and trade. The Greeks, and after them the Romans, did much to expand man's knowledge of the outlying regions of Asia and Europe, much, too, for the carrying into those regions their several civilizations, but their motive was that of empire and commerce. So, too, of those wonderful voyages and explorations culminating in and following upon the discovery of America.
Their moving cause was not the desire to enlarge human knowledge, not to carry forward the frontiers of civilized life, but it was primarily to discover and open a new pathway to the riches of the East, a motive made urgent when the inroads of the Turks had closed to Western Europe the trade routes of Asia.
The explorations and settlements of Christian missionaries in the early centuries of our era, penetrating as they did to the remote and rude peoples of Europe; the settlement of the Puritan on the coast of New England; the missions of Jesuits circling the far horizon of the New World like a line of light from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Mississippi, all belong to movements resulting from higher and exceptional motives. So of the early mission settlements of Oregon.
The coming of white men to Oregon before the coming of Jason Lee and his company was chiefly for the purpose of trade. Whatever settlements such earlier coming contemplated, or resulted in, had trade for their primary object. The kind of trade, too, was such as contemplated the preserving of the country as far as possible in its native wildness, and of the inhabitants in their uncivilized state. The fur trade, which hitherto had been the chief inducement for white men to come to the Oregon Country, would not have been furthered by any movement that had resulted in the colonization and cultivation of the country, or which had induced to settled life and civilized occupations its wild and roving inhabitants.
