Page:Oregon, End of the Trail.djvu/77

 ton, were

the first American vessels to visit the northwest coast. On a second voyage from Boston, in the Columbia, Gray again visited this region and entered the long-sought river on May n, 1792, sailing for several miles upstream, trading with the natives, and making notes about the surrounding country. Before leaving, he named the river the Columbia, after the first ship to anchor in its inland waters. Five months later, Lieut. William R. Broughton, an English naval officer under Captain George Vancouver's command, explored the river for nearly a hundred miles inland, sighted and named Mount Hood on October 29, and formally clai-red the region for Great Britain on the grounds that (though he knew of Gray's earlier visit) "the subjects of no other civilized nation or state had ever entered this river before."

For a good many years both before and after Gray's verification of its existence, the river was commonly referred to as the Ouragon, Oregan, Origan, or Oregon. As early as 1765, Major Robert Rogers, commanding an English post in the upper Mississippi Valley, petitioned King George III for permission to conduct an exploring party to the Pacific Ocean by way of the river "called by the Indians Ouragon." As now spelled, the name first appeared in Jonathan Carver's Travels in Interior Parts of America, published 1778, in a reference to "the River Oregon, or the River of the West, that falls into the Pacific Ocean at the straits of Anian." Carver states that he got the name from the Indians, and most authorities believe it is derived from the Sautee word oragan, meaning a birchbark dish. It remained unfamiliar to the public at large until William Cullen Bryant popularized and perpetuated it by the reference in his poem "Thanatopsis," published in 1817:

Or lose thyself in the continuous woods Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound Save its own dashings.

As the river was long known as the Oregon, so the vast northwest territory of which it was one of the most prominent geographical features acquired the name of "the Oregon country" or "the Oregon territory." The region thus designated originally comprised all the land between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Ocean, from the vaguely delimited border of the great Spanish Southwest to the equally vague delimitations of British America and the Russian possessions on the north. By the Treaty of Florida in 1819, the southern boundary was fixed at the 42nd parallel; and in 1846, Great Britain and the United States agreed to a northern boundary along the 49th parallel. From the area of more than 300,000 square miles within these boundaries