Page:How Marcus Whitman Saved Oregon.djvu/216

 Eells, "that in fifty years the whole country will be filled with the descendants of the Hudson Bay Company." But while they believed, just as the American immigrants did, that as a result of the Treaty of 1818-28, the country would belong to the nationality settling 194 it; yet they had so long held supreme power that they were slow to think that such power was soon to pass from them.

That the diplomacy of the home Government, the bold methods and "The shrewdness, daring and commercial activity in the heads" of the Rulers, that the Edinburgh Review pictures, were all to be thwarted and that speedily, had not entered into their calculations, and they did not awake to a sense of the real danger until those hundred and twenty-five wagons, loaded with live Americans and their household goods, rolled down the mountain sides and into the Valley of the Willamette on that memorable October day, 1843.

It was America's protest, made in an American fashion. It settled the question of American interests as far as Americans could settle it under the terms of the Treaty of 1818, as they understood it.

Under the full belief that Whitman would bring with him a large delegation, the Americans met and organized before he reached Oregon. And when the Whitman caravan