Oregon : the struggle for possession

Front matter

American Commonwealth

EDITED BY

HORACE E. SCUDDER.

Contents

PAGE

I. The European Powers in America . . . 1

II. Spain Enters the Struggle and Fails, . . 5

Chapter I. The European Powers In America

In 1697, the year of the Treaty of Ryswick, Spain claimed as her share of North America, on the Atlantic coast, from Cape Romaine on the Carolina shore a few miles north of Charleston, due west to the Mississippi River, and all south of that line to the Gulf of Mexico. That line, continued beyond the Mississippi, makes the northern boundary of Louisiana. In the valley of the lower Mississippi, Spain acknowledged no rival, though France was then beginning to intrude. On the basis of discovery by the heroic De Soto and others, she claimed up to the heads of the Arkansas and the present famous Leadville, and westward to the Pacific. On that ocean, or the South Sea as it was then called, she set up the pretensions of sovereignty from Panama to Nootka Sound on Vancouver. These pretensions covered the coasts, harbors, islands, and fisheries, and extended themselves indefinitely inland, and even over the whole Pacific Ocean, as then limited. These stupendous claims Spain based on discovery, under the papal bull of Alexander VI. in 1493. This bull or decree gave to the govern- 1 ment of the discoverer all newly discovered lands and waters. In 1513 Balboa, the Spaniard, discovered the Pacific Ocean, as he came over the Isthmus of Panama, and so Spain came into the ownership of that body of water ! Good old times those were, when kings thrust their hands into the New World, as children do theirs into a grab-bag at a fair, and drew out a river four thousand miles long, or an ocean, or a tract of wild land ten or fifteen times the size of England !

At the Ryswick partition of the world, France held good positions in America for the mastery of the continent. Beginning on the Mississippi, where the Spanish line crossed it, that is, where Louisiana and Arkansas unite two of their corners on the Father of Waters, the French claimed east on the Spanish boundary, and north of it to the watershed between the head streams dividing for the Atlantic and the Mississippi. Their claim was bounded by this highland line, continuing north and east, and still separating Atlantic streams from those flowing into the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence. Where this line reached the springs of the Penobscot it followed its waters to the ocean. It was the proud thought of France, that from the mouth of the Penobscot along the entire seaboard to the unknown and frozen Arctic, no European power divided that coast, and the wild interior back of it, with her. So France claimed indefinitely north to the farther rim of Hudson Bay, as now known, and all lands drained into that Bay, and wildly west to the heads of the Mississippi and Missouri, and thence down to our two corners of Louisiana and Arkansas. This gave to France even the western parts of Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York, and a large northern portion of New Eng-

THE EUROPEAN POWERS IN AMERICA. 3

land, as we now name those sections. Certain vague doubts hung over those F rench claims in the great north land after the convention of Ryswick, but they were claims of little worth.

Russia had no possessions in North America at the date of this survey, 1697. But as Peter the Great, her emperor, had at that time his plans matured for gaining interests in the New World which afterwards resulted in Russian America, and as that nation entered the list of competitors for Oregon, it seems best here to outline her position on the field of struggle.

The Russians came into possession on the northwest coast of America through their ardor in the fur trade. Within a few years after the Treaty of Ryswick, the Russians had subdued all Northern Asia in the interests of this trade, and Siberia became the great game preserve of the empire. When once on the Asiatic shores of the Northern Pacific it was natural and not difficult, in the chase for the sea-otter and other valuable furs, to push off to the Aleutian Islands and then to the American mainland of Alaska. So through the enterprise of his widow, Queen Catharine, and of his daughter, Queen Elizabeth, the wish and vision of Peter the Great were realized in a commercial conflict with the Spanish and French and English on that coast. Among the distinguished leaders in this Russian enterprise was Bering the Dane, who, in his third voyage, gave up his life on the desolate little granite island that bears his name and his grave. In after years the narrow passage between the two continents, through which he had twice sailed without discovering the Straits, but supposing himself to be in the broad Arctic, was honored with his name.

