Page:History of Oregon volume 1.djvu/809

758 as the roughest and most rolicksome plenipotentiary the great republican capital had ever seen.

It little concerned Meek that his relative was the president's secretary. Was he not a great American citizen, very free and quite unceremonious, and the representative of other great American citizens who looked out on a sea toward the sunset? Two days had not passed before the apartments of the White House were as familiar to him as the canons of Snake River. Yet he was not wholly void of compunctions.

He began to feel in due time that after all in whatsoever appertained to greatness, there should be applied the eternal fitness, and so he permitted a tailor to trust him for a suit of 'store clothes.' On the 29th of May President Polk laid before both houses a special message on Oregon affairs, in which he quoted some passages from the memorial of the colonial legislature, forwarded by Meek, touching the neglect of congress, and reminded members that in his annual messages of 1846 and 1847 he had urged the immediate organization of a territorial govern-