Page:Centennial History of Oregon 1811-1912, Volume 1.djvu/375



of land ; Albert Town and others in the State of Ohio had asked for a large tract to settle upon; and John M. Bradford and others of Louisiana had asked for a grant of one million and twenty-four thousand acres of Oregon land in which to found a colony. These propositions were all voted down by Congress as being incompatible ■with Republican principles to make special grants to anybody. Floyd's term expired in 1829, and thus ended the efforts of Oregon's first friend in Congress to help this country.

Nothing more is heard in Congress about the settlement of Oregon until Sen- ator Lewis F. Linn, introduces his first bill in 1838 ; which proposed to organize "The Oregon Territory;" occupy the Columbia Valley; erect a fort on the Co- lumbia river with a military force ; establish a port of entry ; and hold the coun- try for the United States.

In his report to support his proposition Linn advanced all the arguments put forth by Floyd ten years before, and then added another which shows he was just about seventy-five years ahead of the statesmen of our day. lie dwelt on the importance of a harbor on the northwest coast of America where the whaling fleet of the Pacific might refit, .iust as Floyd had, and then prophesied "That direct communication between the Atlantic and the Pacific would soon be opened by a canal across the isthmus of Darien, by which the whole trade of the Eastern Hemisphere would be changed in its course, which would be then toward the shores of North America." But the Congress of the United States was not yet awake and Linn's bill was defeated in the Senate. But Linn's work had brought before the country a mass of information about Oregon, which was readily picked up by ambitious and adventurous men throughout the west who saw visions and dreamed dreams of founding an empire on the Pacific as their forefathei's had on the Atlantic. And about this same time Caleb Cushing, a very able and dis- tinguished man in his time and a member of Congress from Massachusetts, as the chairman of the committee on foreign affairs, to which had been referred the Jason Lee Memorial of 1839, and other documents about Oregon, made a lengthy and exhaustive report on the Oregon question, of which report ten thousand copies were printed in addition to five thousand copies of Senator Linn's speech, and all scattered over the country. It is said that this report educated the people to an exalted idea of the value of Oregon, and at the same time incited a hatred of the British traders who had kept the Americans out of the fur trade in that country. Here then is found the foundation of the wide spread interest in Old Oregon which prevailed throughtout the Eastern States, and specially in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. Only one thing more was necessai-y to fire the train, and set it in mo'tion towards Oregon. And we soon find that.

On the 31st of March, 1840, Senator Linn reported back to the Senate a sub- stitute for his former proposition, asserting the title of the United States to Oregon, authorizing the President to take such measures as was necessary to pro- tect the persons and property of Am'erican citizens in Oregon, to erect a line of military posts from the Missouri river to the Rocky Mountains, and granting to each white male inhabitant over eighteen years of age one thousand acres of land. This proposition was followed up by a petition from Elizabethtown, Kentucky, a.«king Congress to plant a colony in Oregon and give the colonists lands ; and by another petition from forty-four citizens from Indiana asking for a grant of lands within a strip of ten miles on each side of the Willamette River, so the settlers