Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 5.djvu/414

404 conduct of the expedition, he is independent, and he comments with practical judgment upon the tactics and every-day conduct of the explorers.

There is an introductory chapter of twenty-six pages on "The Louisiana Purchase." This brings out correctly the priority of the inception of the exploration, but as an attempt at a review of the diplomatic history affecting this western country the chapter is a positive blemish. It should be either rewritten or omitted. It must have been an afterthought. The following excerpts will serve as evidence: "Spain had held the island of New Orleans on both sides of the stream to its mouth" (p. 3): "This [the claim of the United States under the Louisiana Purchase] included the greater part of Texas—to which the claim of the United States would seem to have been a righteous one—west of the Great River; . . . the treaty of 1819, in which Spain ceded all of East and West Florida, and all country west of the Mississippi north of the forty-second degree of latitude "and westward to the Pacific, to which she claimed ownership" (p. 15). The author also gets into trouble when, out of his province, he remarks that Meares sailed into Baker's Bay (II, 232). It is true that the British commission on England's claims to the Oregon country in 1826 made this claim, and that Travers Twiss contends for it as a fact, yet the log-book of Meares does not admit of that interpretation. The blemishes are virtually confined to the preliminary chapter. The work as a whole is well done and is readable. 1em