vast waste, equal in area to France, Germany, Spain, Portugal,
Austria-Hungary, Italy, Denmark, and Belgium combined, a land where
now wheat and corn fields and grazing herds produce much of the food
supply for the larger part of America and for great areas of Europe,
roamed the bison and the Indian hunter. Beyond this, the Rocky
Mountains and the Sierra Nevadas, enclosing high plateaus, heaved up
their vast bulk through nearly a thousand miles from east to west,
concealing untouched treasures of silver and gold. The great valleys
of the Pacific coast in Oregon and California held but a sparse
population of Indian traders, a few Spanish missions, and scattered
herdsmen.

At the beginning of Monroe's presidency, the Pacific coast was still
in dispute between England, Spain, Russia, and the United States.
Holding to all of Texas, Spain also raised her flag over her
colonists who spread from Mexico along the valley of the Rio Grande
to Santa Fe, and she claimed the great unoccupied wilderness of
mountain and desert comprising the larger portion of Colorado,
Arizona, Utah, and Nevada, as well as California. In the decade of
1820-1830, fur-traders threaded the dark and forbidding defiles of
the mountains, unfolded the secrets of the Great Basin, and found
their way across the Rockies to California and Oregon; the
government undertook diplomatic negotiations to safeguard American
rights on the Pacific, and extended a line of forts well into the
Indian country; while far-seeing statesmen on the floor of Congress
challenged the nation to fulfill its destiny by planting its
settlements boldly beyond the Rocky Mountains on the shores of the
Pacific. It was a call to the lodgment of American power on that
ocean, the mastery of which is to determine the future relations of
Asiatic and European civilizations. [Footnote: Cf. Babcock, Am.