opening a campaign of education in regard to the value of Oregon designed to influence public opinion to push the claims of the United States when the time of settlement should come. From beyond the Mississippi there came at once a vigorous protest from Thomas H. Benton against any recognition of English rights on the Columbia, a protest as significant as his denunciation of the relinquishment of Texas in the Florida Treaty, on the ground that it was a dismemberment of the Mississippi Valley. It meant that the people of the West, fresh from the conquest of the farther slopes of the Appalachians, would not shrink from the Rockies, or give over the work of the pioneer until their advance line was arrested by the Pacific. Two years later in Congress, Mr. John Floyd, a representative from Virginia, began the steady agitation for the occupation of the Columbia River country by the United States.
Inasmuch as the late Frances Fuller Victor and other writers on Oregon history have ascribed to a Massachusetts schoolmaster, Hall J. Kelley, the initiation of this agitation, it will not be inappropriate on this occasion to examine somewhat in detail the character of the early Oregon movement, its sources of inspiration, and to give brief sketches of its leaders. Mr. Kelley's claims for himself seems to me greatly exaggerated, and the dates of his published writings on the Oregon question indicate, I think, that instead of influencing Floyd to champion Oregon he himself reflected the movement initiated by Floyd.
Hall Jackson Kelley was born in 1790, and graduated from Middlebury College in Vermont in 1813. He tells us in after years that he projected a settlement west of the Rocky Mountains as early as 1817. His society to establish such a settlement was not incorporated until 1829, and the date of his first publication on Oregon was apparently not earlier than 1830.
