The Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition has clearly two unique and complementary missions. It should bring fully into the national consciousness the historic services through which this nation attained an outlook upon the Pacific comparable with that on the Atlantic, and the significance of this to the future of the American people. It should address itself to the peculiar problems of progress on this coast and thus mark an epoch in the added impetus, the better organization, and the higher aims it gives us as a people; rightly planned it would be an exposition of patriotic national services and of the problems of largest social progress—an exposition of western history and western problems.
The Lewis and Clark expedition and the Oregon movement, or the American movement to the Pacific, which the Lewis and Clark expedition initiated, have not yet had anything like an adequate interpretation in American history. Oregon represents the greatest opportunity in our national life—an opportunity that the fathers of Oregon made as well as seized. A sequel to the Oregon opportunity, or rather a part of it, were the immense gains south of the forty-second parallel on the Pacific Slope. Through the Oregon opportunity realized this American democracy has a territorial basis for supremacy among the nations of the world, and this nation and all mankind will profit from it to the end of time. The Louisiana Purchase was not an opportunity made, but only one accepted when it was tossed into the nation's lap. The Oregon opportunity, as it stands in history and in promise for the future—in what is realized and in what is only potential—is in its import only second to the American opportunity. It had to do with the winning of a domain that made our nation four-square and continental, with a national territory commensurate with the spirit and possibilities of the American people.
The development of the situation on this coast, which the Lewis and Clark expedition converted into America's opportunity, was something like this: Four hundred years ago this continent lay unoccupied save by a race destined to melt away before the onslaughts of the sturdier European. The Spaniard, schooled by eight centuries of crusading against the Moor, whom he had finally driven from Spanish soil, was in the moment of victory, when his hands were free and spirit exultant, pointed by Columbus the supposed way to the Indies, long-famed for unparalleled riches. Spanish hopes were high and the cavaliers came on.
They passed by the West Indies in quest of gold. Cortes and Pizarro found something of their hearts' desire in Mexico and Peru. So on they pressed down the west coast of South America and up the west coast of North America and across the Pacific; but the vigor of the Spaniard was about wasted. He hung helplessly to his outposts on the flanks of the Pacific Northwest. At the beginning of the last quarter of the eighteenth century he rallied and sent vessels up and down the coast of Oregon; but his explorations were not determinate, and they were not followed by occupation. Early in the eighteenth century the Muscovite, advancing eastward across Siberia, had reached the shores of the Pacific, and soon gained a foothold on our northern shores, with designs on all this coast. England, too, was ready to have a hand in the contest for this last great territorial prize on the North American continent. Elated by her decisive victories over her mortal enemy, France, and, by the treaty of Paris, 1763, the proud possessor of all of the eastern half of this continent, of India, mistress of the seas, conscious also of the great advantages that the invention of the steam engine, the power loom and other machinery gave her, she dispatched explorers to scan the different quarters of the globe for new possessions. Captain Cook outlined the shores of Australia and of many other lands of the south seas, and in 1778 was off the Oregon coast. At the same time enterprising Britons were pressing westward along the Great Lakes and overland toward this still available portion of the continent. Thus, the progressive nations of the world were closing in on this last choice imperial domain of the temperate zone awaiting a pre-emptor—the possessor of which would be the natural master of the Pacific. At this critical juncture the then young American nation was fortunate in the spirit of maritime enterprise among the merchants of Boston. Seeking the profits of trade in furs which the voyage of Cook had revealed, they sent Captains Gray and Kendrick to the North Pacific coast, and in 1792 Gray, in the ship Columbia, performed the feat that secured to this country priority of right to the basin of the Columbia. Still more fortunate was this country at this time in having the prescient mind of Thomas Jefferson devoted to its interests. While Gray's vessel was lying in the Columbia he was getting up a subscription for sending explorers overland to the Pacific. Even ten years before this he had proposed an expedition to the Pacific under the leadership of George Rogers Clark. He then had it in mind to head off an English enterprise of which he had heard; but it was not until 1803, twenty years after his first effort in this direction, that Jefferson succeeded in getting the means for the first and by far the most important of our national exploring expeditions—the Lewis and Clark.
