August 14: When the frontier line gets drawn on the map

On August 14, 1848, the U.S. Congress organized the Oregon Territory. Tonight's film: Serenity (2005).

August 14. There is a date like this that always stops me when I open the almanac: a new frontier line gets drawn on the map. On August 14, 1848, the United States Congress passed “An Act to Establish the Territorial Government of Oregon,” and President James K. Polk signed it. The 30th Congress created the first formal territorial government for the Pacific Northwest.

The new Oregon Territory covered present-day Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and parts of Montana and Wyoming. The first capital was Oregon City, not far from present-day Portland. Two years earlier, in 1846, the Oregon Treaty had ended joint occupation with Great Britain. But what actually pushed Washington to act was the Whitman Massacre of November 29, 1847: members of the Cayuse tribe killed Dr. Marcus Whitman, a Presbyterian missionary, his wife Narcissa, and eleven settlers near present-day Walla Walla. That kind of violence demanded a federal response.

Try to picture the scale. The 1850 census counted only 13,294 residents across the entire territory. 1848 is the era of Manifest Destiny: on February 2 the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo closed the Mexican-American War, and that December gold was found in California. The Oregon Territory existed until February 14, 1859, when its southwestern portion entered the Union as the state of Oregon.