Having outlined the claims of these three leading powers in North America at the opening of this narrative, the English possessions are obvious as the small remainder. They constituted the long, narrow Atlantic slope, extending from the Spanish Cape Romaine, north of Charleston, to the French bounds on the Penobscot, and inland up that river and along the watershed of the Alleghanies and of the French claim, down to the east and west Spanish boundary, and on it to Cape Romaine again.

Under these claims, France and Spain held much more territory on this continent than the entire area of the continent of Europe ; an estimate of the Russian possessions has been given ; the narrow English belt, hugging the Atlantic, was hardly equal in area to Missouri.

Of course these outlines are stated only approximately, and somewhat guessingly, because of the dark geographical ignorance that shrouded North America at the opening of the eighteenth century. The pretentious claims of royalty, of the papacy, and of the rival favorites of the different courts, overlapped each other like bogus mortgages, and they ran far and wide as liberally as astronomical spaces.

Thus stood the foreign ownership of the New World at the conclusion of the Treaty of Ryswick, 1697. At this date and our starting point, England was at her minimum and France at her maximum of claims in North America, and Spain had come down from grandiloquent assumptions to sensible pretensions.

Chapter II. Spain Enters The Struggle And Fails

The claims of Spain in North America have been marked off. A notice of the vast shrinkage in her pretensions, prior to the Treaty of Ryswick, will prepare one to trace, in this chapter, her weakening and final departure from the contest for Oregon.

“ To prevent collision between Christian princes, on the 4th of May, 1493, Alexander VI. published a bull in which he drew an imaginary line from the north pole to the south, a hundred leagues west of the Azores, assigning to the Spanish all that lies west of that boundary, while all to the east of it was confirmed to Portugal.” 1

Since Spanish navigators had explored somewhat the Atlantic Ocean and coasts as far as Newfoundland, Spain claimed, by this papal authority, and under the name of Florida, “ the whole sea-coast as far as Newfoundland and even to the remotest North. In Spanish geography Canada was a part of Florida. Yet within that whole extent not a Spanish fort was erected nor a harbor was occupied nor one settlement was planned.” And when St. Augustine, Florida, was founded, the bigoted Philip II. was proclaimed monarch of all North America.

More surprising it is to see such pretensions set forth at a much later day. The archbishop Lorenzana, in his

1 Bancroft’s History of the United States, Author’s Last Revision, vol. i. p. 9. .. . _ history of New Spain, published in 1770, at the City of Mexico, says, “ It is doubtful whether the country of New Spain does not border on Tartary and Greenland, by the way of California on the former, and by New Mexico on the latter.” The bishop was poor in geography, and was in the error then still lingering, that America was made up of big islands, extending west and ending in the East India Islands, and that one could sail through, somewhere, from Newfoundland to China.

When the French began their discoveries and settlements in Canada and the other northern provinces, the Spanish gradually, but under bloody protests, withdrew their claims toward the South. After the Jamestown colony was established, and parts of New England occupied, they consented to make the southern boundary of Virginia the northern boundary of their Florida. This was about 1650, and when the royal province of Virginia had about fifteen thousand white inhabitants and three hundred negro slaves.

Then followed the English grant for the Carolina plantations ; and the recall of the Edict of Nantes, expelling many Protestants from France, furnished many colonist^ with other adventurers. The Spanish remonstrated against the encroachments, but the English would not acknowledge a claim both unwarranted and unused. At length, about 1690, the Spanish quietly contracted the limits of their shrinking Florida, and agreed to the line already named, being a little north of Charleston, and running exactly west from Cape Romaine to the Mississippi River.

