McDuffie said: "What is the character of this country?" (referring to Oregon). "As I understand it there are seven hundred miles this side of the Rocky Mountains that are uninhabitable; where rain never falls; mountains wholly impassable, except through gaps and depressions, to be reached only by going hundreds of miles out of the direct course. Well, now, what are you going to do in such a case? How are you going to apply steam? Have you made an estimate of the cost of a railroad to the mouth of the Columbia? Why the wealth of the Indies would be insufficient. Of what use would it be for agricultural purposes? I would not, for that purpose, give a pinch of snuff for the whole territory. I wish the Rocky Mountains were an impassable barrier. If there was an embankment of even five feet to be removed I would not consent to expend five dollars to remove it and enable our population to go there. I thank God for his mercy in placing the Rocky Mountains there."
Will the reader please take notice that the speech was delivered on the 25th day of January, 1843, just about the time that Whitman, in the ever-memorable ride, was floundering through the snow drifts of the Wasatch and Uintah Mountains, deserted by his guide and surrounded by discouragements that would have appalled any man not inspired by heroic purpose.
It was at this same session of 1843, prior to the visit of Whitman, that Linn, of Missouri, had offered a bill which made specific legal provisions for Oregon, and he succeeded in passing the bill, which went to the House and as usual was defeated. The prevailing idea was that which was expressed by General Jackson to President Monroe, and before referred to, in which Jackson says, "It should be our policy to concentrate our population and confine our frontier to proper limits until our country, in those limits, is filled with a dense population. It is the denseness of our population that gives strength and security to our frontier." That "interminable desert," those "arid plains," those "impassable mountains," and "the impossibility of a wagon road from the United States," were the burdens of many speeches from the statesmen of that time. And then they emphasized the whole with the clincher that, after overcoming these terrible obstacles that intervened, we reached a land that was "worthless," not even worth a "pinch of snuff."
Senator Dayton, of New Jersey, in 1844, in the discussion of the Oregon boundary question, said: "With the exception of land along the Willamette and strips along other water courses, the whole country is as irreclaimable and barren a waste as the Desert of Sahara. Nor is this the worst; the climate is so unfriendly to human life that the native population has dwindled away under the ravages of malaria."
The National Intelligencer, about the same date, republished from the Louisville Journal and sanctioned the sentiments, as follows:
"Of all the countries upon the face of the earth Oregon is one of the least favored by heaven. It is the mere riddlings of creation. It is almost as barren as Sahara and quite as unhealthy as the Campagna of Italy. Russia has her Siberia and England has her Botany Bay and if the United States should ever need a country to which to banish her rogues and scoundrels, the utility of such a region as Oregon would be demonstrated. Until then, we are perfectly willing to leave this magnificent country to the Indians, trappers and buffalo hunters that roam over its sand banks."
In furtherance of the Jackson sentiment of "a dense population," Senator Dayton said: "I have no faith in the unlimited extensions of this government. We have already conflicting interests, more than enough, and God forbid that the time should ever come when a state on the shores of the Pacific, with its interests and tendencies of trade all looking toward Asiatic nations of the east, shall add its jarring claims to our already distracted and over-burdened confederacy. We are nearer to the remote nations of Europe than to Oregon."
The Hudson Bay Company had done its educating work well. If they had graduated American statesmen in a full course of Hudson Bay training and argument and literature, they could not have made them more efficient. Our statesmen did not doubt that the honest title of the property was vested in the United States; for they had gone on from time to time perfecting this title; yet they had no idea of its value and seemed to hold it only for diplomatic purposes or for prospective barter.
The United States had no contestant for the property except England, but in 1818 she was not ready to make any assertion of her rights. In 1828 she still postponed making any demand and renewed the treaty, well knowing that the little island many thousands of miles across the Atlantic, was the supreme ruler of all the vast territory.
Again, when the Ashburton Treaty was at issue, and the question of boundary which had been for forty-eight years a bone of contention, the government again ignored Oregon, and was satisfied with settling the boundaries between a few farms up in Maine.