Lawyer, soldier and politician, but not yet a statesman, Thomas H. Benton went from Tennessee to Missouri after the war with England was over. Though St. Louis was yet only a large village, it was the focus of the activities of the Great West. Mr. Benton saw it was the place for a rising man to grow up in, and accordingly he settled there.
In St. Louis Mr. Benton found an aristocracy of fur-traders, whose attachment for their own usages and old form of government bound them together. They kept their own language and manners. With many it was a point of honor never to learn English at all. In all things they were as distinctively French as the French people of Canada are to-day. Thus this scion of refinement had been grafted on a rude frontier life, but would not assimilate with the coarser elements thrown upon it by emigration from the States.
By the side of this middle-class (bourgeois) aristocracy stood the Catholic clergy, with its traditions of the old régime in Canada, its proud record of discovery and missionary work among the barbarians of these Western wilds, whose every stream and fountain had its story of zeal and heroism to tell.
This was society at the core. The clergy was its rock of support. Boys were taught in the parish school, and girls in a nunnery. So education was as much in the keeping of the Church as religion itself. Nations may change, but the Roman Church never abandons its people or its objects.
Around this foundation was grouped the community of French Creoles, whom the great fur companies employed and who were their dependants. And around them clustered again an increasing population of American adventurers, coming mostly from the Southern States in search of a living, for whom St. Louis was the magnet which attracts to itself the scattered atoms of society far and near.
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.
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.
So when Mr. Benton wanted the Government to take Oregon with an armed force, he was told it was not worth the trouble, for Oregon could never become a State if we did.
There was another element to the dispute, which found much favor in the West. This was Mr. Monroe's declaration that no European power would be allowed to subdue or overturn the independent governments of our continent. This was a notice to England that she could not have Oregon. It has since been known as the Monroe Doctrine,[4] and so Mr. Monroe became the author of a national policy.
Mr. Benton mastered all the details of the vexatious Oregon question. The interests of his constituents were at stake. His patriotism was aroused. He felt equal disgust with the artifices by which England kept us out of Oregon, as with the cautious spirit of the East, which counted the cost of every thing beforehand, less, it seemed to him, in the spirit of statesmanship, than for what it would be worth at the present moment.
It should not be forgotten, however, that New England enterprise had first made known the resources of our possessions on the Pacific.
In fine, Mr. Benton made himself the champion of the growing West. He had already become, in a sense, the trustee of Mr. Jefferson's pet scheme of a great overland highway to India, which, indeed, proved too great for the time that wise man lived in, but only waited for the people to grow up to it. Mr. Benton knew from Mr. Jefferson's own lips what results had been hoped for, but not realized,—how the best-laid plans had been thwarted, or suffered to sleep the sleep of oblivion,—and the Missouri senator had gone away from his memorable interview more than ever impressed with the greatness of the mission he was henceforth to take upon himself as Mr. Jefferson's disciple.
England managed, in one or another way, to delay a settlement just forty-nine years. A few Americans had gone into Oregon, but as yet they were only a handful. In 1832 Captain Bonneville[5] took the first wagon train across the Wind River chain into the Green River Valley, thus proving the mountains were practicable for vehicles. The same year Nathaniel J. Wyeth[6] led a party all the way from New England to Fort Vancouver, after a journey lasting seven months, in which some of his men were killed by the Blackfeet. In 1834 and 1835 some American missionaries[7] were sent out to Oregon, one of whom, Marcus Whitman, was to figure largely in its history. In the following year Dr. Whitman went through to Fort Walla Walla with a wagon, thus doing what had been declared impossible. Yet up to the close of 1841 not quite a hundred and fifty Americans, in all, had settled in Oregon, though the Oregon Trail was largely shorn of its terrors by the intrepidity of these real pathfinders. For his part, Dr. Whitman saw clearly, that, since diplomacy was purposely hindering it, emigration must step in and settle the question who should have Oregon. And Dr. Whitman was not only a man of clear sight, but of action.
[1] Santa Fé Trail and Oregon Trail. Independence was long the farthest white settlement in Missouri, and consequently became the starting point. So far the Missouri River could be followed. See map. Westport, and finally Kansas City, grew from this cause. As settlements extended up the river, the main trails were struck from many points, as Fort Leavenworth, St. Joseph, Council Bluffs, etc.,—like trunk roads with many branches.
[2] The Columbia and its Basin. England claimed that Drake and Cook had first discovered and taken possession of Oregon, which then included the present Oregon, Idaho, Washington and part of Montana. In 1671 Saint Lusson, at Sault Ste. Marie, had taken possession of all the country west to the South Sea for France. (See preceding chapters.) Whatever rights France acquired became ours by purchase from her. But Spain had the better title on the Pacific. She, however, relinquished to us, on the cession of the Floridas, in 1819, all north of 42°, the present north line of California. We thus became possessed of all rights either power had laid claim to north of that parallel. The north boundary, between Louisiana and the British Possessions, was supposed to be fixed by the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) at the forty-ninth degree.
[3] Astoria was restored to us (1818), after much wrangling, but the Hudson's Bay Company established Fort Vancouver, ninety miles up the Columbia, so cutting off Astoria from the upper valleys. It was burnt to the ground in 1821, except a few huts.
[4] The Monroe Doctrine. "The American Continents, by the free and independent condition they have assumed and maintain, are not to be considered as subjects for colonization by European powers."
[5] Captain Bonneville's adventures are related by Washington Irving.
[6] Nathaniel J. Wyeth established Fort Hall on Lewis River, in what is now Idaho. The Hudson's Bay Company at once set up a rival post called Fort Boisé below it, so compelling Wyeth to sell out to it or be ruined by its competition.
[7] These Missionaries were Revs. Jason and Daniel Lee sent by the Methodist denomination, and Revs. Samuel Parker and Marcus Whitman sent by the American Board. The Methodist mission was at the Dalles, the other at Walla Walla. This was the first introduction of Protestant missions among the Oregon tribes.