The conquest of Oregon was to be made, if made at all, at the hands of an army of men with broadaxes on their shoulders; not elsewhere in our national annals does this appear more clearly than in the case of Oregon. In the military sense there was no conquest to be effected; an enterprising fur company, controlled by men of principle but served by perfectly unprincipled agents, sought the land for its wealth of skins, and would not have wished it "opened," in any sense, to the world. The case is quite parallel to the attitude of England at the close of the Old French War, described on a previous page[5]; the proclamation of 1763, permitting no pioneer to erect a cabin beyond the head-springs of the Atlantic rivers, because, if populated, the land would not pour its treasures into the coffers of a spendthrift king, was as idle a selfish dream as was ever conceived with reference to Oregon by a Hudson Bay Company's _engagé_. In the case of no other distinct region in our entire domain, perhaps, was it equally plain that the first people to really occupy would be, in all likelihood, the people that would control and at last possess it. It was like so many early military campaigns in America, as, for instance, Forbes's march on Fort Duquesne and Clark's advance to Vincennes,--to reach the destination was of itself the chief hardship; for if in the case of Forbes that great army could be once thrown across the Alleghanies where lay Braddock's mouldering bones, the capitulation of Fort Duquesne would be but a commonplace consequent.