Having set bounds, mutual and somewhat permanent, on the seaboard between themselves and the English, the Spanish already began to feel the encroachments of the

French, down the Mississippi from the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes. Vague and fascinating rumors had gone up from time to time, among the scattered and frozen settlements of the St. Lawrence, about great rivers that never froze over, and plains and warm valleys toward the South Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. As early as 1658 French fur traders had wintered on Lake Superior, and two years later the devout Menard had gone up there, to a death that he knew must soon come from the Indians, that he might plant the Cross on the barbarous border. More and more, trader and Jesuit, forgetful of all toil and danger, threaded the Indian trails to the head waters of rivers that disappeared in the mysterious southwest. The almost social waters, as if talking of better homes in more sunny climes to which they were hastening, tempted these Indian merchants and preachers to the bold venture. So with only blankets and food for a few days they pushed their frail canoes into the jolly waters, saying : Where shall we land ? In the Sea of Virginia? In the South Sea? In the Gulf of Mexico ? In China ? In Cathay ?

In 1670 the spirited La Salle, a Jesuit priest in France, a fur trader and feudal colonist in Canada, and an ardent dreamer of the Straits of Anian, opening somewhere from the Atlantic to the Pacific, floated in his birch canoe south as far as Louisville. In 1671 St. Lusson, with his fifteen whites, and swarming red men of fourteen tribes, chanted the Vexilla Regis at the Sault Ste. Marie, the outlet of Lake Superior, and took possession for Louis XIV. of all the country bounded by the seas of the north and of the west and of the south. It was a wonderful occasion in that deep interior wilderness in North America. On that leafy morning in June, and on an eminence at the foot of the rapids, the civilians in showy armor and the Jesuits in their robes surrounded the wooden cross and chanted and offered prayers. The Indians, crouching and gliding and gazing on all sides, watched the pompous ceremonials while a large part of North America was made over to Louis the Grand. A volley of musketry, a Vive le Hoi , and the yelping of the savages closed the marvellous scene. Mr. Parkman in his “ Discovery of the Great West,” — a captivating volume, where true and pure history makes the highest romance, tells the story with fascination.1

Two years later we find Marquette and Joliet at the mouth of the Arkansas ; and in 1682 La Salle appears again, and now at the mouth of the Mississippi. With what daring and romance and grand expectations these early voyageurs and the first of white men must have glided into and through those primeval solitudes ! Twenty-five hundred miles they pushed off into the unknown, among savages and wild beasts. Now they take the broad stream midway, and now under its dark forest banks. One timid deer is shot from the grazing herd, and no sound like that has ever waked echoes in that stillness of ages. The calm evening comes over the prairies, and then the cheery camp-fire, venison, vespers and sweet sleep.

Shortly after the Treaty of Ryswick the French began to occupy, and with energy, that portion of the great valley that was recognized as their own. As early as 1705 Kaskaskia had become a populous and happy French post, and seven years later it was constituted the capital of the Illinois country, having a population of two thousand, a monastery and a college. It was a 1 Parkman’ s Discovery of the Great West , 40-42.

marked frontier town, and had the vicissitudes of Indian, French, and English wars. In 1778 Colonel Clark, by one of those heroic and romantic movements that have so signalized our frontier and stored it with material for an American Walter Scott, took possession of it for the young republic.

In 1682 La Salle spread French claims over the lower Mississippi, and three years after he annexed Texas to the realm of his king, and established a trading post and fort on Isle Dauphin, between which and Quebec a lively trade sprang up. Thus early the active and progressive French opened a way into the very interior of indolent New Spain, and were transporting not only peltries and furs, but grain and flour and other agricultural products down that mysterious river.

The same persistent discoverers, the trader and the Jesuit, also opened the Ohio, Illinois, Wabash, and Kaskaskia. The bold and far-reaching plan was adopted to connect the Great Lakes with the Gulf of Mexico by a cordon of military posts. About 1720 the first of them, Fort Chartres, was founded on the eastern bank of the Mississippi, and about forty-five miles below St. Louis. It became the French headquarters for Upper Louisiana, and continued for a long time their western centre of life and fashion, intrigue and ambition — the Paris of the Great West. So active were the French that in 1780 they had planted one hundred and forty families and six hundred converted Indians on the Illinois alone, and five years later they founded Vincennes on the Wabash, as a military and rallying centre.

