Northwest Corner [antikvár]

THE NORTHWEST CORNER of the United States is composed of the commonwealths of Oregon and Washington, which, together, form a rectangle some 400 miles wide and 500 miles long, or up and down the map. The Corner is bounded on the north by British Columbia, on the south by California and Nevada, on the east by Idaho, on the west by the Pacific. That makes a sizable piece of country, far too large, complain regional patriots, for its sparse population. There are entire counties, big ones, that harbor less than 3,000 souls. In 1940 the entire Corner contained less than three million people. It was also the last frontier in the United States. Parts of it are frontier still. The Northwest Corner's first permanent white settlers were fur trappers and traders. It was then all known simply as the Oregon Country, and there was considerable doubt as to its sovereign ownership. A majority of the first trappers and traders were employed by the venerable Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson's Bay, an outpost of empire that already had almost two hundred years of spearheading the frontier before it established Fort Vancouver on the Columbia. The Hudson's Bay Company found the Oregon Country well to its liking. There were beaver here, and beaver were currency, sound as sterling-or, as dollars, for the British traders had scarcely set up shop before aggressive Americans, among them John Jacob Astor's men, arrived with traps and guns and the requisite beads and rum. Almost on their heels came American missionaries to soften, as best they could, the cruel blows of liquidation that were removing the natives by liquor, disease, and violence. The missionaries brought the first waves of American settlers, for the most part pious and determined men and women, who found the beaver-dam soils of the Willamette Valley perfect ground for their farms and for their towns which, in this, the New Canaan, they named Amity and Salem and Sweet Home and Lebanon. So many Americans came that they were soon able to form, in spite of British efforts, a provisional government; and in 1846, after great billows of sonorous and truculent oratory, both in Congress and in Parliament- yet without a shot being fired-Oregon Territory was organized as a part of the United States. The waves of American immigrants continued. Once in the Territory, the pioneers fanned out, north to the newly constituted Canadian boundary, south to the California line, and west to the Pacific shore. They built their cabins and frame houses, a few of which survive today, and they laced