272 EDWARD GAYLORD BOURNE. knowledge in regard to its resources. The whole spirit of the West was then as now expansive, and yet it is in this period that legend has placed the extraordinary miscon- ception that Congress and the administration were likely to relinquish Oregon to England and that Oregon was saved to the United States by private efforts counteracting governmental and public indifference. Curious as this is the explanation in some measure is more curious still. The seed of the widely spread notion that Oregon was saved to the Union was planted by one of the great cham- pions of Oregon, Thomas H. Benton. Ever present in Benton's arguments for occupying Oregon was the appre- hension that if we did not act England would secure the whole territory. First among his five reasons for such action in 1825 was "To keep out a foreign power." He dreaded for that reason a renewal of the joint occupation in 1828. So in 1841, 1842, and 1843 when President Tyler's administration seemed absorbed in the quest of San Francisco, and disposed to consider a concession of the region between the Columbia and the forty-ninth par- allel to England, about half the present State of Washing- ton as a possible equivalent for England's efforts, if they could be enlisted, in enabling us to acquire northern Cal- ifornia and all of Texas without war, and when the Pres- ident seemed to the urgent westerner indisposed to take active measures to encourage and protect emigration to Oregon before the question of boundaries should be set- tled, Benton felt that such a course imperiled Oregon. " The title of the country," he writes, " being thus imper- iled by the Government, the saving of it devolved upon the people, and they saved it." A few sentences later he speaks of " the task of saving the Columbia" devolving " John Quincy Adams' diary contains much information on this question, derived from his reading of the unpublished dispatches of the Department of State.
