Every staple place and trading station is a center of geographical information; it therefore gives an impulse to expansion by widening the geographical horizon.  The Lewis and Clark Expedition found the Mandan villages at the northern bend of the Missouri River the center of a trade which extended west to the Pacific, through the agency of the Crow and Paunch Indians of the upper Yellowstone, and far north to the Assiniboine and Saskatchewan Rivers.  Here in conversation with British and French fur-traders of the Northwest Company’s posts, they secured information about the western country they were to explore.[187] Similarly the trade of the early Jesuit missions at La Pointe near the west end of Lake Superior annually drew the Indians from a wide circle sweeping from Green Bay and the Fox River in the south, across the Mississippi around to the Lake of the Woods and far north of Lake Superior.[188] Here Marquette first heard of the great river destined to carry French dominion to the Gulf of Mexico.

[Sidenote:  Movements due to religion.]

Trade often finds in religion an associate and coadjutor in directing and stimulating the historical movement.  China regards modern Christian missions as effective European agencies for the spread of commercial and political power.  Jesuit and fur-trader plunged together into the wilds of colonial Canada; Spanish priest and gold-seeker into Mexico and Peru.  American missionary pressed close upon the heels of fur-trader into the Oregon country.  Jason Lee, having established a Methodist mission on the Willamette in 1834, himself experienced sudden conversion from religionist to colonizer.  He undertook a temporary mission back to the settled States, where he preached a stirring propaganda for the settlement and appropriation of the disputed Oregon country, before the British should fasten their grip upon it.  The United States owes Hawaii to the expansionist spirit of American missionaries.  Thirty years after their arrival in the islands, they held all the important offices under the native government, and had secured valuable tracts of lands, laying the foundation of the landed aristocracy of planters established there to-day.  Their sons and grandsons took the lead in the Revolution of 1893, and in the movement for annexation to the United States.  Thus sometimes do the meek inherit the earth.

[Sidenote:  Religious pilgrimages.]

The famous pilgrimages of the world, in which the commercial element has been more or less conspicuous,[189] have contributed greatly to the circulation of peoples and ideas, especially as they involve multitudes and draw from a large circle of lands.  Their economic, intellectual and political effects rank them as one phase of the historical movement.  Herodotus tells of seven hundred thousand Egyptians flocking to the city of Bubastis from all parts of Egypt for the festival of Diana.[190] The worship of Ashtoreth in Bambyce in Syria drew votaries from all the Semitic peoples