Outside of St. Louis, Missouri owed her rapid growth to the in-coming of actual settlers. In 1816 only thirty families were found on the left bank of the Missouri, above Callaway County. In three years the number had increased to eight hundred families. Here was the real bone and sinew of the State.
Mr. Benton found the American Fur-Trading Company sending forth its yearly caravans over the great plains to the mountains, and from the mountains, through passes known only to the Indians and fur-traders, into Sonora, New Mexico and Oregon. Since the way was beset by hostile Indians, these caravans went armed to the teeth. The same Indians might fight them one day and trade the next. In time, the passing to and fro of these traders had marked out well-beaten paths up the Arkansas and the Platte, which presently came to be known on the frontier as the Santa Fé Trail and Oregon Trail.[1]
At bottom the St. Louis fur-traders were not more friendly to colonization than the English fur-traders, but they were quite as eager to push their business into Oregon, conceiving they had the best right there, as the English companies were to keep them out of it so that they themselves might reap all the profit; and so there was rivalry and ill blood between them.
STATUE OF BENTON.
Mr. Benton was energetic, ambitious and self-reliant, qualities which soon identified him with the thought and interests of the people among whom he had cast in his lot in life. Thoroughly Southern in his feelings, he had borne an active part in making Missouri a slave State, and when that result was accomplished the people sent him to the United States Senate as a reward for his zeal in their behalf.
When the war with England was over, our Government wished to have the boundary between our own and the British possessions defined and settled. Though proposed to be run on the forty-ninth parallel it had never been done, and in buying Louisiana we inherited a dispute which, so long as that vast region was unexplored and unknown, had slept, but was now become a source of irritation and danger between England and the United States. The Columbia River and its basin[2] were the bone of contention. Both wanted them. Neither would give them up. Since Astoria[3] had been sold, the Hudson's Bay and North-west Companies had held uninterrupted possession of the whole country, to the exclusion of our own ships and traders, whose interests had suffered in consequence; but as England would not yield her pretensions peaceably, the people of the Atlantic coast were unwilling to go to war about a region so remote, the more so because they were just recovering from the effects of the one lately ended, and felt that they would be the greatest sufferers if war again broke out between the two nations.
So the two countries compromised their differences by agreeing to hold Oregon in common, first for ten years (1818-1828), and afterward from year to year. All this time England was growing stronger in Oregon, and the United States losing the hold her citizens had first obtained there, for though it was neutral ground on paper, the English with their free access by land and sea were able to shut out our traders, and did so.
This state of things was humiliating to the West. It was as though the nation were eating humble-pie rather than offend England. Continual agitation of the question served to keep up a feverish feeling about Oregon, but since Major Long had said it was of no use to think of cultivating the land between the meridian of Council Bluffs and the Rocky Mountains, it seemed settled that nobody but fur-traders would want to cross this desert while so much fertile land remained vacant in the Mississippi and Missouri Valleys. If settlement must stop at the edge of this desert, then the idea of geographical unity vanished, and Oregon would, in truth, be worth little to us. Mr. Benton, himself, was at one time of this opinion.