Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 4.djvu/21

Rh and Clark trail was thus the basis from which was developed the Oregon trail.

During the forties, when the national movement was setting strongly towards the Pacific, Oregon was an uppermost subject in the thought, and frequently in the plans, of a large portion of the people of this country. Oregon pioneers were clinching our hold upon the Pacific coast. The party slogan of "fifty-four forty or fight" in 1844 had response deep in the hearts of a great majority of the people of the northern part of the Mississippi Valley, and stirred the whole nation. American influences and activities in California from 1846 on radiated mainly from Oregon. Captain Fremont was sent out originally to explore the best route to Oregon, and went to California from Oregon. William Marshall, the discoverer of gold in California in 1848 was an Oregon pioneer of 1844. Peter H. Burnett, the first governor of California, was an Oregon pioneer of 1843. The exclusion of slave labor from the mines of California was largely due to the "Columbia-river men." But now at the close of the forties came the diversion of the national interest from Oregon amounting almost to an eclipse of Oregon for some fifty years. The annexation of Texas, the war with Mexico, the gold discovery in California, the opening of the Kansas and Nebraska lands, the civil war, the development of the manufacturing industries, the occupation of the Dakotas, absorbed in turn the main attention and energies of the nation, leaving outlying Oregon in comparative obscurity, with resources developing but slowly.

Oregon's day, however, is dawning again. America's surplus energy is no longer absorbed in gold mining in California, in occupying the plains of Kansas, Nebraska, or the Dakotas. The overloaded passenger trains to the Pacific Northwest tell unmistakably the nation's need of this region. It needs our farm lands. It will more and