Part 22

Texas was not contented to stand alone; she begged the United States to add her to its great and growing family of states. This was done in 1845. But, as we shall presently see, a war soon broke out (1846) between the United States and Mexico, and when that war was ended we obtained a great deal more land at the west.

231. General Sam Houston in the great war between the North and the South; what he said.--We have seen the part which General Sam Houston took in getting new country to add to the United States. He lived in Texas for many years after that. When, in 1861, the great war broke out between the North and the South, General Houston was governor of the state. He withdrew from office and went home to his log cabin in Huntsville. He refused to take any part in the war, for he loved the Union,--that is, the whole country, North and South together,--and he said to his wife, "My heart is broken." Before the war ended he was laid in his grave.

232. Summary.--General Sam Houston of Tennessee led the people of Texas in their war against Mexico. The Texans gained the victory, and made their country an independent state with General Houston as its president. After a time Texas was added to the United States. We then had a war with Mexico, and added a great deal more land at the west. General Houston died during the war between the North and the South.

Tell about Sam Houston and the Indians. Where did Houston go after he became governor of Tennessee? Where did Houston go next? What did he say he would do about Texas? What was David Crockett's motto? What is said about Fort Alamo? What about the battle with the Mexicans? What did Texas become? To what office was Houston elected? What is said of the Texas flag? When was Texas added to the United States? What war then broke out? What did we get by that war? What is said of General Houston in the great war between the North and the South?

CAPTAIN ROBERT GRAY (1755-1806).

233. Captain Gray goes to the Pacific coast to buy furs; he first carries the Stars and Stripes round the globe.--Not long after the war of the Revolution had come to an end some merchants of Boston sent out two vessels to Vancouver Island, on the northwest coast of America. The names of the vessels were the Columbia and the Lady Washington, and they sailed round Cape Horn into the Pacific. Captain Robert Gray went out as commander of one of these vessels. He was born in Rhode Island and he had fought in one of our war-ships in the Revolution.

Captain Gray was sent out by the Boston merchants to buy furs from the Indians on the Pacific coast. He had no difficulty in getting all he wanted, for the savages were glad to sell them for very little. In one case a chief let the captain have two hundred sea-otter skins such as are used for ladies' sacks, and which were worth about eight thousand dollars, for an old iron chisel. After getting a valuable cargo of furs, Captain Gray sailed in the Columbia for China, where he bought a quantity of tea. He then went to the south, round the Cape of Good Hope, and keeping on toward the west he reached Boston in the summer of 1790. He had been gone about three years, and he was the first man who carried the American flag clear round the globe.

234. Captain Gray's second voyage to the Pacific coast; he enters a great river and names it the Columbia; the United States claims the Oregon country; we get Oregon in 1846.--Captain Gray did not stay long at Boston, for he sailed again that autumn in the Columbia for the Pacific coast, to buy more furs. He stayed on that coast a long time. In the spring of 1792 he entered a great river and sailed up it a distance of nearly thirty miles. He seems to have been the first white man who had ever actually entered it. He named the vast stream the Columbia River, from the name of his vessel. It is the largest American river which empties into the Pacific Ocean south of Alaska.

Captain Gray returned to Boston and gave an account of his voyage of exploration; this led Congress to claim the country through which the Columbia flows as part of the United States.

After Captain Gray had been dead for forty years we came into possession, in 1846, of the immense territory then called the Oregon Country. It was through what he had done that we got our first claim to that country which now forms the states of Oregon and Washington.

235. Summary.--A little over a hundred years ago (1790) Captain Robert Gray of Rhode Island first carried the American flag round the world. In 1792 he entered and named the Columbia River. Because he did that the United States claimed the country--called the Oregon Country--through which that river runs. In 1846 we added the Oregon Country to our possessions; it now forms the two states of Oregon and Washington.

Tell about Captain Gray's voyage to the Pacific coast. What did he buy there? What did he first carry round the globe? Tell about his second voyage. What did he do in 1792? What happened after Captain Gray returned to Boston? What happened in 1846? What two states were made out of the Oregon Country?

CAPTAIN SUTTER (1803-1880).

236. Captain Sutter and his fort; how the captain lived.--At the time when Professor Morse sent his first message by telegraph from Washington to Baltimore (1844), Captain J. A. Sutter, an emigrant from Switzerland, was living near the Sacramento River in California. California then belonged to Mexico. The governor of that part of the country had given Captain Sutter an immense piece of land; and the captain had built a fort at a point where a stream which he named the American River joins the Sacramento River. People then called the place Sutter's Fort, but to-day it is Sacramento City, the capital of the great and rich state of California.

