Page:Portland, Oregon, its History and Builders volume 1.djvu/196



on the trail had to overcome. As a sample of the public sentiment in large portions of the eastern states we give two extracts from speeches of United States senators. Senator W. L. Dayton of New Jersey in the senate on February 23, 1844, said :

"What there is in the territory of Oregon to tempt our national cupidity, no one can tell. Of all the countries on the face of the earth, it is one of the least favored of Heaven. It is the mere riddling of creation. It is almost as barren as the desert of Africa, and quite as unhealthy as the Campania of Italy. We would not be subjected to all the innumerable and indescribable tortures of a journey to Oregon for all the soil its savage hunters ever wandered over. All the writers and travelers agree in representing Oregon as a vast extent of mountains, and valleys, of sand dotted over with green, and cultivable spots. Russia has her Siberia, and England has her Botany Bay, and if the United States should ever use a country to which to banish its rogues and scoundrels, the utility of such a region as Oregon will be demonstrated."

And then the wise senator from Jersey ventilates his wisdom on the possi- bility of a railroad to this "riddling of creation," and says :

"The power of steam to reach that country has been suggested. Talk of steam communication — a railroad to the mouth of the Columbia ! a railroad across 2500 miles of desert, prairie and mountains ! The smoke of an engine through those terrible fissures of that great rocky ledge, where the smoke of the volcano has rolled before! Who is to make this vast internal — rather external improvement? All the mines of Mexico and Peru, disembowelled would scarcely pay a penny of the cost."

Dayton lived long enough to become the candidate for vice-president on the ticket with Fremont in 1856, and died in Paris in 1864, after the railroad had started across the deserts of Kansas and Nebraska towards Oregon; and if he could arise from his grave and see the two railroads on the Columbia river daily carrying more freight than is produced in the State of New Jersey in a year, he would give up the delusion that Oregon was a desert.

But Dayton was not alone in the opposition, from the northern states to securing the territory of Oregon. As great a man as Daniel Webster made open as well as secret opposition to the acquisition of Oregon. In a public address on November 7, 1845, at Faneuil hall in Boston, in discussing the Oregon question said "that the vast importance of peace with England, he took for granted; but the question that now threatened that peace, and was causing great alarm, was of forty years standing, and was now coming to a crisis. It is a ques- tion that is a fit subject for compromise and amicable adjustment, but one which in my opinion can be settled on an honorable basis by taking the forty-ninth parallel of north latitude as the boundary line, the two countries would then keep abreast on that line to the Pacific ocean."

Later on Mr. Webster declared that the title and government of Oregon would go to the people which had the greatest population in the territory. And still later on, in the United States senate, as showing his position generally, he declared in a speech on March ist, 1847:

"In the judgment of the whig party, it is due to the best interests of the coun- try, to declare at once, and proclaim now, that we want no new states, nor terri- tory to form new states out of us, as the end of conquest. For one, I enter into this declaration with all my heart. We want no extension of territory, we want no accession of new states. The country is already large enough."

This shows why Dr. Whitman could not move Webster, while secretary of state, to help Oregon. And shows the undercurrent of apathy, not to say dis- loyalty to the west, with which Benton, Lynn Semple and other western states- men had to contend to save Oregon to the nation.

Now, sixty years after that disgraceful surrender to England the commercial interests, and all the people of this city and the Pacific coast can see the damage wrought to national interests by having a British state sandwiched in between