flattering to the hopes of British diplomatists. Spanish records, and Spanish officers, furnished many incontrovertible facts concerning discovery and occupation. The officers and log-books of the despised Yankee trading vessels completed the evidence; and, unfortunately, fixed a certain taint of falsehood, very hard to be borne, upon British officers high in the favor of the Government. As for contiguity: if Great Britain succeeded in establishing her right to extend her territory to the Pacific, north of the forty-ninth parallel, she would still come out several degrees north of the mouth of the Columbia.
Thus affairs remained during the ten years following the convention of 1818. The United States was waiting to regain strength; Great Britain, perhaps, waiting for the same thing. In 1827 the convention was renewed for another ten years; provided, that "on giving due notice of twelve months to the other contracting party," either party might cause the agreement to be annulled and abrogated.
What both contracting parties desired to bring about was the occupation of the country by actual settlers, who would hold it by the right of possession for their own Government. That the English Government was not able to do this was a part of the special providence for which we are putting in this plea. For the Government of the United States seemed about this time to be under a spell, which, while it was pretended to be prudence, looked excessively like timidity. After refusing to sustain Mr. Astor in re-establishing his business on the Columbia, or to listen to the importunities of other private citizens who were enthusiastically enamored of different projects for settling the valley of the Columbia, it quietly ignored the growing power of the Hudson's Bay Company, extending from the mouth of that river to its northern and southern sources. Fourteen years after the convention of 1818 the thirty or forty thousand Indians west of the Rocky Mountains had nearly all become more or less subject to the Hudson's Bay Company, whose employés moved among them with tolerable security, while the American fur companies, who ventured into the mountains from the eastern side, were forced to contend for every inch of the way. That they did contend for it, and encroached every year more and more on savage territory, defying the Indians and Hudson's Bay Company at once, was due to the character of their nation.
But it was not the fur trader who first made Destiny manifest: it was quite a different character. It was the missionary. It is always, or generally, we will say, your missionary who becomes the avant courrier of commerce; and in that capacity might claim to be supported by the State as well as the Church. It seems like inverting the natural order of things; but man proposes, God disposes. News had been received by the various churches in the East, through the medium of the St. Louis Fur Company, that certain Indians west of the Rocky Mountains were inquiring about the white man's God. This was a call the Christian heart could not withstand, imbued as it was at that time with highly romantic notions concerning the red men—views, alas! to be violently dispelled after years of useless labor among them.
In 1834 the first Methodist missionaries, under the protection of the fur traders, went overland to the Rocky Mountains. Why they did not tarry in the neighborhood of their own countrymen, and among the tribe who were inquiring about the God who furnished plenty of horses, guns, and food to his worshipers, has never been made quite plain. However that may be, these two men, Lee by name, chose to pass quite by these interesting savages, and settle nearer the coast, right under the eyes
