Page:The History of Oregon Bancroft 1888.djvu/126

108 him. The seizure cost the government twenty thousand dollars, and caused much ill-feeling. This was after the appointment of a collector for Puget Sound in 1851, whose construction of the revenue laws was even more strict than that of other Oregon officials.

Thus we see that the position of the Hudson's Bay Company in Oregon after the passage of the act establishing the territory was ever increasingly precarious and disagreeable. The treaty of 1846 had proven altogether insufficient to protect the assumed rights of the company, and was liable to different interpretations even by the ablest jurists. The company claimed their lands in the nature of a grant, and as actually alienated to the British government. Before the passage of the territorial act, they had taken warning by the well known temper of the American occupants of Oregon toward them, and had offered their rights for sale to the government at one million of dollars; using, as I have previously intimated, the well known democratic editor and politician, George N. Sanders, as their agent in Washington.

As early as January 1848 Sir George Simpson addressed a confidential letter to Sanders, whom he had previously met in Montreal, in which he defined his view of the rights confirmed by the treaty, as the right to "cultivate the soil, to cut down and export the timber, to carry on the fisheries, to trade for furs with the natives, and all other rights we enjoyed at the time of framing the treaty." As to the free navigation of the Columbia, he held that this right like the others was salable and transferable. "Our possessions," he said, "embrace the very best situations in the whole country for offensive and defensive operations, towns and villages." These were all