Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 4.djvu/17

Rh "Yellowstone Expedition" of 1820, which was to have gone over but a part of the route of Lewis and Clark. This had an outfit many times more expensive than that of Lewis and Clark and ten times as many men; but it went to pieces before it got beyond what is now Omaha.

Unique as the Lewis and Clark expedition was in its original purposes and in its execution, the Oregon people are sponsors for the celebration of its coming centennial anniversary mainly because of the consequences with which it was fraught. Theodore Roosevelt, in his "Winning of the West," speaks of it as opening "the door into the heart of the West." His book has the date mark "1896." It was written before the battle of Manila, and the treaty closing the Spanish-American war which placed the Philippines permanently under our care, before America's determining part in preserving the integrity of China after the quelling of the Boxer insurrection. It was written before President Roosevelt had set his eyes upon the Pacific Northwest. If, after the latter days of this month (May), he ever again has occasion to characterize the import of the Lewis and Clark expedition, his dictum will be more like this: "It led to the acquisition of the whole Pacific Coast, containing the fairest and richest regions under the American flag, and made inevitable the American mastery of the Pacific and American supremacy among the nations of the world." It is, surely, not preposterous to expect a revision of the verdict of history on the significance of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Henry Adams, than whom no scholar has done better work on the history of the United States, in volume IV of his history, with date mark, 1890, speaks of the Lewis and Clark expedition in this wise: "The crossing of the continent was a great feat, but it was nothing more. * * Great gains to civilization could be made only on the Atlantic coast under the protection of