Such was the colonizing activity of the French in the upper Mississippi, thus overshadowing and making timid the Spanish below. But in Lower Louisiana the encroachments were still more annoying and alarming. In 1699 D’Iberville made a settlement near Ship Island, and proposed French control over the whole coast and region from Pensacola to the Rio Grande. He surveyed the Mississippi for about four hundred miles, to the region of Natchez, and caused an exploration of Red River for a thousand miles from its mouth, and the Arkansas up to Little Rock, while the Washita and Yazoo were not neglected. The Missouri he explored up to the entrance of the Kansas, and the Mississippi to the St. Peter’s. Waters now made familiar by steamboats and crossed by railroads the light canoes and pirogues of D’Iberville glided over, like waterfowl, shooting rapids, making “ carries,” and submitting to no obstacles. No white man had ever before much disturbed these hidden recesses of nature.

In 1710 the entire population of Lower Louisiana amounted to only three hundred and eighty souls — a small village to-day. The men were ignorant, indolent, and vicious ; negro slaves and Indian girls did the most of the work, and the loose, arms-length government was supported by a hundred and seventy-five soldiers.

The Spanish governor at Pensacola remonstrated against these French intrusions, but as his remonstrance was able to do no more it was in vain. On the east of the Mississippi the Perdido had been accepted by both governments as the eastern line of the French and the western one of Florida. But on the west of the Mississippi all claims to territory were in a contested uncertainty. While the Spanish claimed eastward, across Texas, almost to the Mississippi, the French claimed westward across the entire province to the Rio Grande.

Nor was the struggle between the two foreign crown confined in that Indian wilderness of the New World to the Gulf coast and the deltas of the lower valley. Spanish adventurers from New Mexico and the Santa Fe country had ranged north and east, across the upper Arkansas, to the Missouri and Mississippi, and found there also the intruding and irrepressible French. An expedition was forwarded to expel these traders and colonists, but the result was very disastrous to the Spanish. After this the French built Fort Orleans on an island in the Missouri, above the mouth of the Osage. In military connection and about the same time Fort Chartres was built, as before mentioned. The wonderful changes in the bed and channels of the Mississippi are seen in the fact that Fort Chartres, originally on the bank of the river, was washed away and then rebuilt, and of stone, far inland. The encroaching river followed and is undermining the new fort. For ten years, ending about 1750, the French were active in establishing friendly relations with the Indians between the Alleghanies and the Missouri, and from the heads of the Mississippi to Texas. This was a deep stroke of policy and involved vast labor.

By all these explorations and encroachments the F rench crowded the Spanish to the south and west of the following line : From the mouth of the Sabine up that river to latitude thirty-two, then due north to the lied River and by it to longitude twenty-three ; thence north to the Arkansas and up it to latitude forty-two and on it west to the Pacific. This was the boundary, practically, that the French forced on the Spanish, though it was not then very formally or definitely agreed to. Indeed, it was one of those singular treaty lines, sometimes appearing in history, on which much has been settled, while they have never been run. The one in question has had a peculiar history.

When, in 1762, France secretly conveyed her western portion of Louisiana to Spain she made this its limit on the southwest. But it was only descriptive, having never been run or traversed by either party. When Spain reconveyed the same to France in 1800, it was limited by the same boundaries and in description only. In 1803 France sold this territory, the Louisianas, to the United States, “ with all its rights and appurtenances as fully and in the same manner as they have been acquired by the French Kepublic.” To this extent, and on a line unrun, and not very definite, the United States were now bounded on Spanish territory, and for sixteen years there was negotiation, and at times unpleasant struggle, to locate and run the line. Then, when, in 1819, the United States purchased Florida, an article was inserted in the treaty restating this line, but it was drawn only by diplomats in sentences, and not by engineers on the ground. The treaty called for a survey, but various delays prevented the setting of metes and bounds, till we acquired New Mexico in 1848, when the line became unnecessary, because we became owners on both sides of it, and so it has never been run. It is a singular fact that this line of three august conferences and treaties, one war, and much diplomatic intrigue and correspondence was never anything more than imaginary and declared.

We have thus grouped the facts, that it may be seen in summary how France crowded Spain on the southwest, and compelled a continuance of the shrinkage in her boastful claims on the New World.

