The Oregon question, muttering in the thirties, thus broke out loudly in the forties. Emigrants then rushed west in the great migrations with deliberate purpose to have and to hold. Once there, they demanded, with absolute confidence, that Congress protect them in their new homes. The stories of the election of 1844, the Oregon treaty of 1846, and the erection of a territorial government in 1848 would all belong to an intimate study of the Oregon trail.
In the election of 1844 Oregon became an important question in practical politics. Well-informed historians no longer believe that the annexation of Texas was the result of nothing but a deep-laid plot of slaveholders to acquire more lands for slave states and more southern senators. All along the frontier, whether in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa, or in Arkansas, Alabama, and Mississippi, population was restive under hard times and its own congenital instinct to move west to cheaper lands. Speculation of the thirties had loaded up the eastern states with debts and taxes, from which the states could not escape with honor, but from under which their individual citizens could emigrate. Wherever farm lands were known, there went the home-seekers, and it needs no conspiracy explanation to account for the presence, in the platform, of a party that appealed to the great plain people, of planks for the reannexation of Texas and the whole of Oregon. With a Democratic party strongest in the South, the former extension was closer to the heart, but the whole West could subscribe to both.
Oregon included the whole domain west of the Rockies, between Spanish Mexico at 42° and Russian America, later known as Alaska, at 54° 40´. Its northern and southern boundaries were clearly established in British and Spanish treaties. Its eastern limit by the old treaty of 1818 was the continental divide, since the United States and Great Britain were unable either to allot or apportion it. Title which should justify a claim to it was so equally divided between the contesting countries that it would be difficult to make out a positive claim for either, while in fact a compromise based upon equal division was entirely fair. But the West wanted all of Oregon with an eagerness that saw no flaw in the United States title. That the democratic party was sincere in asking for all of it in its platform is clearer with respect to the rank and file of the organization than with the leaders of the party. Certain it is that just so soon as the execution of the Texas pledge provoked a war with Mexico, President Polk, himself both a westerner and a frontiersman, was ready to eat his words and agree with his British adversary quickly.