Page:Essays in Historical Criticism.djvu/98

 farming stations every two hundred miles, with blacksmith, gunsmith, and carpenter's shops, under the charge of government agents empowered to act as notaries and justices. Such stations would be self-supporting from the sale of produce and the services rendered to the immigrants. Whatever the merits of this plan, which was in fact an alternative for the establishment of military posts as urged by the Secretary of War, it was not adopted and had no influence on legislation. Moreover, there was nothing novel in the general Oregon policy which Lovejoy represents Whitman as pressing upon the government. It had been urged for years by prominent senators and representatives, and the government was already moving in that direction. Four years earlier, for example, Jason Lee, one of the pioneer Methodist missionaries, presented a memorial signed by nearly all the settlers in the Willamette valley "to Congress, praying that body to extend the United States government over the territory," and his letter and the memorial were included in Caleb Cushing's report on Oregon, of which 10,000 extra copies were printed. Over a month before Whitman arrived in Washington Senator Linn's Bill passed the Senate by a vote of 24 to 22, providing for the extension of the laws of the United States over the whole of the Oregon territory, the erection of courts and the granting of lands to settlers. So far from there being any danger that Oregon would be lost to the United States the real danger was that the govern-