270 EDWARD GAYLORD BOURNE. of Representatives voted against acting on Floyd's bill at that session 100 to 61, the educative influence of the debate and of the committee reports should not be ignored. It bore fruit not only later in the Oregon agitation, but also contributed powerfully to strengthen the desire for Cali- fornia which dominated Folk's administration twenty years later. All the arguments derived from the Pacific trade, the whale fisheries, the relations with the Far East applied with even greater force to California where the splendid harbor of San Francisco, the Puget Sound har- bors being then unknown or unrealized, far overtopped the mouth of the Columbia. Mr. Floyd's efforts in the House of Representatives were ernestly seconded by Benton in the Senate, who steadily from 1821 to 1846 was the sturdy advocate of occupying the Columbia River. His interest in the question he owed to Jefferson "who projected the expedition of Lewis and Clark to discover the head and course of the river (whose mouth was then known), for the double purpose of opening an inland commercial communication with Asia, and enlarging the boundaries of geographical science. The commercial object was placed first in his message, and as the object to legitimate the expedition. "In this re- spect he was distinctly less prescient of the future than Floyd and Baylies, and all that I myself have either said or written on that subject from the year 1819, when I first took it up, down to the present day when I still contend for it is nothing but the fruit of the seed planted in my mind by the philosophic hand of Mr. Jefferson." 15 Benton, how- ever, at first assumed with Jefferson that when settlements grew up west of the Rocky Mountains they would naturally become independent of the United States on account of the difficulties of intercommunication. In 1828 Benton is Benton, Thirty Years 1 View, 1, 14.
