Page:History vs. the Whitman saved Oregon story.djvu/30

24 these offers of England, and of the fact that in 1825 the Hudson's Bay Company "officially notified" Dr. McLoughlin, their superintendent in charge of the Oregon region from 1824 to 1845, that "in no event could the British claim extend south of the Columbia" and also to suppress all mention of the fact that Lord Ashburton came over in April, 1842, "specifically authorized," as we shall see later, to renew to us the offer made us in the negotiations of 1824 and 1827, and also to suppress all mention of the fact that in 1826, when not only all the region north of Missouri and west of the Mississippi River, but also everything else north and west of Illinois and Michigan was not even organized as a territory, but was an unbroken wilderness, we notified England that "49 degrees was our ultimatum for the northern boundary of Oregon."

Second. That England could by making settlements and establishing trading posts subsequent to Oct. 20, 1818 (the date of the first of our treaties of "joint policy" relating to Oregon), strengthen her claim to it while the treaty of 1818 and its renewal in 1827 remained in force.

In support of his repeated assertions that England could do this and that the Hudson's Bay Company were actively engaged in doing it. Dr. Mowry quotes, not the Presidents, Secretaries of State and Ministers to England who negotiated for us on the Oregon boundary, all of whom held that England could not do this, but his favorite "original authorities" on the history and diplomacy of Oregon—Rev. H. H. Spalding, Rev. C. Eells and Mr. W. H. Gray.

But the very terms of those treaties made such strengthening of her claims impossible, a position not only always held by every one of our diplomatists and Presidents who negotiated on the Oregon question—James Monroe, John Q. Adams, Albert Gallatin, Andrew Jackson, Edward Livingston, Martin Van Buren, John Tyler, Edward Everett, Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, James Buchanan, James K. Polk and George Bancroft—and also by many others of our most eminent statesmen, but also tacitly admitted by all the British diplomatists who negotiated on it, no one of whom ever ventured to assert that such settlements and trading posts had made the British claim one whit stronger than it was Oct. 20, 1818, and also explicitly assented to by Lord Aberdeen (head of the British Foreign Office from 1841 to 1846), in two interviews with Edward Everitt in November and December, 1843. (Cf. on this the authorities cited in Trans. Am. Hist. Assn. for 1900, p. 223 infra, and Berlin Arbitration, p. 126.)

Third. That as late as March, 1843, the Government and the people of the country thought Oregon worthless because the Rocky and Blue Mountains were supposed to be impassable for wagons. To support this Mr. Mowry offers not a sen-