Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 1.djvu/239

Rh that was, almost more than all else, to influence the Oregon Question to an issue favorable to the United States. Whitman seems to have seen this from the first. The settlement of the Oregon Question came to appear to him simply a matter of prior settlement of the territory from contiguous states, and such prior settlement was a question only of an open pathway through the intervening mountains. To his mind, therefore, the first duty of the American government was not in military occupation of the region in question, nor in the extension over it of civil jurisdiction, but in making the pathway thither already pointed out, a plain and safe highway for American settlers. This done, the people would do the rest.

In the year 1837, after a silence of nearly ten years, the Oregon Question was again moved in congress. Many things had happened in the interval since its last appearance there to make it certain that with its reappearance the question had come to abide until settled. The settlements already mentioned, small as they were, were not inconsiderable in their influence at the east. They were the centers of ties that reached back into various influential communities in the states of the union; nor were the men who composed the settlements slow to avail themselves of every such tie to make and influence public sentiment at home. The same energy and indomitable spirit which they manifested in reaching the new land, were shown again in their efforts to enlighten the country in regard to the land they had come to possess, and to persuade others to join them in their efforts to take and keep possession of it. Never was a new country so much talked of, nor its excellencies so enthusiastically set forth, when those who could do so from experience were so few. From the time the first real American colony was founded in Oregon, and there had been time for word from it to reach the states from which its' members had come, nei-