INTRODUCTION
"Westward the course of Empire takes its way;
The four first acts already past;
The fifth shall close the drama with the day;
Time's noblest offspring is the last."
Prophecies: "Fixity of residence and thickening of population are the prime requisites of civilization; and hence it will be found, that, as in Egypt where great civilization was developed in a narrow valley hemmed in by deserts, and in Greece limited to a peninsula bounded by the sea on one side, and mountains on the other, when the Caucasian race, startfng from India and pursuing its western course around the earth, shall reach the shores of the Great Pacific ocean, it will dam up in the strip of country between the Rocky mountains and the sea, and there in the most dense population, produce the greatest civilization on the earth." (Vestiges of Creation, 1838, anonymous, supposed to be written by Robert Chambers of Edinburgh, Scotland.)
The French naturalist, Lacepede, and one of Napoleon's ministers, writing to Jefferson in 1804 said: "If your nation can establish any easy communication by rivers, canals and short portages between New York and a city that must be built at the mouth of the Columbia, what a route for the commerce of Europe, Asia, and America."
"The city carrying on a trade with the islands of the Pacific, and the people about the shores of the ocean, commensurate with its wants, must advance in prosperity and power unexampled in the history of nations. From the plentitude of its own resources, it will be enabled to sustain its own operations, and will hasten on to its own majesty, and to a proud rank on the earth." (Hall J. Kelley, in his prospectus for a city where University park, Portland, is now located, 1832.)
"I say the man is alive, full grown, and is listening to what I say, who will yet see the Asiatic commerce traversing the North Pacific ocean—entering the Oregon river—climbing the western slope of the Rocky mountains—issuing from its gorges—and spreading its fertilizing streams over our wide extended Union!
The steamboat and the steam car have not exhausted all their wonders. They have not yet found their amplest and most appropriate theatres—the tranquil surface of the North Pacific ocean, and the vast inclined plains which spread east and west from the base of the Rocky mountains. The magic boat, and the flying car are not yet seen upon the ocean, and upon the plain, but they will be seen there; and St. Louis is yet to find herself as near Canton as she is now to London, with a better and safer route by land and sea to China and Japan than she now has to France and Great Britain." (Extract from, an address by Thomas H. Benton, U. S. Senator, at St. Louis, October 19, 1844.)
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