Prominent among the steamship enterprises of the country stand the two lines which connect the Atlantic and Gulf seaboard with our large and rich possessions in the Pacific, California, and Oregon. Established at a time when California was held by military government, and when Oregon was a wild untamed wilderness, these lines became the means of developing the richest portion of the American continent, and binding the far distant western world in close connection with the old confederacy, notwithstanding the mighty Cordilleras and Rocky Mountains which rose like forbidding barriers between them. Important as these possessions were, naturally and geographically, they acquired a new interest about the time that the Pacific and the Aspinwall Steamship Companies were established. The contracts which were made with these companies would certainly have ruined them but for the discovery of gold in California. This opened a new and brilliant field of effort, and the opportunities offered by these companies soon determined tens of thousands of our hardy and enterprising countrymen to enter and develop it. It is pleasing in this connection to trace the almost mysterious progress of our Pacific territory during the past eight years, and the agencies producing it. Among these agencies none have been so effectual as the Pacific Mail Steamship Company. That Company was compelled to form an establishment of the most effective character four to five thousand miles away from home, and as it was at the time, thirteen thousand miles distant. The country was wholly new, so much so that it was, in most parts of the field which it had to occupy, extremely difficult to procure ordinary food for their operatives. Their ships had to make a voyage more than half of that around the world before they arrived at their point of service; and they found themselves without a home when there. The steamer "California," which left New-York on the 6th October, 1848, was the first to bear the American flag to the Pacific ocean, and the first to salute with a new life the solitudes of that rich and untrodden territory. She was soon followed by the "Panama" and "Oregon," and in due course of time by the "Tennessee," the "Golden Gate," the "Columbia," the "John L. Stephens," the "Sonora," the "Republic," the "Northerner," the "Fremont," the "Tobago," the "St. Louis," and the "Golden Age." From a small beginning that Company now has the finest steam fleet in the United States, although the difficulties in forming it were probably much greater than any of our other companies had to contend with.