Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 6.djvu/263

Rh owes its participation in the life of the old, there has been from the earliest opening of the northern regions the more immediate appeal of the fur trade, which more than any other economic interest has lifted the veil from the unknown interior of the Continent. These two influences flowed together somewhat over a century ago, and the field of their combined action was the Pacific Northwest. To that remote region the restless energy of the fur traders had penetrated in the very years when the enterprising merchants and sailors of the young United States, recently emancipated from the restraints of the British colonial system, and no longer admitted to more than a meagre share of its privileges, and still shut out from free commerce with other European colonies, sought an outlet in opening up direct trade with China. That China was a better market than Europe for furs was soon realized, and the far-seeing Astor planned a combination of the fur trade and the China trade, which in its conception was the most far-reaching commercial project which had ever been developed by a single mind in our history, and which in its political and educational results, exercised long continued influence upon the American imagination.

Again, the great pilgrimages of pioneer families to Oregon from 1843 onward reproduce more nearly than any other movements of our population the impulse, the spirit, and the character of the migration to Virginia and New England over two centuries earlier. In all these aspects early Oregon history is an epitome of American history.

Gray's discovery of the mouth of the fabled River of the West, Lewis and Clark's exploration of its course, and the treaty with Spain for the cession of the Floridas and the determination of the boundaries between the American possessions of Spain and the United States gave us our first hold on the Pacific, and fixed in a deeper sense