Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 13.djvu/364

 356 CLARENCE B. BAGLEY The ratification of the tre'aty with Mexico at Washington on the 15th of March was discussed by the newspaper at length and with much animadversion as being in the interests of the slave holding oligarchy of the South. August 16th, by the Louise regular files of California papers to May 29th received, announcing the discovery of gold "some way above Sutter's fort, about 130 miles from San Francisco." June 17, the Mary had arrived direct from Boston. All this news was from the Polynesian of June 24, via Sandwich Islands. The treaty between Great Britain and the United States was concluded at Washington June 15, 1846, that fixed the inter- national boundary at latitude 49 degrees and settled the "Ore- gon Question." No item of news of that period possessed a small part of the interest to the white people of Oregon, whether American or foreign born, still it was more than four months before it reached them. In a letter I have from Peter Skene Ogden and James Douglas to Dr. William Fraser Tolmie at Nisqually, under date of November 4, 1846, Vancouver, is the following paragraph : "The barque Toulon arrived lately in the river with very important intelligence from the Sand- wich Islands. It appears that the Oregon boundary is finally settled, on a basis more favorable to the United States than we had reason to anticipate . . . Business will, of course, go on as usual, as the treaty will not take effect on us for many years to come." In early years the Hudson's Bay Company established a house at Honolulu, shipped thence lumber, timber, salmon, grain, flour and such other articles as were in demand in the Sandwich Islands, and in turn brought back such products of the Islands as were serviceable at Vancouver. As early as 1845, the authorities at Washington began mak- ing spasmodic efforts for mail service from the Atlantic States to Oregon, via Havana, Aspinwall, across the Isthmus to Pan- ama, thence up the Coast to the Columbia River, and thence to the Sandwich Islands, but little came of it until the discovery of gold in California. Early in 1847, Cornelius