was not unmindful
of his duties to his country, while he endeavored to establish
legitimate trade and preserve a profitable private business which had
been well founded long before the introduction of ocean steam. He was
a worthy and most honorable gentleman, and is a loss to the whole
public.

Prominent among the steamship enterprises of the country stand the two
lines which connect the Atlantic and Gulf seaboard with our large and
rich possessions in the Pacific, California, and Oregon. Established
at a time when California was held by military government, and when
Oregon was a wild untamed wilderness, these lines became the means of
developing the richest portion of the American continent, and binding
the far distant western world in close connection with the old
confederacy, notwithstanding the mighty Cordilleras and Rocky
Mountains which rose like forbidding barriers between them. Important
as these possessions were, naturally and geographically, they acquired
a new interest about the time that the Pacific and the Aspinwall
Steamship Companies were established. The contracts which were made
with these companies would certainly have ruined them but for the
discovery of gold in California. This opened a new and brilliant field
of effort, and the opportunities offered by these companies soon
determined tens of thousands of our hardy and enterprising countrymen
to enter and develop it.

It is pleasing in this connection to trace the almost mysterious
progress of our Pacific territory during the past eight years, and the
agencies producing it. Among these agencies none have been so
effectual as the Pacific Mail Steamship Company. That Company was
compelled to form an establishment of the most effective character
four to five thousand miles away from home, and as it was at the
time, thirteen thousand miles distant. The country was wholly new, so
much so that it was, in most parts of the field which it had to
occupy, extremely difficult to procure ordinary food for their
operatives. Their ships had to make a voyage more than half of that
around the world before they arrived at their point of service; and
they found themselves without a home when there. The steamer
"California," which left New-York on the 6th October, 1848, was the
first to bear the American flag to the Pacific ocean, and the first to
salute with a new life the solitudes of that rich and untrodden
territory. She was soon followed by the "Panama" and "O