Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 6.djvu/353

347 THE WINNING OF THE OREGON COUNTRY. 347- of this company in what was then the Oregon country was valued by if at $4,990,036. Meantime Lewis and Clark in 1804-6, the American Fur Company of St. Louis in 1808, John Jacob Astor in 1810, with his overland expedition and his ships, the Tonquin and the Beaver, the Lark, the builder and founder of As- toria, the restoration of Astoria under the words of the treaty of Ghent of December 14, 1814, which occurred in 1818 when the English flag was hauled down and the Stars and Stripes raised instead these men and these events had done much for the American cause. It was at this time that Rufus Choate said in the senate of the United States : " Keep your eye always open, like the eyes of your own eagle, upon the Oregon. Watch day and night. If any new developments of policy break forth, meet them. If the times change, do you change! New things in a new world. Eternal vigilance is the condition* of empire as well as of liberty." In 1821 Floyd's committee reported to Congress a bill recommending the establishment of small trading guards on the Missouri and Columbia, and to secure immigration to Oregon from the United States and from China. In 1823 a special committee was raised in Congress to consider the military occupation of ,th-e mouth of the Columbia, and it recommended a dispatch of two hundred men overland at once, and two vessels with supplies and stores, and that four or five military posts be established on the Pacific and one at Council Bluffs the latter the frontier post. In 1824 Mr. Rush, the American minister at London, claimed for the United States the country from the forty-second parallel to the fifty-first, to which the English government replied that it would never yield anything north of the Columbia. Presidents Monroe and Adams in 1824 and 1825> respec- tively, in their annual messages recommended a survey of the mouth of the river and the surrounding country,