Page:History vs. the Whitman saved Oregon story.djvu/36

30 with a "sloop of war, a brig of war, two launches, ten boats, and upward of 300 men" he was busily engaged till October 10, 1841, in a far more extensive and thorough exploration of Oregon by land and water than any other single expedition has ever made, even to this day. He surveyed and chartered Puget's Sound and the navigable waters of the Columbia, visited all the mission stations of the Methodists and of the American Board, and all of the posts of the Hudson's Bay Company south of 49 degrees, except Hall and Boise (which hundreds of Americans 'had visited), and all the settlements in Oregon.

He sent a party from Puget's Sound eastward to the Columbia and back to the sound by a different route, through the center of the region north and west of the Columbia (being all that was really in dispute, and) of the real value of which (according to Spalding's letter of April 7, 1846, edited by Whitman, and published in Palmer's Journal in 1847) the missionaries of the American Board knew absolutely nothing until the party sent from the settlements in the Willamette Valley explored it in the autumn of 1845, i.e., three years after Whitman started to the States.

He also sent a party overland from the Columbia up the Willamette and down the Sacramento to San Francisco.

He dropped anchor at New York June 10, 1842, and three days later filed in the navy department a most enthusiastic "special report" on Oregon (covering 44 pages foolscap), urging the immense value of the Puget's Sound region, and declaring that in Oregon a man could make a living and acquire wealth with only one-third the labor required in the States, and that "No portion of the world beyond the tropics can be found that will yield so readily with moderate labor to the wants of man" as the Oregon territory would.

These statements,—as powerful stimulants to migration as could well be imagined,—with enough more to make 14 pages the House of Representatives took, and on January 4, 1843 (when Whitman was near Bent's Fort), added it to the 64 pages of the Report of the Military Committee of the House on Oregon (of which 5,000 copies had been printed in May, 1842), and ordered another edition of 5,000 copies printed.

In a part of this Special Report which was not printed, in discussing passes over the Rocky Mountains, Wilkes wrote: "Finally the two southern routes, which are preferable, susceptible of being used at almost all seasons, and a good wagon road may be constructed with little expense. ... It is readily to be perceived that the difficulty of communication with the Territory is far less for us than for the British." There was no need for our government to print this, because it had