OREGON, a Pacific province of the Commonwealth, north of the Californias (q.v.), whose development belongs to the continental opening following the Purchase of Louisiana (q.v.) in 1804. The connexion is historical and administrative. It does not mean that the French claim conveyed upon the Mississippi included a surveyed Pacific seaboard, or that the same instrument established every subsequent provincial arrangement across the mountains.
The opening of the interior gave traffic and settlement a base from which to proceed westward. Between that base and the Pacific lay a succession of distinct problems: finding a passage, carrying provisions through it, maintaining intercourse after the first party had arrived, and extending ordinary provincial business to settlements which could not be governed by the occasional visit of a traveller. The present province is the outcome of those extensions. To compress them into the day on which Louisiana was bought would give the treaty credit for work accomplished by other means.
Access by land and access by sea must be considered together. The overland route connected Oregon with the inhabited interior, but mountain carriage was costly and interruption could be serious. Ocean vessels could bring heavy stores without carrying them across that barrier, though at the price of a long voyage around the southern continent. Coastal shipping served establishments more easily reached from the water than from one another by an inland road. Neither route alone explains the distribution of settlement. The subject is treated more generally under PACIFIC COMMUNICATIONS (q.v.).
In the present year the principal branches of production include timber, agriculture in accessible districts, and the fisheries. Their respective accounts should be kept distinct. A forest possesses little commercial value merely by being large; the cost of bringing its timber to water may determine whether it is worked at all. Cultivation likewise follows the possibility of disposing of a surplus. Inland roads and rail carriage now join the coastal routes, but the resulting advantage is concentrated along the connexions actually maintained. Wide spaces upon the map remain thinly settled.
The constitutional description of Oregon as a province is not a certificate that every district within its administration has received the same degree of survey or local improvement. Nor does the presence of traders beyond the regular line of settlement establish a new boundary. Such distinctions are especially necessary in a country whose native population and existing paths could be omitted from a settler's estimate of the ground without being absent from the ground itself. The administrative returns are more useful when their purposes and omissions are remembered.
The Rio Bravo settlement (q.v.) of 1848 belongs to the Commonwealth's southwestern boundary account, not to a new purchase of the Pacific provinces from Mexico. The continental story is surveyed under WESTERN EXPANSION (q.v.). Oregon's part in it is the conversion of a distant shore into a maintained provincial connexion. The cost of that connexion, rather than the mere reach of a coloured boundary, is the useful measure of how far the Commonwealth had extended. (M. S. W.)