In his fort Captain Sutter lived like a king. He owned land enough to make a thousand fair-sized farms; he had twelve thousand head of cattle, more than ten thousand sheep, and over two thousand horses and mules. Hundreds of laborers worked for him in his wheat-fields, and fifty well-armed soldiers guarded his fort. Quite a number of Americans had built houses near the fort. They thought that the time was coming when all that country would become part of the United States.

237. Captain Sutter builds a saw-mill at Coloma; a man finds some sparkling dust.--About forty miles up the American River was a place which the Mexicans called Coloma, or the beautiful valley. There was a good fall of water there and plenty of big trees to saw into boards, so Captain Sutter sent a man named Marshall to build a saw-mill at that place. The captain needed such a mill very much, for he wanted lumber to build with and to fence his fields.

Marshall set to work, and before the end of January, 1848, he had built a dam across the river and got the saw-mill half done. One day as he was walking along the bank of a ditch, which had been dug back of the mill to carry off the water, he saw some bright yellow specks shining in the dirt. He gathered a little of the sparkling dust, washed it clean, and carried it to the house. That evening after the men had come in from their work on the mill, Marshall said to them, "Boys, I believe I've found a gold mine." They laughed, and one of them said, "I reckon not; no such luck."

238. Marshall takes the shining dust to Captain Sutter; what he did with it, and how he felt about the discovery.--A few days after that Marshall went down to the fort to see Captain Sutter. Are you alone? he asked when he saw the captain. Yes, he answered. Well, won't you oblige me by locking the door; I've something I want to show you. The captain locked the door, and Marshall taking a little parcel out of his pocket, opened it and poured some glittering dust on a paper he had spread out. "See here," said he, "I believe this is gold, but the people at the mill laugh at me and call me crazy."

Captain Sutter examined it carefully. He weighed it; he pounded it flat; he poured some strong acid on it. There are three very interesting things about gold. In the first place, it is very heavy, heavier even than lead. Next, it is very tough. If you hammer a piece of iron long enough, it will break to pieces, but you can hammer a piece of gold until it is thinner than the thinnest tissue paper, so that if you hold it up you can see the light shining through it. Last of all, if you pour strong acids on gold, such acids as will eat into other metals and change their color, they will have no more effect on gold than an acid like vinegar has on a piece of glass.

For these and other reasons most people think that gold is a very handsome metal, and the more they see of it, especially if it is their own, the better they are pleased with it.

Well, the shining dust stood all these tests. It was very heavy, it was very tough, and the sharp acid did not hurt it. Captain Sutter and Marshall both felt sure that it was gold.

But, strange to say, the captain was not pleased. He wished to build up an American settlement and have it called by his name. He did not care for a gold mine--why should he? for he had everything he wanted without it. He was afraid, too, that if gold should be discovered in any quantity, thousands of people would rush in; they would dig up his land, and quite likely take it all away from him. We shall see presently whether he was right or not.

239. War with Mexico; Mexico lets us have California and New Mexico; "gold! gold! gold!" what happened at Coloma; how California was settled; what happened to Captain Sutter and to Marshall.--While these things were happening we had been at war with Mexico for two years (1846-1848), because Texas and Mexico could not agree about the western boundary line of the new state. Texas wanted to push that line as far west as possible so as to have more land; Mexico wanted to push it as far east as possible so as to give as little land as she could. This dispute soon brought on a war between the United States and Mexico. Soon after gold was discovered at Coloma, the war ended (1848); and we got not only all the land the people of Texas had asked for, but an immense deal more; for we obtained the great territory of California and New Mexico, out of which a number of states and territories have since been made.

In May, 1848, a man came to San Francisco holding up a bottle full of gold-dust in one hand and swinging his hat with the other. As he walked through the streets he shouted with all his might, "Gold! gold! gold! from the American River."

Then the rush for Coloma began. Every man had a spade and a pick-axe. In a little while the beautiful valley was dug so full of holes that it looked like an empty honeycomb. The next year a hundred thousand people poured into California from all parts of the United States; so the discovery of gold filled up that part of the country with emigrants years before they would have gone if no gold had been found there.

Captain Sutter lost all his property. He would have died poor if the people of California had not given him money to live on.

Marshall was still more to be pitied. He got nothing by his discovery. Years after he had found the shining dust, some one wrote to him and asked him for his photograph. He refused to send it. He said, "My likeness ... is, in fact, all I have that I can call my own; and I feel like any other poor wretch: I want something for self."

240. How we bought more land; our growth since the Revolution.--Long before Captain Sutter died, the United States bought from Mexico another great piece of land (1853), marked on the map by the name of the Gadsden Purchase. A number of years later (1867) we bought the territory of Alaska from Russia.