Now, it is important to notice that the old Spanish

SPAIN ENTERS TUE STRUGGLE AND FAILS.' 13

claim extended from Panama, on the Pacific, to Prince William’s Sound ; and of course covered the Oregon of our narrative, that is, the Oregon, Washington Territory, Idaho, and British Columbia of to-day, up to 54° 40'. According to the decree of Pope Alexander VI., the Spanish had granted to them exclusive privileges in all lands and seas which they might discover in the Pacific. On this basis they founded the audacious claims of sovereignty over the American shores of the Pacific.

When, therefore, the English, profiting by Cook’s discoveries, that ended with his death in 1778, and by the enterprise of others, sought to open the fur, seal, whale, and other traffic, on the northwest coast, the Spanish government regarded the attempt as an intrusion, and in its anxiety as to the end sought by its rival, entered strong objections. This arrogant claim of Spain to all Pacific waters and coasts and islands near to our continent is well illustrated in the case of the American ship Columbia. In 1788 she left Boston for trade in the Pacific, was damaged, and put into Juan Fernandez for repairs, and having been refitted, was allowed by the Spanish authorities there to proceed. For this the Commandant was removed under severe rebuke, on the ground that every vessel found in seas beyond Cape Horn, without Spanish license, was to be treated as an enemy, since no nation had a right to territory or trade that would require the doubling of that Cape. Russia was already on the northwest coast of America, and Spain sought to make Prince William’s Sound the southern limit of Russia. This was in 1789.

At this time “ no settlement, factory, or other establishment whatsoever had been founded or attempted, nor had any jurisdiction been exercised by the authorities or subjects of a civilized nation in any part of America bordering on the Pacific, between San Francisco and Prince William’s Sound.” 1 It is true that Spain led off in discoveries on those coasts, and afterward she had, jointly with England, France, and Russia, landed here and there, and taken possession ceremonially. But it early came to an understanding among these nations that no such pageant could constitute possession. That could be proved and maintained only by habitations and residence.

The issue between Spain and England as to sovereignty on the northwest coast was made at Nootka Sound in 1789. Each nation then attempted to form a settlement there. The Spanish captured the English vessels, and this threw the case into diplomacy between the two courts. England informed the Spanish court that she could “not accede to the pretensions of absolute sovereignty, commerce and navigation” that were claimed, and secretly prepared to back her protest by two fleets. The Spanish government was informed that “ British subjects have an indisputable right to the enjoyment of a free and uninterrupted navigation, commerce, and fishing, and to the possession of such establishments as they should form, with the consent of the natives of the country, not previously occupied by any of the European nations.” The younger Pitt, then in his prime of power, and with all his father’s hatred and contempt of Spain, shaped the policy that ended in the famous Nootka Treaty of 1790.

The question opened so widely that France did not think it best to remain quiet ; and though she seemed to maintain neutrality she took steps, at once, to increase 1 History of Oregon and California , by liobert Greenhow, p. 187.

her navy to unusual proportions. Under Louis XVI. Mirabeau led this policy, and, by a semblance, assumed to mediate between the two courts. The result was the Nootka Treaty, by which England gained her full commercial demands. Five years later Spain, for various reasons, informally and quietly, and without quitclaiming her rights, withdrew from Nootka Sound, and afterward fixed the northern limit of her claims at the present northern boundary of California. When she withdrew thus to the southern limits of Oregon she could well be counted out as a competitor for the Oregon of our story, though she had owned it from 1763 to 1800.

Here, therefore, we take leave of Spain in the grand game of kings for that magnificent prize in the northwest. But we cannot do it without reflecting on the weak ambition and papal folly that grasped for so much while it could hold so little. Spain once claimed from Panama, on the Atlantic side, to Newfoundland, and on the Pacific to Prince William’s Sound. At this date in our narrative all her Atlantic claims were dwarfed to eastern Florida, and at this date of writing all her vast interior and Pacific claims have gone out of her hands.

