Page:Centennial History of Oregon 1811-1912, Volume 1.djvu/74



La Salle had literally given his life to his king, to France, and to the ex- tension of the Catholic religion. According to the supposed law of nations two hundred years ago, La Salle had given France a good title to all the lands drained by the Mississippi river. And as it turned out in the current of his- torical and political events, that title was made good to France by the subse- quent action of President Thomas Jeiferson; thus showing what a great work and a great gift La Salle had conferred on his country. From that territory, and founded upon the title which the acts and labors of La Salle had given to France, and for which the United States paid France fifteen million dollars more than a hundred years ago, the following American states have been peopled and organized: Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas, Ne- braska, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Indian Territory, and parts of Montana and Colorado.

But we must not forget that this was not all of the empire which the dis- coveries of La Salle conferred on France. La Salle had claimed all the lands drained by the Mississippi. In addition to the states named above, this claim covered Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, and parts of Wisconsin, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Mississippi. France had already claimed the whole of lower and upper Canada, and for two hundred and thirty years, running from 1524 down to 1760, had held exclusive possession of the same, and from La Salle's advent on the Mississippi, had held a like exclusive possession of the whole of the Mississippi Valley for more than seventy years.

The relation and connection of this state of Oregon with this chapter of the life of the great La Salle consists of the influence which the acts of the explorer gave to the extension of American settlements and exploration towards the Pa- cific Northwest. It may be adverted to now, and enlarged upon hereafter, that the French nation and the French people have always been, whenever occasion offered, friends of American ideas and institutions on the American continent as against other nations. And this friendship has more than once been effective to confer great benefits not only on the United States, but also on the people of Oregon.

In 1753, England, by virtue of the possession of the colonies on the Atlantic coast, and especially the colony of Virginia, put forth a claim to all the ter- ritoj'y west of Virginia. The first public assertion of this claim by England was when Dinwiddle, colonial governor of Virginia, on the 30th of October, 1753, sent a young man named George Washington over the Alleghany mountains, to the forks of the Ohio to find out what the French were doing in that region. Young Washington, then only twenty-two years of age, took along with him an old soldier that could speak French, engaged a pioneer guide and struck out into the vast wilderness. Reaching an Indian camp twenty miles below where the city of Pittsburg now stands, he held a pow-wow with the red men, and they furnished him an escort and guides to go up the Alleghany river and find the Frenchmen. This was then in the middle of a bad winter. But nothing could stop Washington. He found the French prepared to hold the country by military force if necessary. He got their reply to Dinwiddle's letter, and returned to Williamsburgh, the then capital of Virginia. Washington Irving has drawn out the story of this first expedition of George Washine;ton in his unsurpassed style and adds: "This expedition may be considered the founda-