Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 6.djvu/279

Rh upon some Western members of Congress upon the people; and then a little later in speaking of the emigration of 1843 and later. "A colony was planted—had planted itself—and did not intend to retire from the position, and did not. It remained and grew; and that colony of self-impulsion, without the aid of government and in spite of all its blunders, saved the Territory of Oregon to the United States." These sentences published in his "Thirty Years' View," in 1856, which was long accepted as a standard historical authority on this period and most widely circulated, (it is said that sixty-five thousand copies were sold soon after publication,) diffused the idea that Oregon was "saved" and prepared the way for the ready acceptance of other explanations of how Oregon was saved to the Union, when as a matter of fact it is impossible to show that the part of the old Oregon territory that the United States secured was ever in any real danger of being lost. I have ventured to touch upon this matter which lies beyond the chronological boundaries of my subject because for a long time I was puzzled as to the origin of the idea that "Oregon was saved" to the Union, and now that Thomas H. Benton, the champion of Oregon for twenty-five years, appears as responsible for it, some may think that I reject it too lightly. Benton's views, however, as to the purposes of the administration to which he was hostile, are demonstrably in error, and in not a few instances his assertions have little more value as history than the familiar "denunciations" of the policy of the party in power which are so conspicuous in our party platforms. No one, I think, familiar with the diplomatic history of the administrations from 1820 to 1846, or with the steadily