tion about the territory along the Columbia, from men who had visited that region, and was sure that its agricultural possibilities had been greatly overestimated. As a final agrument, he declared that the people on the Pacific and those on the Atlantic could never live under the same government. "Nature," said Mr. Tracy, " has fixed limits for our nation; she has kindly interposed as our western barrier mountains almost inaccessible, whose base she has skirted with irreclaimable deserts of sand."[1]
Defeat of Floyd's bill. On the 23d of January, 1823, after a long and vigorous debate, Floyd's bill came to a vote in the House of Representatives and was defeated, one hundred to sixty-one. The time had not yet come for an American colony on the Pacific, because the government was unwilling to plant such a settlement, and the people were not yet thinking of Oregon as a "pioneer's land of promise." Only a few men, and those of the rarer sort, looked forward to the occupation of the Columbia region as a step toward the establishment of a greater America, with a frontage on the Pacific Ocean similar to that which we then had upon the Atlantic.
Strangely enough none of the speakers in the House seemed to suspect that we might not have a right, under the treaty of joint occupation, to plant a military colony at the mouth of the Columbia, or that Great Britain
- ↑ From the time of Long's exploring expedition to the Rocky Mountains (1819), the western portion of the Great Plains was called the "Great American Desert."
