Page:The Early Indian Wars of Oregon.djvu/20

2 links in the chain of evidence which prevailed in the controversy with Great Britain concerning our title to the Pacific Northwest. It stimulated the first commercial enterprise on the coast of Oregon the Pacific Fur Company of Astor the melancholy failure of which, through the cowardice and treachery of his Canadian partners, made room for the advent of a British company.

The ruin of the Pacific Fur Company was regarded as a humiliation to the country, but such was the situation of international politics that congress declined to interfere, or subsequently to extend aid to individual enterprise in Oregon, and the Hudson's Bay Company, successor to the Northwest Company, was left in actual possession, while diplomacy in London and Washington carried on the contest for mastery year after year, with varying prospects of success.

The war of the Revolution had found Americans a nation of politicians, and left them a nation of patriots, barring the Tory minority, of whom, after the Declaration of Independence, very little was heard: The doings of congress in the early part of the century were far more interesting to, and notwithstanding the lesser number of public prints, more studied by the people than are its acts in this age of daily newspapers. Each man who had in any way aided in the struggle for freedom felt a personal pride in enhancing the glory of the new republic, and a corresponding desire to punish its enemies or abase its rivals. Such was the spirit of Americanism for the first fifty years of the existence of the United States.

Well aware of the national temper, statesmen made use of it in the movement to establish the title to the territory in dispute on the Pacific coast. They took care to inform themselves of the private enterprises of the citizens in the Northwest, the most notable of which, as occurring so soon after Lewis and Clarke's expedition, was the adventure of Major Henry, who led a fur-hunting party to the head waters of Columbia in 1808. He confined his