But this was not simply an exploring expedition. It represents better than any other one event the expansion of this nation from the Mississippi to the Pacific. The expedition was great not merely even in what it symbolizes. It was grandly great in itself, in its inception, and in execution. It was the herald of the American democracy making its way across the continent to the Pacific, but it was more. There was the highest nobility of purpose in its inception, and matchless skill and fortitude in its execution. Not only in the train of its consequences, but in every aspect was it glorious and worthy of a national celebration. The burden of the special message of January 18, 1803, through which President Jefferson secured an appropriation for it, was the maintenance of the factory system, or the trading posts, among the Indian tribes of the west. Jefferson took keenest delight in a project to extend the bounds of knowledge and which he hoped would open a water route of commerce across the continent with Asia. Yet on the face of it the Lewis and Clark expedition had primarily its inception as a means for promoting the success of these government trading posts among the Indians. This governmental policy, connected with the administration of the factory system, was the one comprehensive, wise, and humane national effort to raise a lower race to the plane of civilization. The idea was to supply the Indian at cost, in exchange for his furs and other products, the implements of husbandry and the comforts of civilized life, at the same time to protect him from the demoralizing influences of the vicious among the white men. The Lewis and Clark expedition was thus in its origin associated with a work of the largest philanthropy, "a system," says Captain Chittenden, author of "The American Fur Trade in the Far West," "which, if followed out as it should have been, would have led the Indian to his new destiny by easy stages, and would have averted the long and bloody wars, corruption, and bad faith, which have gained for a hundred years of our dealings with the Indians the unenviable distinction of a 'Century of Dishonor.'"
In his instructions to the leaders of the expedition Jefferson showed the tenderest solicitude for the welfare of the red man. The expedition could not have been in better hands. Captain Chittenden says of it: "This celebrated performance stands as incomparably the most perfect achievement of its kind in the history of the world." Dr. Elliott Coues has this about it: "The story of this adventure stands easily first and alone. This is our national epic of exploration." To appreciate the unique skill of leadership in this expedition we need but compare its success with the wretched failure of the "Yellowstone Expedition" of 1820, which was to have gone over but a part of the route of Lewis and Clark. This had an outfit many times more expensive than that of Lewis and Clark and ten times as many men; but it went to pieces before it got beyond what is now Omaha.
Unique as the Lewis and Clark expedition was in its original purposes and in its execution, the Oregon people are sponsors for the celebration of its coming centennial anniversary mainly because of the consequences with which it was fraught. Theodore Roosevelt, in his "Winning of the West," speaks of it as opening "the door into the heart of the West." His book has the date mark "1896." It was written before the battle of Manila, and the treaty closing the Spanish-American war which placed the Philippines permanently under our care, before America's determining part in preserving the integrity of China after the quelling of the Boxer insurrection. It was written before President Roosevelt had set his eyes upon the Pacific Northwest. If, after the latter days of this month (May), he ever again has occasion to characterize the import of the Lewis and Clark expedition, his dictum will be more like this: "It led to the acquisition of the whole Pacific Coast, containing the fairest and richest regions under the American flag, and made inevitable the American mastery of the Pacific and American supremacy among the nations of the world." It is, surely, not preposterous to expect a revision of the verdict of history on the significance of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Henry Adams, than whom no scholar has done better work on the history of the United States, in volume IV of his history, with date mark, 1890, speaks of the Lewis and Clark expedition in this wise: "The crossing of the continent was a great feat, but it was nothing more. * * Great gains to civilization could be made only on the Atlantic coast under the protection of civilized life." Mr. Adams in this estimate seems wholly blind to the fact that nations like individuals have opportunities presented to them which seized may not give immediate results but which have an ever increasing influence upon their destiny. In the Lewis and Clark expedition this nation took the flood tide to world supremacy. Three years ago, when American arms and diplomacy were exercising such a determining influence on the problem of mankind in China, I heard Prof. F. J. Turner of the University of Wisconsin, the highest authority on western history, who writes so forcibly on the Louisiana Purchase in the current number of the Review of Reviews, say, that "the occupation of the Pacific Coast by the American people was not only the greatest event in American history, but a great event in all history."
That the American movement Oregonward and Pacificward followed strictly in the wake of the Lewis and Clark expedition has many proofs. Even before Lewis and Clark reached Saint Louis on their homeward journey they met parties of traders and trappers bound for the heart of the wilderness from which they were returning. These were acting on the information Lewis and Clark had sent back from their Mandan winter quarters. A few months after they reached Saint Louis the Missouri Fur Company was organized to conduct operations on the Upper Missouri, that is, on the trail of Lewis and Clark. Four years later John Jacob Astor organized the Pacific Fur Company, and devised plans including a great emporium at the mouth of the Columbia, trade with China on the west, with the Russian settlements on the north, and a line of trading posts overland on the Lewis and Clark route. Astor's scheme was a feasible one, but the war of 1812 came on and England dispatched a vessel to capture the American post on the Columbia. Before this reached Astoria the British sympathizers among Astor's partners sold him out. Astor was probably the first to have a vision not only of what the nation was to gain on this coast, but also of what more might have been gained had President Madison been as bold in regard to his enterprise as was Jefferson in the Louisiana purchase. Had this been so Captain Chittenden thinks "the political map of North America would not be what it is to-day," implying that there would have been an uninterrupted American Pacific coast line from the extreme north to the Mexican boundary.
