218 THE TREATY OF WASHINGTON. 



strategic point between the mountains and the shores 

 of the Pacific ; their servants killed the fur-bearing 

 animals; they cut and exported the timber; and, 

 by means of its wealth and organization, the Com 

 pany monopolized the commerce and the resources 

 substantially to the exclusion for a long time of the 

 people of the United States. 



But at length some settlements of Americans had 

 been commenced in Oregon; and the attention of 

 Congress was called to the usurpations of the Hud 

 son s Bay Company by Mr. Benton, Mr. Linn, and the 

 writer of these pages : in consequence of which steps 

 were taken to put an end to the joint occupation of 

 Oregon. In fact, the Company had now set up the 

 most extravagant pretensions, exaggerating a mere li 

 cense to trade into a grant of proprietorship to the 

 whole of the immense region south and west of Ku- 

 pert s Land, to the dissatisfaction of the people of 

 Canada -as well as of the United States. For it was 

 the interest of the Company to retain the whole 

 country occupied by them in the condition of a mere 

 hunting-field, and quite uninhabited except by vassal 

 Indians : while the Canadians desired that it should 

 be opened to colonization, so as to add to the materi 

 al resources and political force of the Canadian Prov 

 inces. Parliamentary inquiry into the rights of the 

 Company was instituted; it was imperatively instruct 

 ed by Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton [afterward Lord 

 Lytton], Colonial Minister [whose dispatches show 

 that he was not less eminent as a statesman than as 

 a poet and a novelist], to desist from all general pre- 



