There were churches and schools already started, and a beginning had been made in government.

Faces and hands and ways and customs and laws of our own people greeted us.Yes.It was America.
Messengers spread abroad the news of the arrival of our wagon train.
Messengers, too, came down from the Hudson Bay posts to scan our equipment and estimate our numbers.

There was no word obtainable from these of any Canadian column of occupation to the northward which had crossed at the head of the Peace River or the Saskatchewan, or which lay ready at the head waters of the Fraser or the Columbia to come down to the lower settlements for the purpose of bringing to an issue, or making more difficult, this question of the joint occupancy of Oregon.

As a matter of fact, ultimately we won that transcontinental race so decidedly that there never was admitted to have been a second.
As for our people, they knew how neither to hesitate nor to dread.

They unhooked their oxen from the wagons and put them to the plows.