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The Oregon country had been jointly occupied by American and English settlers since 1818; by the 1840s both nations looked to annex the territory to gain an outlet to the Pacific. Spurred by the interests of the Hudson's Bay Company, the British viewed the Columbia River as the appropriate boundary between Canada and northwest America. Expansionists in the United States looked much further north and coined the latitudinal slogan "54º40' or Fight!" In 1845, in anticipation that war might break out in Oregon, Captain Henry James Warre was sent out of Montreal in secret to survey the region. As a British officer, Warre had been trained to sketch the landscape; during the arduous fourteen-month journey by canoe, boat, and horseback, he made more than eighty drawings. By 1846 the crisis was settled by the Oregon Treaty, which fixed the boundary at the 49th parallel. Warre then converted his sketches and notes into a magnificent color plate book, the most important one published on the subject of the Pacific Northwest. Sketches in . . . the Oregon Territory presents sixteen pages of lithographs. Included are dramatic depictions of Puget Sound, Mount Hood, and multiple views of the Columbia River and of the Rocky Mountains. Pictured here is "The Rocky Mountains from the Columbia River Looking N.W." (lithograph with hand coloring, 10 1/8 x 15 11/16 in.). Warre described the Rocky Mountains as "magnificent" and "similar in form to the Alps of Switzerland," but so far removed from settlement that there "you felt that you were in the midst of desolation." He noted that the Indians of the region were so reduced in number by disease and warfare that they were a "quiet" and "inoffensive people."
Image rights owned by the Virginia Historical Society. |
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