cult, government, or destruction of enemies. And neither time, toils, distance, hardships, savage tribes and enemies, or deadly pestilence could stay or defeat it. The poet Whit