Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. II.djvu/422

Rh region, between Missouri and Texas has sprung up a peaceful, flourishing, Indian community, which ought, at some future time, to be admitted into the Great Union as an independent Christian Indian State. This would be a more beautiful conquest for the people of North America than their acquisition of New Mexico!

We have now reached the Rocky Mountains, an irregular, bold rock-formation, more remarkable for their fantastic shapes and masses, than for their height. Westward of these extend the so-called Pacific States, Oregon, as yet merely an immense territory; and California, in the highest boundaries of which, or the Upper California, the Mormon State, Deseret or Utah, flourishes upon the fertile banks of the Great Salt Lake, Christian in faith and confession, hierarchical in their form of government, and in certain respects a mystery to their contemporaries.

These States, lying along the coast of the Pacific Ocean, and broken up by the Sierra Nevada Mountains, are possessed of every climate, and of every natural production which can be found from the region of snow to the heat of the tropics. Oregon, in particular, abounds in salmon and forests; California, as all the world knows, in gold.

And now we are on the shores of the Pacific Ocean, and here let us rest awhile, for I confess to being weary with our long ramble. The North Americans will not rest till they have possessed themselves of the Southern portion of their hemisphere; already have they reached Panama with their railroads, canals, warehouses, homes, churches, and schools. And they say quite calmly, when speaking of the country between Panama and the Rio Grande, that is to say, the whole of Central Mexico, “When this is ours, then, &c.”

I shall not tell you anything about the Constitution of these States, nor of their institutions as individual, independent States; nor of their relation to one Federal