Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 5.djvu/117

 discovered by the British, and in 1805 the Nort Invest Company sent out its men to establish posts and occupy territories on the Columbia. This party, however, got no farther than the Mandan villages on the Missouri, but another party, dispatched in 1806, crossed the Rocky Mountains by the passage of Peace River, and formed a small trading establishment near the 54th degree of latitude, the first British post west of the Rocky Mountains. But it was not until 1811 that any Englishman came through to the country of the Lower Columbia, and then the Pacific Fur Company, or Astor party, was already established here.

But north of the Columbia River there was basis for the claims of Great Britain; and the controversy known in our history as the Oregon Question, arose. Neither party was, in truth, able wholly to exclude the other, but it was the expedition of Lewis and Clark that gave us the strength of our argument. The talk on our side of "fifty-four-forty or fight" was merely a cry of a party; say rather the insolence of partisanship, for Great Britain's claims to a standing below "fifty-four-forty" rested on a basis too solid to be disposed of in this way; and, besides, our claim of "fifty- four-forty" rested merely upon a convention between the United States and Russia, through which the latter had named "fifty-four-forty" as the southern boundary of her American possessions. But to this convention Great Britain was not a party, and she justly declared that her rights could not be concluded through any negotiation in which she had not participated, or in whose results she had not promised agreement. The question, therefore, was still open as between Great Britain and the United States. Both countries had undoubted claims. Great Britain, by retrocession of Astoria to the United States, after the War of 1812, had acknowledged our right in the country. She had, indeed, never made any serious pretension to the territory smith of the Columbia River, but had insisted on that stream as the boundary line. We had, however, in Gray's discovery, in the exploration of Lewis and Clark and in the settlement of Astoria, a chain of title that made it impossible