the cradle of the world, we should now have an intolerable situation of affairs in North America. Had we refused Louisiana from Napoleon, what is now the United States would be partitioned, geographically, about as follows: East of the Mississippi would be the Republic of the United States of America of 1783, with England in Canada on the north, and Spain in Florida and fringing the Gulf of Mexico. Louisiana would have fallen into England's hands as a result of the Napoleonic wars, and so, perhaps, Oregon, either by reason of a favorable interpretation of the Nootka convention, or Vancouver's discoveries. Mexico, as the successor of Spain, would own Texas and all the remainder of the west south of the forty-second parallel and not included in Louisiana. With a republic on one side, and European sovereignty on the other, the Mississippi would to-day be bristling with cannon. The purchase of Louisiana was political foresight, and the completion of our title to Oregon was a direct result of the Louisiana transaction. The war with Mexico was the logical sequence of both. From whatever point we may regard it, the acquisition of the trans-Mississippi region, viewed in the perspective of a century, was worth what it cost in money, actual war, and risk of war with what, in the early stages of our history was the most powerful nation on the globe.
The beginnings of the West date from 1850. Further back the census reports do not present statistics that can be compared for valuable purposes, with present standards, although as early as 1840 there were nine hundred thousand people along the western shore of the Mississippi in Arkansas, Iowa, Louisiana, and Missouri. These states were long on the firing line of American civilization, and their people subsisted by general farming, or by outfitting ox-train merchandise caravans for Santa Fé and Chihuahua, or by outfitting and trading with pioneer
