A Chance Meeting.
Photograph by F. S. Dellenbaugh.
In 1845 Texas was admitted into the Union as a State. President Polk, on what ground is not apparent, agreed with the Texans that the western limit of their domain was certainly the Rio Grande. He might as well then and there have agreed that it was the Pacific. General Taylor was ordered to occupy the region west of the Nueces and he pushed on to the Rio Grande. There was nothing left for the Mexicans to do but fight, and this they accordingly did. Scott was ordered with his army to Mexico, Kearney to New Mexico and California. Santa Fé was easily captured in 1846, and the navy speedily took the California coast towns. Frémont being in California engaged actively in the insurrection there, and was much censured for what he did. The Mexicans were vanquished. In 1848 a treaty was entered into between them and the United States, by which in consideration of $15,000,000, and the United States assuming all claims, New Mexico and California were ceded to the Americans—that is, all below the forty-second parallel to the Gila and the Rio Grande. The latter river now was admitted to be the western boundary of Texas; a boundary afterwards adjusted with the Federal Government. The Mexicans were left with nothing north of the Gila; the British with nothing south of the forty-ninth parallel, west of the Mississippi. The immense area which once had formed the basis of so many broad and indefinite claims was now held by a nation which had no being when the European countries began their wrangling over this splendid domain. From Atlantic to Pacific, from the Lake of the Woods to the Rio Grande, one power was in control, and that power the very youngest in all the world. The American nation had secured for itself the most fertile, most diversified, and altogether the finest and richest area on the entire globe. The Spanish sentinel had been turned with his face to the wall; the British sentinel was equally overwhelmed; the natives were cheerfully poisoned with cheap whiskey; and it was now only a question of settlement and communication between the widely separated parts of the Republic.
The beaver was gone. Buffalo robes formed the bulk of the fur trade. Even the buffalo were diminishing in numbers. It seemed as if little incentive remained to lead people to brave the discomforts and dangers of the western Wilderness. It appeared as if the young Republic for centuries to come would have a wilderness on its hands.
But under the very feet of the trapper struggling to earn his small wage by exterminating the beaver, rich metals were hidden; and Fortune was almost ready to remove the blindfold, and lure the next set of Wilderness breakers into the field.
