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28 making these grants of land, which will soon place thirty or forty thousand rifles beyond the Rocky Mountains."

In the course of the discussion, Linn's policy had received many reinforcements from without. It was about this time that the naval officer whom President Jackson had appointed, made a report which showed the need of action. In the beginning of the new agitation of the question, the Eev. Jason Lee, head of the Methodist missionary movement in the Willamette Valley, appeared in Washington. He had performed the long and dangerous journey across the plains, partly in the interests of his mission and partly -in the interests of settlement and a civil government. Although a Canadian by birth, he early identified himself with American interests as best adapted to the successful accomplishment of his missionary enterprise. Although he had gone into the country in the interests of the natives, he was soon convinced that their interests would be served not alone by laboring with them, but by building up a moral and religious community. He was the bearer of a petition to congress from the colonists. It was signed not alone by those connected with the mission, but by some of the French and Canadian ex-employees of the Hudson's Bay Company, who had started an agricultural settlement on a beautiful tract of land called the French Prairie, in the Willamette Valley. This document set forth the history of the mission settlement, the prosperity which had attended it, the resources of the country for agricultural purposes, the advantage of its position for trade with China, and urged upon the United States the extension over it of a civil government, both in the interests of the colonists and of the country at large. It