Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 1.djvu/241

Rh in congress of the Oregon Question, congress and the country had the detailed results of this first official inquiry into the condition and prospects of the settlements in the region of the Columbia.

Throughout this period when the question was in abeyance, individual explorers, American and British, had from time to time visited this region and had returned to write for eager readers of what they saw and learned in the strange new land, until a piqued interest on two continents was alert for the next news from Oregon. The publication at the close of this period of Irving's Astoria in 1836, and of his Adventures of Captain Bonneville in 1837, books which were themselves the offspring of the widespread and romantic interest already felt, served in turn to make that interest still more keen, and to awaken it in minds where else it had never been felt.

But greatest among all the forces that had been at work during this period toward the solution of this question was one that had worked silently and unobserved, but persistently and effectively, and withal wholly in the American interest. In the ten years that followed the extension of the convention of 1818, more than three hundred thousand people, immigrants from foreign lands and emigrants from older states, had crossed the Mississippi and settled in the two states of Arkansas and Missouri, and the territory of Iowa. At the close of this period, when congress again took up the question more than half a million of people were settled between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains, and of these more than three hundred thousand were in Missouri alone, the state which stood upon the highway to the new country, and nearest to the gate of entrance. The fact of this great array of American families fast moving toward the intervening barrier, and all but pressing upon it, with myriads 2