The Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society, Vol. IV / March, 1903-December, 1903

by Oregon Historical Society

Colossal, seen of every land,

And keep the soldier firm, the statesman pure:

Till in all lands and thro' all human story

The path of duty be the way to glory."

ROBERT TREAT PLATT.

THE GREAT WEST AND THE TWO EASTS.

A resounding chorus of gratulations will herald to the world within the next two years the first centennial of two events upon which the history of the Great West is founded—the purchase of Louisiana and the expedition of Lewis and Clark to the mouth of the Columbia River. Whether the student of history at the Saint Louis World's Fair in 1904 pause in admiration of the political foresight of Jefferson, or join in the general acclaim of the heroism of our first explorers at Portland, in 1905, the fact that will most impress him is that geographical lines have been obliterated and there is no West. Migrations having their origin in the dim, remote past, and continuing down to the present, have brought the Aryan race face to face on the opposite shores of the great western ocean, and the world finds itself confronted with that condition which William H. Seward predicted, when, addressing himself to the commerce, politics, thought, and activities of Europe, he said they "will ultimately sink in importance, while the Pacific, its shores, its islands, and the vast regions beyond, will become the chief theater of events in the world's great hereafter." The East that Columbus sailed westward from Spain to discover will ever be the world's East; the West, "the remote shores that Drake had once called by the name of New Albion," will be the East of the World's Great East, and the West only in its geographical relation to the Atlantic seaboard of our own country.

The West has fulfilled every promise of its value to the Union made by its champions when its cause was before the people of the new Republic; it has refuted every prediction of dire effect made by the opponents of its acquisition. When the purchase of Louisiana was under consideration, the fear was expressed that people who would move to that region would scarcely ever feel the rays of the general government, their affections would be alienated by distance, and American interests would become extinct. The generous response of men and money made by Missouri, Kansas, and Iowa, when the Union was in the throes of a struggle for its preservation, attests the loyalty of the Louisiana region. A Southern senator asked, in 1843, what good was Oregon for agricultural purposes, and said he would not give a pinch of snuff for the whole territory. Yet the Oregon Country has given the Union three sovereign states, and part of its territory has been taken to form two other states; its occupation by Americans was a direct cause of the annexation of California; it has in the Columbia River and Puget Sound two important bases for military and naval operations; far from being inhospitable to the honest farmer of the Atlantic seaboard, or the Ohio Valley, it has one hundred thousand farms, valued at nearly $600,000,000. Alaska was denounced as a barren waste, that would never add one dollar to our wealth, or furnish homes to our people. Yet in less than forty years Alaska has supplied gold, fish, and furs worth $150,000,000, and has paid revenue to the government exceeding by $1,500,000 the price Russia got for it in 1867; and at no distant day Hawaii and the Philippines will justify American occupation by statistics as telling as those here presented of Louisiana, Oregon, and Alaska.

If a nonexpansive policy had prevailed in our national councils at the beginning of the nineteenth century; if the presidential chair had been occupied by another than the broad statesman who saw beyond the Mississippi, over the Rockies to the Pacific, and over the Pacific to the cradle of the world, we should now have an intolerable situation of affairs in North America. Had we refused Louisiana from Napoleon, what is now the United States would be partitioned, geographically, about as follows: East of the Mississippi would be the Republic of the United States of America of 1783, with England in Canada on the north, and Spain in Florida and fringing the Gulf of Mexico. Louisiana would have fallen into England's hands as a result of the Napoleonic wars, and so, perhaps, Oregon, either by reason of a favorable interpretation of the Nootka convention, or Vancouver's discoveries. Mexico, as the successor of Spain, would own Texas and all the remainder of the west south of the forty-second parallel and not included in Louisiana. With a republic on one side, and European sovereignty on the other, the Mississippi would to-day be bristling with cannon. The purchase of Louisiana was political foresight, and the completion of our title to Oregon was a direct result of the Louisiana transaction. The war with Mexico was the logical sequence of both. From whatever point we may regard it, the acquisition of the trans-Mississippi region, viewed in the perspective of a century, was worth what it cost in money, actual war, and risk of war with what, in the early stages of our history was the most powerful nation on the globe.