as to those men who were making their living trapping for furs, they did not want any settlers here of any kind. They wanted the country left as a game preserve just as the Hudson Bay Company wanted it. And but for the active efforts of the missionaries, the people of the extreme west who furnished the emigrants, to come in and save the day, would not have learned in time to come here and form a state organization under American auspices.
But all the credit and glory does not belong to the missionaries. There is another man who has never had his just deserts from any historian for his work for Oregon. And although he was not a missionary, he was a religious enthusiast, that might well have his name inscribed alongside of the heroic defenders of American rights to Oregon. And while he did not preach from the house tops, he scattered his appeals for settlers in Oregon, and for the propagation of the gospel as thick as forest leaves. Hall J. Kelley of Three Rivers in the state of Massachusetts commenced agitating the Oregon question in 1815 and kept on incessantly advocating the settlement of this country for more than forty years.
The list of his books, pamphlets, circulars, letters, public lectures, memorials to congress, and miscellaneous writings on the Oregon question would fill a page in this book. It will not be claimed that he was always wise, judicious, or practical in his propaganda for settlement and education or religious teaching in this wild west region. He was hardly an acceptable co-laborer in the cause, for the peculiarity of his temperment did not harmonize well with those who did not always coincide with his views. But he was tireless, incessant and courageously persistent. He secured a hearing by his perseverance, and he made the claims of Oregon known to thousands of men, who, but for his work and his omnipresent pamphlets would never have known anything about this country. He had ability too; and wrought practical works. While here in Oregon, and very much disabled by a long spell of sickness, he made a survey of the Columbia river to Astoria that was of real value, and it was the first survey of the river by an American. And that his numerous published articles, given to the public before any of the missionaries came to Oregon, were the first public statements to call attention to the feasibility of settling Oregon by overland emigration there can be no dispute. The public meetings held to raise funds to send the missionaries to Oregon had Kelley's writings on the subject before them. And his constant agitation of the subject for so many years unquestionably interested many persons and led them to investigate the claims of Oregon. And so we conclude, that it was a religious motive in the beginning, which gathered the seeds of information about this country and planted them in the fertile soil of Iowa and Missouri, where they sprang up and bore fruit, a thousand fold, in brave men and noble self-sacrificing women, who, taking their lives in their hands, toiled and struggled along the two thousand miles of dusty rocky mountain way over the old Oregon trail, and settled and saved this country to the American union.
The far-reaching influence of the frontier emigration to Oregon in 1843–4 and 5 has never been fully comprehended. Had the nation secured what it had a just right to claim, the British government could have been shut out of the west coast of America, and its power limited to the east side of the Rocky mountains north of the forty-ninth parallel of north latitude. Then in that case, the Pacific ocean would have been practically an American (United States) lake. For we would have had everything from the northern boundary of Mexico clear up to the Arctic ocean. But as it is, England now holds Vancouver island in front of United States territory and three hundred and fifty miles of frontage, on the Pacific ocean, with many good harbors. On this frontage and in these harbors, British battle ships are posted as a menace to American commerce, and as a protection to the piratical Canadian seal fishery poachers. This menace, and the friction thereby imposed may be borne for a long time; but sooner or later, an American Jackson will go into the presidential chair, and
