Hello, my friends. Happy to have you here today. Welcome. And I've got so much

interesting good stuff to cram into one episode about the gorgeous state of Oregon.

So let's dive in.

I'm Sharon McMan.

And welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast.

Org it is really beautiful by the way. I meant that. It has a lot of waterfalls and

like mountains and greenery and ocean. It has a lot of natural beauty.

When you were growing up, did you call it Oregon?

Or did you call it Oregon? In Minnesota we definitely said Oregon. And that is not

the way people from Oregon say it. They say it Oregon. So FYI. Let's go back in time for just a moment to the mid-1800s.

When the United States was still locked in a boundary dispute with Great Britain involving the parallel that

extended from Minnesota all the way out to the West Coast. So the Canadian border with the United States has not always been that well established and it wasn't until the sort of late 1840s that the United States finally settled this boundary dispute and it gave what is now present day Oregon in Washington to the United States and cut that boundary off at Vancouver Island.

So in 1848, when Oregon became a U.S. territory,

there was this rush to expand westward. Do you guys know the phrase

manifest destiny? Manifest destiny that it was the God-given responsibility of Americans to settle the

entire North American continent from East Coast to West Coast

and that it was the destiny of America to continue its westward expansion.

There were paintings at the time that showed what almost looked

like an angelic like female figure guiding pioneers so to speak westward into California Oregon and Washington manifest destiny that the

United States was essentially ordained by God and so this belief was quite pervasive amongst certain groups in the United States in the

mid-1800s.

In fact, the term Manifest Destiny was coined by a man named John L. O'Sullivan.

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