grants with their cattle and wagons reaching Oregon through the mountains, and urged the government to encourage such caravans by making the way thither as easy and safe as possible. What was thus said in the ears of government, and through the public press, was talked by many voices in crowded assemblies, at village stores, and at firesides throughout the country, from the frontiers of Missouri to the coast of Massachusetts, and from Portland, Maine, to New Orleans. The people were thus already aroused, even before the failure in congress of the administration's plans for the settlement of the boundary question. The country of the Oregon had been made to appear inviting for seekers for new homes in all parts of the land, and colonization of it by the direct route through the Rocky Mountains practicable to the nation at large, so that the state of the public mind at this time boded ill to any plan of settlement that proposed a surrender of any part of the territory to which the United States was believed to have a well grounded claim. The time for bargaining away any part of the Oregon Territory, south of the forty-ninth parallel and the Straits of Fuca, had now fully passed. No one was quicker to see and appreciate the changed conditions of the question, than was the President himself. Naturally desirous that his administration should have the honor of settling this long pending question, he continued, through his succeeding secretaries, to endeavor to bring the negotiations to a successful conclusion; but henceforth his proposals were based upon a return to the former position of the government on the line of the forty-ninth parallel. After a proposal of the line of the Columbia our government was at a disadvantage in renewing proposals based upon the more northern line, while the changed temper of congress and the country obliged to a firmer standing to the old position, once it was resumed. The President's best
