Page:Mexico, Aztec, Spanish and Republican, Vol 1.djvu/353

Rh and thence, on the same parallel, to the St. Mary's. France, it will be remembered, had always claimed dominion in Louisiana to the Rio Bravo del Norte, or Rio Grande; by virtue:—

1st. Of the discovery of the Mississippi from near its source to the ocean.

2d. Of the possession taken, and establishment made by La Salle, at the bay of Saint Bernard, west of the river Trinity and Colorado, by authority of Louis XIV. in 1635—notwithstanding the subsequent destruction of the colony.

3d. Of the charter of Louis XIV. to Crozat in 1712.

4th. Of the historical authority of Du Pratz, Champigny and the Count de Vergennes.

5th. Of the authority of De Lisle's map, and of the map published in 1762, by Don Thomas Lopez, Geographer to the king of Spain, as well as of various other maps, atlases, and geographical authorities.

By an article of the secret treaty of San Ildefonso in October, 1800, Spain retroceded Louisiana to France, but this treaty was not promulgated until the beginning of 1802. The paragraph of cession is as follows: "His Catholic majesty engages to retrocede to the French republic, six months after the full and entire execution of the conditions and stipulations above recited, relative to his royal highness the Duke of Parma, the colony and province of Louisiana, with the same extent that it already has in the hands of Spain, and that it had when France possessed it, and, such as it should be, after the treaties passed subsequently between Spain and other powers." In 1803, Bonaparte, the first consul of the French republic, ceded Louisiana to the United States, as fully, and in the same manner, as it had been retroceded to France by Spain, under the treaty of San Ildefonso; and, by virtue of this grant, Messrs. Madison, Monroe, Adams, Clay, Van Buren, Jackson, and Polk, contended that the original limit of the new state had been the Rio Grande. However, by the third article of our treaty with Spain, in 1819, all our pretensions to extend the territory of Louisiana towards Mexico on the Rio Grande, were abandoned by adopting the river Sabine as our boundary in that quarter.

The Mexican authorities upon this subject are either silent or doubtful. No light is to be gathered from the geographical researches of Humboldt, whose elucidations of New Spain are in many respects the fullest and most satisfactory. In the year 1835, Stephen Austin published a map of Texas, representing the Nueces as the western confine,—and in 1836, General Almonte the former