The impact of the Saxon ideal forced the holders of the Roman law both north and south. The final act saw it settled firmly in the vast middle borders of the continent. All during these fateful centuries there loomed and lured on the northern and western borders unsolved mysteries and undiscovered regions: the River of the West, the Straits of Anian, the Northwest Passage to India and the Spice Isles of the Pacific. To whom should these alluring regions belong? Which culture, which tradition, monarchy or democracy, would prevail in the Land of Sunset? What factor would determine exploration? War? Exploitation? Diplomacy? Pioneer settlement? All, perhaps, helped. There is not space to prove, but only to suggest that the factor which turned the scale in favor of the Stars and Stripes and democracy was the American woman, for where she went, homes were established; homes meant permanent settlement and government, not exploitation and expediency.
If the movement which carried to dominance the Saxon rather than the Roman ideal for North America be examined, it will be found that the deep-rooted and outstanding factor, that differentiated the two streams of colonizing enterprises, lies in this one fact: the Saxon took with him the wife of his own blood and established a home; the Latin man did not. It is needless to point out that had the American woman failed in courage and endurance, she could not have entered into this conquest of these rich regions for America. The result might easily have been other than it was.
But before the pioneers, came the missionaries and with them in 1836, Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Spaulding, the first white women to cross the Rocky Mountains. Previous to this time, the Hudson Bay Company had been monarch of all it surveyed. Eleven times American traders had tried for a foothold and each time finally accepted defeat at the hands of this autocratic corporation. But when the mountain men saw those two white women, they said: "There is something the honorable Hudson Bay Company cannot drive out of this country." And so it was. From that time the tide of autocracy began to ebb. Wave after wave bore forward the hosts of democracy until Oregon, Old Oregon, was safe beneath the Stars and Stripes. On July 4, 1836, these two white women, standing with their husbands on the summit of the Rocky Mountains, with Bible and with Flag, as their diaries tell us, took possession of the Pacific Coast in the name of Christ and for the American Home. In two years more they were joined by Mrs. Cushing Eells and Mrs. Elkanah Walker.
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