So far our rights to the region were based on priority in discovery, in exploration, and in occupation; but now for a period of thirty years the British Hudson Bay Company was to have almost undisputed possession. However, the rights established by Gray, Lewis and Clark, and Astor did not lapse and could not be set aside through occupation by a mere trading company. During nearly all of this thirty-year period the Boston schoolmaster, Hall J. Kelley, was agitating the colonization of Oregon, and in 1832, and again in 1834, Nathaniel J. Wyeth, with herculean effort, indomitable perseverance, and incredible energy led expeditions to the Columbia only to meet with disaster when with his slender means he was pitted against the mighty corporation in possession here. With Wyeth came the first party of missionaries. The "Mountain Men"—retired trappers—soon followed, seeking homes here; and, beginning with 1842, annual migrations of thousands of Oregon pioneers were on the way. The Lewis and Clark exploration had thus led to a national movement—"the migration of a people," says Captain Chittenden, "seeking to avail itself of opportunities which have come but rarely in the history of the world, and which will never come again." The route traced by these Oregon pioneers will some day be restored as a national memorial highway, and will be celebrated in song and story, every mile of which has the tenderest associations of hardship and suffering, but also of high purpose and stern determination; and yet the Oregon trail was in the strictest sense a derivative of the Lewis and Clark trail. For nearly twenty years the Lewis and Clark route up the Missouri River had been the only one used to reach the Rocky-mountain wilderness, but in the fall of 1823 a party of trappers, pushing westward from the Yellowstone and desirous of avoiding the implacable Blackfeet on the Upper Missouri, turned to the south and discovered in South Pass, an easy crossing of the Rocky Mountains. The region beyond on the headwaters of the Green and Snake rivers, and in the basin of the Great Salt Lake, was found to be rich in furs. Henceforth to some point in this region the annual cavalcades of the fur companies would come and there meet their own trappers, the free trappers, and the Indians of all the interior country. This was the annual rendezvous for trading, for the delivery of the season's catch of furs, and for equipment for the next year's activity. In making this annual round trip from Saint Louis the original route into this transmontane country, the half-circle route along the Missouri, was naturally abandoned for a great cut-off from the western borders of Missouri to the South Pass. A direct route northwestward across the plains of present Kansas and Nebraska to the Platte, up the Platte and the North Fork and its tributary, the Sweetwater, was found to be the finest natural highway in the world. To reach Oregon the pioneers took this great cut off of the Lewis and Clark trail, and from its western terminus on the upper waters of the Snake they had but to follow the route of Hunt's Astor party until the original Lewis and Clark trail was struck again on the Columbia. The Lewis and Clark trail was thus the basis from which was developed the Oregon trail.
During the forties, when the national movement was setting strongly towards the Pacific, Oregon was an uppermost subject in the thought, and frequently in the plans, of a large portion of the people of this country. Oregon pioneers were clinching our hold upon the Pacific coast. The party slogan of "fifty-four forty or fight" in 1844 had response deep in the hearts of a great majority of the people of the northern part of the Mississippi Valley, and stirred the whole nation. American influences and activities in California from 1846 on radiated mainly from Oregon. Captain Fremont was sent out originally to explore the best route to Oregon, and went to California from Oregon. William Marshall, the discoverer of gold in California in 1848 was an Oregon pioneer of 1844. Peter H. Burnett, the first governor of California, was an Oregon pioneer of 1843. The exclusion of slave labor from the mines of California was largely due to the "Columbia-river men." But now at the close of the forties came the diversion of the national interest from Oregon amounting almost to an eclipse of Oregon for some fifty years. The annexation of Texas, the war with Mexico, the gold discovery in California, the opening of the Kansas and Nebraska lands, the civil war, the development of the manufacturing industries, the occupation of the Dakotas, absorbed in turn the main attention and energies of the nation, leaving outlying Oregon in comparative obscurity, with resources developing but slowly.