fears had moved the people up to this date. There had been no recognition by congress. Laws had been enacted and executed by the pioneers. Society had begun to organize in a few centers, and public sentiment was respected; but our nation had not recognized this small band of American citizens on her extreme frontier along the Pacific ocean until 1848. The earlier pioneers—the hunters and trappers, the missionaries and their wives, and the immigrant families of the settlers—had found the path and opened the way hither, and offered a safe and welcome home to all new comers. Great was their task and nobly they completed it.
They had organized the provisional government in 1842-4, on the American plan of equal rights and and equal justice to every citizen, and had included all as citizens who were so held under state and national laws. They had ventured the experiment of self-government as a duty of self-protection, and not in disrespect or defiance of congress or the constitution. Having marched two thousand miles westward over the famed "American desert," and over three mountain ranges, and still standing on American soil, they wished no divorce from the home government, but, rather, a stronger union with it. The fires of patriotism burned more, not less, brightly within them under the force of their long and painful tramp to plant and defend the "flag of our nation" on this Pacific frontier.
—Rev. G. H. Atkinson.
