States naval officer commanded the leading vessel in the expedition. Under the treaty of Ghent, Astoria was to be restored to its original owners, but it was not until 1846 that this act of justice was consummated. In 1818 it was mutually agreed that each nation should equally enjoy the privileges of all the bays and harbors on that coast for ten years, and this agreement was renewed in 1827 for an indefinite time. Practically this meant the occupation of the country by the Hudson Bay Company, which found its forests and waters a mine of fur-bearing wealth. The most eminent of America's statesmen, so far as the Pacific Northwest was concerned, seemed to be under the spell of their own ignorance and of the Hudson Bay Company's misrepresentations. The great Senator Benton said that, "The ridge of the Rocky Mountains may be named as a convenient, natural and everlasting boundary." Winthrop, of Massachusetts, quoted and commended this statement of Benton, and McDuffie of South Carolina declared that the wealth of the Indies would be insufficient to pay the cost of a railroad to the mouth of the Columbia. While the nation was stirred up over a boundary dispute involving a comparatively small district in the Northeast--settled by the Ashburton Treaty in 1842--Oregon, with its extensive territory and magnificent natural wealth was treated as unworthy of controversy. But for the patriot missionary, Marcus Whitman, who in the winter of 1842-43 made a perilous journey from his mission post in Oregon to Washington, to stir up the American Government to a sense of its duty, and of the imminent danger of the seizure of Oregon by the British, that valuable region would in all probability have passed under British dominion. "All I ask," said Doctor Whitman to President Tyler, "is that you won't barter away Oregon or allow English interference until I can lead a band of stalwart American settlers across the plains; for this I will try to do." The President promised; the settlers went, and Oregon was saved.[1] For a time it seemed that war might result, but the two nations at length compromised on a boundary line at forty-nine north latitude.