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PART TWO

Allow me to tell you something of the time I had—the time I made—a long time ago, when I was 23, over half a lifetime ago. Well, truth be told and that it shall be, I had turned 24 by the time I successfully demarcated Dr. McLoughlin's land claims in Oregon Territory.

So, no, Dear Reader, I didn't find Oregon, but I did help blaze the most convenient and safest possible path to it. I also made the unique contribution of securing the property rights and legal groundwork necessary to founding the first municipality incorporated on the western side of the Rocky Mountains. Additionally, I brought to the table one resolution that would both free that resource-blessed territory from the clutches of Imperial England and deliver her safely as a state into the arms of America. L'avocat c'est moi!

In the course of my aspirations to become the (Very) Poor Man's Jefferson, I feel it incumbent upon me to remind you who the actual Thomas Jefferson was: an aristocrat. Had Thomas Jefferson been born on the other side of the Atlantic, one can only imagine the reams of parchment it would take to scroll out all his titles at once. However, from his vaunted position, Jefferson saw fit not to jealously guard his status but to ensure others in this land were freeborn as he—citizens, mind you. (Words are such slippery things!)

I should also like to remind you who wrote the Constitution: lawyers, as I said earlier, but lawyers like Jefferson—not like me. Jefferson had a talent for democracy, but I am democracy. Though of no high birth—pace my solid Pilgrim stock and lineage, ahem—I took the fruits of what my country gave me and took it upon myself to bring those gifts further West—so far West that the West itself became simply a byword for inexhaustible possibility!

In short, I was young, not unlike our country. My generation, it sometimes seems, has lived the lives of dozens of generations and it has been the rapid maturation of our country, I can assure you, that has aged us so. Growing pains never cut so deeply as when they cut my generation in two. We spread our gazes West until the continent could no longer support the terrible weight of so much vision and cracked in half. Those parallels the good Senator Clay had drawn may as well have been perforated—but...but...

But before all of that—before North and South—there was only West. (That was the point we feared.) And, when the West as new as only a breathless, timeless, deathless cardinal direction could be, I represented one Dr. McLoughlin. And, upon the successful conclusion of his legal affairs—and the payment of his legal fees—I made my way down to a little place called California. I was off to greener pastures! Yes, Oregon was green, but California lay to the South, so surely it was even greener!