Page:Centennial History of Oregon 1811-1912, Volume 1.djvu/345



tude up to Alaska. Ami that, as we liave showu clearly belonged to Spain and was transferred to the United States by Spain in the Florida ti-eaty of 1819.

But notwithstanding this clear record title, when our government came to deal with the actual possession of the country, when American citizens wanted to come in for settlement and trade, it made a sorry mess of the business. When President Thomas Jeft'erson purchased Louisiana of France, and hastily sent out Lewis and Clark to explore the couuti-y, he unquestionably believed the United States had a right to colonize the country. As has been stated before, his mind had for a long time been studying the future of the "Far West."" Cap- tain Gray had discovered the great "'River of the West" in 1792, and his dis- covery had been hailed by our people as settling the title to a vast and important territory. xVud the same spirit which had taken possession of, and held the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, w-as ready to move on to the Pacific when the advance was necessary. The report of the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1S05, had electri- fied the whole nation with the wonders of the far west they had made known to the world. The Napoleonic commercial spirit of John Jacob Astor leaped across a continent, and without national recognition or protection, founded the semi- military post at the moutii of the great river, and fiuug the Stars and Stripes to the world in claiming for his adopted country its most valuable and grandest national outpost.

And while England made a pretense that Captain Gray did not really enter the Columbia river, but had only sailed into a bay into which the river emptied, and that an English ship, had, subsequent to Gray, sailed up the Columbia a hundred miles, and therefore the English discovered the river, yet that pretense had to be abandoned when actual sea-faring men proved that the Columbia was a real irresistible river clear down to the ocean bar.

And England never disputed the right of Lewis and Clark as a government expedition to explore this region in 1805, nor did the British object to the found- ing of Astoria until the war of 1812 gave them an excuse to rob American citi- zens of their property wherever they could find them ; and so they robbed Astor of what his treacherous partnei-s had not already stolen. But this gave Eng- land nothing but a robber's title to Astoria, which tlu'v surrendered after the close of the war.

President Jefferson attempted to get the northern boundary line settled with England in 1807, and because the English negotiators attempted to insert a paragraph in the treaty that would make Spain believe that the United States and England intended to claim Spanish territory west of the Rocky ^Mountains, Jefferson rejected the whole business as an unfriendly intimation to Spain.

In 1814, after the close of the war of 1812, President iladison renewed the effort to have the northern boundai-y line settled, and offered the proposition of 1807, to-wit: that the boundary should run west from the most northern point of the Lake of the Woods (at the head of the Mississippi river) to the summit of the Rocky Mountains, but "that nothing in the present article he construed to r.rfend to the northicest coast of Aynerica, or to the territory claimed by either party westward of the L'ocky Mountains."

The British ministry offered to accept this article, provided, England was granted the right of navigation of the Mississippi river from British America to the Gulf of Mexico. And this, of course, was rejected by the Americans.