appropriating money to enable the president to take and retain possession of the territory of the United States on the north-west coast of America. Benton explained that his motive in offering the resolution was to prevent the territory in question from falling into the hands of another power.
When Floyd's bill was brought up in the senate, in February 1825, it found an advocate in Barbour of Virginia, who believed both in the right and the policy of the United States in forming an establishment on the Oregon River,[1] the arguments used being in essence the same as presented by the friends of the bill in the house. Dickerson of New Jersey took opposite grounds. He not only contended that the military occupation of the Oregon would justly lead to war with Great Britain, but that the territory would never, in any event, become a state of the federal union. He ridiculed the idea of a senator from Oregon to Washington City going and coming in less than a year, whether he travelled overland, or by sea around Cape Horn, or through Bering's Straits round the north coast of the continent. "It is true," he said, "this passage is not yet discovered, except upon our maps; but it will be as soon as Oregon shall be a state."[2] When Dickerson came to talk of cost, he had reason and common sense on his side. The appropriation of $50,000, he said, was a mere bagatelle. A sum ten times larger would be required to carry into effect the provisions of the bill; to prove which he cited the expense of the Yellowstone expedition, $255,000, besides other expenses which swelled the amount to $300,000. At that rate it would require a million of money to establish a post on the Oregon, and other posts at proper intervals across the continent. Besides the wrong to the natives of despoiling them of their territory, Oregon could never be of any
