Unhappily this advice was not long heeded by either side.  While Douglas was giving his vote for men and money for the Mexican War and the gallant Hardin was serving his country in command of a regiment, “the last Mormon war” broke out, which culminated in the siege and evacuation of Nauvoo.  Passing westward into No-man’s-land, the Mormons became eventually the founders of one of the Territories by which Douglas sought to span the continent.

It was only in the Northwest that the cry for the re-occupation of Oregon had the ring of sincerity; elsewhere it had been thought of as a response to the re-annexation of Texas,—­more or less of a vote-catching device.  The sentiment in Douglas’s constituency was strongly in favor of an aggressive policy in Oregon.  The first band of Americans to go thither, for the single purpose of settlement and occupation, set out from Peoria.[198] These were “young men of the right sort,” in whom the eternal Wanderlust of the race had been kindled by tales of returned missionaries.  Public exercises were held on their departure, and the community sanctioned this outflow of its youthful strength.  Dwellers in the older communities of the East had little sympathy with this enterprise.  It was ill-timed, many hundred years in advance of the times.  Why emigrate from a region but just reclaimed from barbarism, where good land was still abundant?[199] Perhaps it was in reply to such doubts that an Illinois rhymester bade his New England brother

    “Scan the opening glories of the West,
      Her boundless prairies and her thousand streams,
    The swarming millions who will crowd her breast,
      ’Mid scenes enchanting as a poet’s dreams: 
    And then bethink you of your own stern land,
      Where ceaseless toil will scarce a pittance earn,
    And gather quickly to a hopeful band,—­
      Say parting words,—­and to the westward turn."[200]

Douglas tingled to his fingers’ ends with the sentiment expressed in these lines.  The prospect of forfeiting this Oregon country,—­this greater Northwest,—­to Great Britain, stirred all the belligerent blood in his veins.  Had it fallen to him to word the Democratic platform, he would not have been able to choose a better phrase than “re-occupation of Oregon.”  The elemental jealousy and hatred of the Western pioneer for the claim-jumper found its counterpart in his hostile attitude toward Great Britain.  He was equally fearful lest a low estimate of the value of Oregon should make Congress indifferent to its future.  He had endeavored to have Congress purchase copies of Greenhow’s History of the Northwest Coast of North America, so that his colleagues might inform themselves about this El Dorado.[201]