American interest in the Pacific Northwest was maintained by a variety of people who visited the area in the 1820s and 1830s. Miner Jedediah Smith visited the area in 1829. The booster Hall Jackson Kelly arrived in 1832, although he did not need a visit before promoting the lands of Oregon to American citizens. American missionaries who arrived in the mid to late 1830s included Jason Lee (1834), Marcus and Narcissa Whitman (1836), and Henry and Eliza Spalding (1836). These people did not represent an important institutional power, but their work kept alive the idea of an American Northwest. When the United States initially accepted the idea of a joint occupation in 1818, it did not really have the resources to strongly shape the Pacific Northwest. It had neither a navy as powerful as the British, nor a colonization agent as well organized and concentrated as the Hudson`s Bay Company. The vast majority of the population lived far east of the Mississippi River. His fur traders and trappers had failed to invade the Rocky Mountains until the 1820s or had not found ways through the mountains to the west coast. Some Americans cherished the idea of a port on the Pacific coast, but most did not imagine that the United States would expand its possessions beyond the watershed. As in Texas, public opinion on the oregon country was divided. While the Texas Territory would have added a representation of slavery in Congress, all potential states formed from the country of Oregon would be free states. As a result, Northerners were the main proponents of acquiring as many Oregon countries as possible.

Gibson`s interpretation reflects a long-standing and pervasive Canadian concern about U.S. power, as well as an accurate reminder of the many threats Americans posed to the integrity of Canada`s borders and Canadian national identity. However, I would like to add a caveat to Gibson`s wording. When the Oregon Treaty was signed, the Confederation of Canada did not exist; America`s northern neighbor was not one nation, but several British colonies. When the U.S. negotiated the Oregon Treaty, it did so with Britain, not Canada, so it makes sense to keep an eye on Britain`s participation in the treaty (there has not yet been any official Canadian involvement in diplomacy). Canadian views on this British involvement indicate various types of weakness in the face of American strength. Gibson, for example, refers to a British sense of “appeasement” when it comes to leaving western Washington for the United States, while another Canadian researcher (John Saywell, Canada: Pathways to the Present [1994]) remembers not only American aggression, but also British negligence when he remembers “what is now Washington and Oregon, in the United States”. American interpretations, on the other hand, do not portray Britain as weak and therefore do not tend to view the Oregon Treaty as an agreement with a “weaker neighbor.” Quite the contrary. Robert H.

Ferrell explained President Polk`s decision to accept the 49th parallel as the border, and wrote in American Diplomacy: A History (1975) that Polk “ceded to Britain [instead of standing for more territory]. It was one thing to assert territorial claims against a nation like Mexico, and it was quite another to oppose the most powerful nation in the world, as Britain was in the nineteenth century. Far north and west of Texas, the United States and several other nations competed for the Oregon Country: the country north of California and west of the Rocky Mountains. The region was claimed differently from the sixteenth century by Spain, Russia, Great Britain and the United States. By the mid-1820s, however, only American and British claims endured. The two nations agreed in 1818 on a “joint occupation” of Oregon, in which the citizens of both countries could settle; this arrangement lasted until 1846. Map with an area claimed by both the United States and Great Britain until 1846, including Vancouver Island to the north. The settlers of Oregon from the United States and Great Britain were very different groups. The British were mainly fur traders associated with the Hudson`s Bay Company, while the Americans were a more eclectic lot. American colonization began in the 1830s when Protestant missionaries moved to the Wilamette Valley. Their reports of the region`s fertile soil quickly spread eastward, causing a massive migration of thousands of American families west along the Oregon Trail.

The resulting demographic inequality, as well as a general decline in the fur trade, persuaded the British government to work towards a negotiated solution to the Oregon question. As in Texas, public opinion on the oregon country was divided. While the Texas Territory would have added a representation of slavery in Congress, all potential states formed from the country of Oregon would be free states. As a result, Northerners were the main proponents of acquiring as many Oregon countries as possible. James K. Polk and the Politics of Expansion In the 1844 presidential election, Democrat James K. Polk defeated his Whig opponent Henry Clay on an aggressively expansionist platform that welded together the problems of Texas and Oregon. Democrats appealed to the expansionist sentiments of voters in the North and the South, and their shared desire to maintain the nuanced balance in Congress. After winning the election, Polk articulated his foreign policy goals: settle Oregon`s dispute with Britain, annex Texas, and acquire California from Mexico.

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