Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 1.djvu/158

146 secret of the prosperity and content was the equal distribution of land, at a price within the reach of any, and the reservation in all the townships for common schools.

We claimed by right of discovery and first occupation, the Oregon Territory. Great Britain disputed our claim with enough show of rights to furnish some ground for the contention. Neither government was prepared to go to war over it, and for nearly thirty years after the convention of 1818 by which a joint occupancy was agreed upon, a perpetual irritation was kept up between the two countries through the determination of the western pioneers to stretch their boundaries to the Pacific, taking the land surveyor along with them. In 1846 the question was finally settled, and not unjustly.

The pioneers who for several years had been toilsomely journeying across two thousand miles of wilderness to reach the Land of Promise, now looked for immediate congressional action to be taken which should give them formally the territorial rights and privileges conferred by the Ordinance of 1787. But in this they were disappointed. That same ordinance, it was, which delayed the organization of a territorial government, the people of Oregon having expressly petitioned to be organized