Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 6.djvu/262

256 had the power, of exploring the vast unknown regions of the upper waters of the Missouri and the western slopes of the Rockies. Between the date of his first interest in the project and its execution Mackenzie reached the Pacific far to the north and Gray discovered the mouth of the great river which Indian report had long vaguely described. Both of these events increased his interest in the design in which he had been encouraged by his French correspondents whose fellow-countrymen had first conceived the idea three quarters of a century before.

I have ventured in this brief comparison of these two achievements of Jefferson's presidency to ascribe the higher degree of credit to his initiation of the Lewis and Clark expedition, because it was not, like the acquisition of Louisiana, a happy accident, brought about to all appearance by the conjunction of the pressing necessities of the western settlers and the revulsion of Napoleon from plans of restoring France's empire in America, in which he had no original interest and from which he drew back with alacrity at the first serious reverses; but was on the other hand, the product of the scientific instinct, of that reaching out of the imagination toward the remote future and to the ideal, which marks the highest of human achievements. These, too, are the characteristics of the history of the Oregon Country in its more general aspects.

More than any other of our territorial acquisitions or of our original area the Oregon Country stands for the continuity of the controlling interests in the great sweep of early American history. It brings down to our own time as an historic force the motive of Columbus to reach the Orient by the west and to establish commerce with it. Parallel with this great motive, to which the new world