The prospect for emigration in 1843; White's letter. Certainly at the time the Ashburton Treaty was signed American prospects were brightening. In the same month (August, 1842), Dr. White wrote a letter from the mountains in which he assured the frontiersmen that the Oregon colony would prove successful, that his company would reach the Willamette in safety, and that a good pilot could be procured to bring out a company the following spring.
Other causes; the Oregon country. This was doubtless one of the causes inducing the pioneers to prepare for the overland march in 1843. But there were many others. The long agitation in Congress, reports, speeches, newspaper articles, and letters had given the pioneering class considerable information about the Oregon country. They knew that the Willamette valley was a favoured land for farmer and stockman, possessing a rich soil, mild climate, and such a combination of prairie and forest, with springs of pure water everywhere, as would make the opening of new farms peculiarly easy and pleasant. In the western states, the settlers had suffered much for the lack of easy transportation, their crops bringing scarcely enough to pay for the labour expended upon them; but in Oregon they would have a navigable river at their
negotiation after the treaty of 1S42, "believing that under the convention of joint occupation we stood on the most favourable footing. Our population was already finding its way to the shores of the Pacific, and a few years would see an American Settlement on the Columbia sufficiently strong to defend itself and to protect the rights of the U. States to the territory."
