arrived, they outnumbered the English and Canadian forces three to one; and the Stars and Stripes were run up, never again to be hauled down by any foreign power in all the wide domain of Oregon.
True, there was yet a battle to be fought. The interests at stake were too grand for the party 195 who held supreme power so long to yield without a contest. But there were rugged, brave, intelligent American citizens now in Oregon, and there to stay. They had flooded home people with letters describing the salubrity of the climate and the fertility of the soil. Statesmen heard of it.
Sudden conversions sometimes make unreasonable converts. The very men who had rung the changes upon "worthless," "barren," "cut off by impassable deserts," now turned and not only claimed the legitimate territory up to forty-nine degrees, but made demands which were heard across the Atlantic. We will have "Oregon and fifty-four forty, or fight."
In a lengthy message in December, 1845, President Polk devotes nearly one-fifth of his space to the discussion of the Oregon question, and rehearses the discussion pro and con between the two governments and acknowledges, that thus far there has been absolute failure. He tells Congress that "The proposition of compromise, which was made and rejected, was, by my