As we look back on this amazing collapse of the Spanish inflation in North America the view should not surprise us. With a few noble colonial leaders the mass of the colonists were of the lower grades, and many of them from prisons, asylums, and the streets. Any country would be benefited by the outgoing of such classes, or damaged by their incoming. After landing in the wilds of America they were more like “ dumb, driven cattle ” than like citizens. The Jesuitism that took charge of their education by no means crowded on them the printing-press and spelling-book ; and priestly hands held back the Bible, though in Latin, and religion was much embodied in rituals and ceremonials. There was nothing in such a colonial system to produce men and women who constitute and perpetuate society,.

CHAPTER m.

FRANCE SELLS HER CLAIMS.

France was only second to Spain in the extent of her inflated claims in the New World. The treaty of Ryswick conceded to her all the country whose waters flowed into the Atlantic, from the Penobscot north to Hudson Bay. This includes not only the basin of which that bay is the reservoir, but also the basin of the Great Lakes, emptying through the St. Lawrence. Down the western slope of the Hudson Bay basin there come the Red River waters of central Minnesota, and those of Lake Winnipeg, fed by the Saskatchewan and Assiniboin, that spring from the melting snows where the Rocky Mountains look down on the Pacific. So far west on the rim of that basin was the French claim conceded, in the old Dutch palace of Ryswick. There was also conceded to her all the great western valley which lies between the Alleghanies and the Rocky Mountains, and whose drainage runs by New Orleans, omitting so much as lies south of the thirty-third degree of latitude on the east of the Mississippi, and so much as feeds the head-springs of the Arkansas and territory south of it. This immense French domain in America would more than cover all the map of Europe.

The peace of Ryswick was brief. Wars soon followed between the parties in both the Old World and the New, and matters soon came again to the council-table of 2 kings. This time it was in 1713, at Utrecht, another Dutch town, and the prominent parties present, by their ministers, were Anne, queen of Great Britain, and Louis XIV. of France. France, once so imperious, had been humbled by failure to absorb the Spanish in the French crown, and by the adverse issues of war in North America. Moreover, Louis was now seventy-five years old, and the shadows of age were falling across his brilliant court of Versailles. He put his name to the Treaty of Utrecht, but not with the bold, iron hand that had throttled kings and pushed thrones aside. The signature is the unsteady scrawl of age, as when old men, nursed and pillowed up on the dying bed, sign their last will and testament.

That signature gave back to Great Britain the Hudson Bay basin, from rim to rim, Newfoundland, and Nova Scotia — the poetic Acadia. There and then, in the old halls of Utrecht, France began to give up her chances on the Pacific by yielding those immense regions on the Atlantic. The tide had turned, and now it went out as with the rapidity with which it is wont to leave her former Bay of F undy.

Struggles followed the concord at Utrecht, and they were between courts and cabinets, prime ministers and ambassadors, armies in Europe and armies in the new continent. The brilliant uniform of the European mingled with the feathers and paint and scalp-lock of the Indian along the forests and rivers and lakes of our then border land. More and more the destinies of battle turned one way, till that fatal September day on the Plains of Abraham, at Quebec, 1759. That was the Waterloo for France in North America ; and in the settlement afterward, by the Treaty of Paris, 1763, she

FRANCE SELLS HER CLAIMS.

was humiliated to yield all her possessions east of the Mississippi. That is, she then lost the eastern slope of the Mississippi Valley, the Canadas, and New Brunswick. After much diplomatic delay — more than three years

— while from time to time the hostile negotiators felt for their swords again, Great Britain allowed France to retain three little islands off the coast of Newfoundland

— not the area of two Yankee townships — where she might build fishermen’s huts and dry her nets. Only the assignment of St. Helena to Napoleon suggests so great a fall or equals so great a humiliation.

About one hundred days before this painful transfer France secretly made over to Spain all her territorial claims on the west of the Mississippi. Under one of those terrible pressures of war, when sometimes a strong nation is no more capable of resistance than an iron ship in an ice-pack, she parted with that half of a grand empire. She feared, and probably foresaw, that Great Britain would finally take all, and so put this beyond the reach of her grasping victor.