Page:How Marcus Whitman Saved Oregon.djvu/55



The United States had no contestant for the property except England, but in 1818 she was not ready to make any assertion of her rights. In 1828 she still postponed making any demand and renewed the treaty, well knowing that the little island many thousands of miles across the Atlantic, was the supreme ruler of all the vast territory.

Again, when the Ashburton Treaty was at issue, and the question of boundary which had been for forty-eight years a bone of contention, the government again ignored Oregon, and was satisfied with settling the boundaries between a few farms up in Maine.

But it requires no argument in view of this long continued series of acts, to reach the conclusion that American interests in Oregon were endangered most of all from the apathy and ignorance of our own statesmen.

That loyal old pioneer, Rev. Jason Lee, the chief of the Methodist Mission in Oregon, visited Washington in 1838 and presented the conditions of the country and its dangers forcibly. With funds contributed by generous friends he succeeded in taking back with him quite a delegation 46 of actual settlers for Oregon. But neither Congress nor the people were aroused.

For all practical purposes Oregon was treated as a "foreign land." There was not even a show of a protectorate over the few American immigrants