That speech was delivered in Congress only a few months before Whitman's memorable ride to save Oregon. Senator Dayton of New Jersey was marked as an able man, and yet his knowledge of Oregon was as limited as that of Webster, Winthrop, or McDuffie. In one of his speeches he called "Oregon a Sahara, except along the little streams and bottom lands!" We have in modern times had some eloquent opponents to expansion, but they were "childlike and bland" when compared with the old statesmen of the first half of the nineteenth century, who easily saw ruin to the country by acknowledging practical ownership of that distant territory. The public press was not behindhand with statesmen in ridiculing Oregon. The Louisville Journal and the National Intelligencer, then the two most influential newspapers in the land, were bitter. The Journal wrote, and the Intelligencer copied and approved: "Of all the countries upon the face of the earth, Oregon is the one least favored by heaven. It is the riddlings of creation. It is almost as barren as Sahara, and quite as unhealthy as the Campana of Italy. Russia has her Siberia, and England her Botany Bay, and if the United States should ever need a country to which to banish her rogues and scoundrels, the utility of such a region as Oregon would be demonstrated. Until then, we are perfectly willing to leave this magnificent country to the Indians and trappers and buffalo-hunters that roam over its sand banks." One passing over that beautiful and fertile land, after only half a century and ten years have passed, can easily conceive how dense was the ignorance of the common people upon the subject, when a man, eminent in letters, and the wisest journalist of his day, George D. Prentice, would give expression to such sentiments. The English press if possible was even more pronounced, and used every argument to discourage emigration. The Hudson Bay Fur Company was owned and controlled by the titled nobility of England. It had made every owner rich by its wealth of furs. It was in full control of all the territory by the consent of the United States, and only desired "to be let alone" and in peace to enjoy the monopoly. [Illustration: LAKE CHELAN--FIRST VIEW OF THE SNOWY PEAKS. (Photo. Lyman.)] The London Examiner, in 1842, just when the United States was waking from its lethargy, wrote: "Ignorant Americans are disposed to quarrel over a country, the whole of which in dispute not being worth, to either party, twenty thousand pounds." About the same time the Edinburgh Review wrote: