Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 4.djvu/13

Rh gives us as a people; rightly planned it would be an exposition of patriotic national services and of the problems of largest social progress—an exposition of western history and western problems.

The Lewis and Clark expedition and the Oregon movement, or the American movement to the Pacific, which the Lewis and Clark expedition initiated, have not yet had anything like an adequate interpretation in American history. Oregon represents the greatest opportunity in our national life—an opportunity that the fathers of Oregon made as well as seized. A sequel to the Oregon opportunity, or rather a part of it, were the immense gains south of the forty-second parallel on the Pacific Slope. Through the Oregon opportunity realized this American democracy has a territorial basis for supremacy among the nations of the world, and this nation and all mankind will profit from it to the end of time. The Louisiana Purchase was not an opportunity made, but only one accepted when it was tossed into the nation's lap. The Oregon opportunity, as it stands in history and in promise for the future—in what is realized and in what is only potential—is in its import only second to the American opportunity. It had to do with the winning of a domain that made our nation four-square and continental, with a national territory commensurate with the spirit and possibilities of the American people.

The development of the situation on this coast, which the Lewis and Clark expedition converted into America's opportunity, was something like this: Four hundred years ago this continent lay unoccupied save by a race destined to melt away before the onslaughts of the sturdier European. The Spaniard, schooled by eight centuries of crusading against the Moor, whom he had finally driven from Spanish soil, was in the moment of victory, when his hands were free and spirit exultant, pointed by