"The whole of Oregon is not worth a pinch of snuff."
Again he said:
"As I understand it, there are seven hundred miles this side of the Rocky Mountains uninhabitable, where rain never falls, mountains wholly impassable except through gaps. What are you going to do in such a case? Can you apply steam? Have you estimated the cost of a railroad to the mouth of the Columbia? The wealth of the Indies would not build it. I wish the Rocky Mountains were an impassable barrier. If there was an embankment five feet high to be removed, I would not vote five dollars to remove it, and encourage our people to go there."
That speech was delivered in Congress only a few months before Whitman's memorable ride to save Oregon. Senator Dayton of New Jersey was marked as an able man, and yet his knowledge of Oregon was as limited as that of Webster, Winthrop, or McDuffie. In one of his speeches he called "Oregon a Sahara, except along the little streams and bottom lands!"
We have in modern times had some eloquent opponents to expansion, but they were "childlike and bland" when compared with the old statesmen of the first half of the nineteenth century, who easily saw ruin to the country by acknowledging practical ownership of that distant territory.
The public press was not behindhand with statesmen in ridiculing Oregon. The Louisville Journal and the National Intelligencer, then the two most influential newspapers in the land, were
