INTRODUCTION
Prophecies: "Fixity of residence and thickening of population are the prime requisites of civilization; and hence it will be found that, as in Egypt where great civilization was developed in a narrow valley hemmed in by deserts, and in Greece limited to a peninsula bounded by the sea on one side, and mountains on the other, when the Caucasian race, starting from India and pursuing its western course around the earth, shall reach the shores of the great Pacific ocean, it will dam up in the strip of country between the Rocky Mountains and the sea, and there in the most dense population, produce the greatest civilization on the earth." (From the Vestiges of Creation, 1838, anonymous, but supposed to be written by Robert Chambers, of Edinburgh, Scotland. It was in fact written before the emigration wave started for Oregon.)
"I say the man is alive, full grown, and listening to what I say, who will yet see the Asiatic commerce traversing the North Pacific ocean—entering the Oregon river—climbing the western slope of the Rocky Mountains—issuing from its gorges—and spreading its fertilizing streams over our wide extended Union!
"The steamboat and the steam car have not exhausted all their wonders. They have not yet found their amplest and most appropriate theatres—the tranquil surface of the North Pacific ocean, and the vast inclined plains which spread east and west from the Rocky Mountains, the magic boat, and the flying car are not yet seen upon the ocean, and upon the plain, but they will be seen there; and St. Louis is yet to find herself as near Canton as she is now to London, with a better and safer route by land and sea to China and Japan than she now has to France and Great Britain." (Extract from an address by Thomas H. Benton, U. S. Senator, at St. Louis, October 10, 1844, eighteen months after his fellow citizens of Missouri had started to Oregon with their wives, children and ox teams to take the country from the British.)
The settlement of Old Oregon, embracing all the territory west of the Rocky Mountains, north of California and up to Alaska, being the result of a long series of explorations by sea and land covering three hundred years from 1506 to 1806, is the most interesting story of the entire settlement of North America. The history of this great territory is both national and local. Apparently the last grand movement of the German Indo–European race of men in its all-conquering march from farthest East to farthest West, the history of Oregon is not only national in its fundamentals but also finds its original root-graft in the oldest of the virile tribes of men. The same Providence that cast the Mayflower on the rockbound shores of New England to land the Pilgrim Fathers in a new world, inspired the men and women and furnished them with the faith and courage to overcome mountains, deserts and savage tribes and plant Christianity, civilization and laws in the wilderness of Old Oregon.
And whatever of difference there may lie in the local coloring which differentiates Oregon from all other of the forty-eight states of the Grand Republic,
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