We cannot follow this wonderful movement in detail, but it is easy to see that the discovery of gold produced startling changes in the relations between the northern and southern sections of the Pacific slope. When the Oregon bill was before Congress in the spring of 1848, some wished to couple with it a bill for a California and a New Mexico territory also; but others declared that the "native-born "territory of Oregon should not be unequally yoked with "territories scarcely a month old, and peopled by Mexicans and half-Indian Californians." Two years after this incident California had a population, mainly American, of 92,000 and was ready for statehood, ten years later she had 380,000, and in another decade more than half a million; while the territory of Oregon which in 1850 included the entire district west of the Rocky Mountains and north of California, had in that year less than 14,000 people. By 1870 the Pacific Northwest, then divided into the state of Oregon and the two territories of Washington and Idaho, had a total population of only 130,000 as against California's 560,000.
California overshadows the Northwest. These facts tell the story of how the natural course of the Pacific coast's development was changed by the magic of gold. The long list of American explorers, traders, and missionaries, whose deeds and sacrifices glorify the early history of the Pacific Northwest, were largely forgotten by a nation entranced with the story of the " Forty-niners." The far-reaching influence of Oregon as the oldest American territory on the Pacific
