ExHiiiiTioy Addmi'Jsses. 131 



nist, bad perished four years before in tbe savage M^astes of tbe 

 southern part of his doniiiiioiis. It was an era of prosperity and 

 wluit seemed permanent glury. George lY, tlie first gentleman of 

 Europe, in his youtli a liberal, in his old age a despot, ruled still over 

 the British empire. Charles X, the last of the regular Bourbons, 

 was the 'absolute monarch of France, and seemed to his admirers and 

 supporters as firmly fixed on the tlirone as ever Louis XIV was, 

 though that throne was destined very soun to crumble and disappear 

 in tlie roar of the barricades of February, 1830. Ferdinand VII tlie 

 crafty, the treacherous, the tyrannous, reigned over Spain, which 

 the Holy Alliance had given back into his hands after he had justly 

 forfeited and lost his rule over it. It was the midnight of reaction, to 

 be soon startled by the coming revolution, when our country only con- 

 tained a population of 12,000,000, not one-third of its present inhabi- 

 tants, and while its wealth was not one-fifth and its industry not 

 more than one-fourth in productiveness of what it is to-day. Michi- 

 gan was still a wooded territory with not half population enough to 

 constitute a State. Illinois and Missouri were our most western free 

 States with but a single representative each in Congress. St. Louis 

 was the only place of any importance on the Missouri or upper Mis- 

 sissippi. Chicago was an inland trading post of perhaps half a dozen 

 huts, and with less than 50,000 inhabitants, within a radius of 200 

 miles, M'here there are now more than 3,000,000 of civilized human 

 beings. Iowa, Minnesota, and Kansas had not yet even names ; but 

 there was a river called Wisconsin, upon which some white men had 

 cut timber, or were preparing or thinking of doing so. California 

 was a Mexican territory, without industry, civilization, or hope, and 

 with but a handful of people; very much like, in fact, what Alaska, 

 is to-day. Two or three little sailing vessels visited that wild region 

 once a year to buy the hides of its wild cattle, which consisted the 

 only disposal)le wealth of its five or six thousand people. There may 

 have been a few huts around the Golden Gate known to the Pacific 

 coasters and Xorth Sea whalers as Verba Buena ; but tlie name of 

 San Francisco had never appeared on any map. Oregon was a 

 British trapping and hunting ground, ruled by the Hudson Bay- 

 Company. 



Steam had fully entered upon its conquering march. The genius 

 of our own Fitch and Fulton had aided its development and applied 

 it to inland navigation, and our great rivers were nightly lit up by 

 the furnace fires of countless steamboats, the plash of whose paddles, 



