Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 19.djvu/157

 CORRESPONDENCE 145 itorial head, with the title "A Field of Promise," in which some extraordinary assertions were made, such as the following: "Oregon, California and New Mexico are all thrown into our hands inviting us to send into that vast region the missionary, the school teacher and the pious layman to preach and labor for God and His church ; there are our mountains and rivers of gold and to them our Eastern population are directing their course and pouring in by multitudes ; in a very few years this newly acquired territory may accommodate a population as large as that which the whole country now sustains ; there will be the wealth and the people and thence will emanate our laws and the great controlling influence." Now, dear brother, these are certainly startling assertions and seem to come from a very respectable source. Were I prepared to believe all this, how should I as a missionary feel^ in view of my responsibility, being one of the few Baptist min- isters in all this region so full of promise, and everywhere so richly endowed with schools of vice ? And how should I trem- ble under the vastness of the responsibility imposed upon not more than eight or ten missionaries who give themselves wholly to the ministry in this field of so much promise ? It must be that these assertions are not true or that our old and wealthy churches have not the map of the field before them, enquiring, like Daniel, after the time and place of the enlargement of Christ's kingdom, or we should see more self-denying soldiers of the cross directing their course to this field. I have thought, if half of these statements were believed to be true in the able and numerous churches, they would gird themselves for this work and quadruple their efforts to give the bread of life to the feeble rising interests everywhere struggling for existence in the settlements as they are rapidly forming through this field of promise. I propose giving in these sheets some geographical facts relative to the extent of that portion of the field embraced in Oregon, which must be crowded with immortal beings in the short space of twenty-five or thirty years. Oregon includes seven degrees of latitude, eight hundred miles of seaboard, with