The senate bill of Douglas was finally passed, after being amended in the spirit of compromise ever dominant in those days, whereby the colonial laws on the subject of slavery were to be continued in force until such time as "the legislature could adopt some other law on the subject," but the House promptly laid this bill on the table and rejoined with a measure practically identical with the Douglas house bill of 1846, and after a long and bitter contest, in which Thomas H. Benton led the fight for Oregon, on the fourteenth of August, 1848, Oregon became a territory of the United States on her own terms, and free soil in name as well as in fact. President Polk promptly appointed General Joseph Lane, of Indiana, a native of North Carolina, and a veteran commander of the Mexican war, as the first territorial governor of Oregon, and urged upon him the immediate organization of the government, in order that it might be inaugurated before March 4, 1849, when there would be a change in the presidency. The long journey of Governor Lane, accompanied by ex-Delegate Meek, now United States Marshal, across the continent by the Santa Fé trail, and up the coast from San Francisco, is one of the stirring incidents of those stirring times, and on the third of March, 1849, but one day before the expiration of President Polk's term of office, General Lane issued a proclamation making known that he entered upon the discharge of the duties of his office, and proclaiming the Federal laws in force over the Oregon country. Thus was the consummation so longed for by the President brought to pass, and what he had striven for so long and so patriotically fulfilled in the closing hours of his administration. During the years of territorial government the slavery question that was tormenting the brain and conscience of the North and the heart and chivalry of the South, played but little part in the life of the far distant territory.