and from La Salle's advent on the Mississippi, had held a like exclusive possession of the whole of the Mississippi valley for more than seventy years.
The relation and connection of this city of Portland with this chapter of the life of the great La Salle consists in the influence which these acts of the explorer gave to the extension of American settlements and exploration towards the Pacific northwest. It may be adverted to now, and enlarged upon hereafter, that the French nation and the French people have always been, whenever occasion offered, friends of American ideas and institutions on the American continent as against other nations. And this friendship has more than once been effective to confer great benefits not only on the United States, but also on the people of Oregon.
In 1753, England, by virtue of the possession of the colonies on the Atlantic coast, and especially the colony of Virginia, put forth a claim to all the territory west of Virginia. The first public assertion of this claim by England was when Dinwiddie, colonial governor of Virginia, on the 30th of October, 1753, sent a young man named George Washington over the Alleghany mountains to the forks of the Ohio to find out what the French were doing in that region. Young Washington, then only twenty-two years of age, took along with him an old soldier that could speak French, engaged a pioneer guide and struck out into the vast wilderness. Reaching an Indian camp twenty miles below where the city of Pittsburg now stands, he held a pow-wow with the red men, and they furnished him an escort and guides to go up the Allegheny river and find the Frenchmen. This was then in the middle of a bad winter. But nothing could stop Washington. He found the French prepared to hold the country by military force if necessary. He 'got their reply to Dinwiddie's letter, and returned to Williamsburgh, the then capital of Virginia. Washington Irving has drawn out the story of this first expedition of George Washington in his unsurpassed style and adds: "This expedition may be considered the foundation of Washington's fortunes; from that moment he was the rising hope of Virginia."
To make a long story short, this was the challenge to France, and the prelude to the war which raged for six years on American soil to decide whether France with the Catholic or England with the Protestant Episcopal faith should rule America. It is one of the remarkable things of history that this war so decisive and far-reaching in its results should have been begun under the leadership of this young Virginian surveyor; and that it had hardly been closed by a treaty which gave nearly all of America to the English, until the colonies themselves, under the leadership of this same Virginian surveyor, should have disputed the rights of England and successfully made good their claim by a subsequent treaty which gave to Washington's work, nearly everything the English had wrested from the French; and thus verifying the prophecy of the French statesman, Count Vergennes, "The colonies (said he) will no longer need the protection of the English; England will call on them to contribute toward supporting the burdens they have helped to bring on her, and they will answer by striking for Independence."
By the treaty of Paris, made February 10th, 1763, the whole of upper and lower Canada and all of Louisiana claimed by La Salle, east of the Mississippi river, had been ceded to England, and the island and city of New Orleans and all of Louisiana west of the Mississippi had been ceded to Spain. By this treaty French rule disappears from America, but French influence remained actively fomenting discord between the colonies and England.
Having thus traced out the impulse given to the exploration of the west by the French, we turn to the American colonies and find that no sooner than the treaty of Paris had been signed, that the hardy pioneers of the border poured over the Alleghany mountains into western Pennsylvania, western Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. The only Englishman we find in this flood of immigration is Jonathan Carver, who left Boston in June, 1766, intending to penetrate the western wilderness to the head of the Mississippi river. It is
