Some years previous, the Rev. Jason Lee, while on a visit to the United States, had visited Washington, and made a strong representation of the need of a representative of the United States in Oregon. As a late response to this plea, in the spring of 1842, the government had sent a sub-agent to look after the interests of the Indians in Oregon. The appointment fell upon Dr. Elijah White, who himself had been a member of the Willamette mission. Doctor White had at once set out for Oregon, in May of that year, and was accompanied by a colony of more than one hundred persons, assembled largely through his influence, the first real colony of American families, aside from the missions, to enter the Oregon Territory. By the end of the winter of 1843, the government was in possession of Doctor White’s report of the safe arrival in Oregon of himself, and this colony; of the satisfaction of the colonists with what they found there; and of the favorable condition and prospects of the settlers already there. Some of the colonists themselves had written to newspapers at their old homes giving good accounts of the new land, and urging their friends to join them there. And these letters, wherever found, were copied by all the great newspapers, north and south, because, as their editors sometimes apologetically added, “every one was eager to hear the latest news from the Oregon country.” About the same time with the arrival of the report of the government’s own agent, there appeared in Washington, fresh from his winter ride from Oregon, Dr. Marcus Whitman, of the Walla Walla mission. In repeated interviews with the President, and members of his cabinet, as well as with members of congress, Doctor Whitman presented earnestly the practicability of large companies of emigrants 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.